Sacha Distel (born Alexandre Distel, January 29, 1933, in Paris) is remembered by most listeners as the smooth French singer of "Scoubidou", "La Belle Vie" and "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head". Before any of that he was a modern jazz guitarist, and through the middle 1950s he was one of the busiest guitarists on the Paris scene, recording with French players and with visiting Americans. He never left jazz entirely after he became a pop star: he went back to it for an album arranged by the trombonist Slide Hampton in 1968, for a Pablo Records session in 1983, and for jazz concerts into the 1990s. This profile covers both halves of that career.

His father, Léonide Distel, was a Russian-Jewish emigré born in Odesa; his mother, Andrée Ventura, was a pianist born in Constantinople; his uncle was the bandleader Ray Ventura, whose orchestra Les Collégiens was a fixture of French popular music. Distel started on piano and switched to guitar after Ventura's orchestra settled in Paris. In 1947, while a film Ventura was producing was being shot, he asked the orchestra's guitarist and singer Henri Salvador for lessons. At his Paris lycée he formed a New Orleans style band with school friends, but in 1948 he heard Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra in Paris, discovered bebop, and turned his own group toward the modern style. That group, built around the tenor saxophonist Hubert Damisch (later a well-known art historian) and the pianist Mimi Perrin, won the prize for best small modern orchestra at a jazz night at the Coliséum, and Distel took a prize as best guitarist. Marc Myers of JazzWax adds that he won first place in a national competition in 1951. At nineteen, in 1952, Ventura sent him to New York to learn English and the music-publishing trade; he bought an electric guitar there, heard the records of Stan Getz and Jimmy Raney, and came home, French Wikipedia says, full of jazz.

Back in Paris he worked the clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter, among them the Caveau de la Huchette. Myers dates his first recording session to 1953, with the Raymond Le Sénéchal Sextet for Vogue (the 10-inch LP Modern Jazz in Paris, Vogue LD 147, dated June 1, 1953 on Discogs, with Fats Sadi on vibraphone), and writes that through the decade he recorded for Vogue, Barclay, Swing and Philips, as a sideman with European musicians and with touring Americans and as a leader. A photograph from June 1954 shows him at the Club Saint-Germain, on the Rue Saint-Benoît, with the guitarists Jimmy Gourley, René Thomas and Jimmy Raney. In May 1954 he was in the Hubert Fol / Sacha Distel Quintette recorded at the Apollo-Théâtre in Paris for the Philips LP Jazz Boom n° 1, with Fol on alto saxophone and René Urtreger, Pierre Michelot and Jean-Baptiste "Mac Kac" Reilles in the rhythm section. On March 18, 1955 he was the guitarist in Lionel Hampton's Paris band, a live date with the trumpeters Nat Adderley, Benny Bailey and Bernard Hulin and the French horn player David Amram, issued on EmArcy as Crazy Rhythm and Jam Session in Paris and on Barclay as Lionel Hampton and His French New Sound. The day before, March 17, he was on the Swing 10-inch LP Rencontre à Paris by the tenor saxophonists Don Rendell and Bobby Jaspar, again with Amram; Jaspar's Plays... Gone With the Winds (Swing) and the Barclay LP Modern Jazz au Club Saint-Germain (1956, credited to Bobby Jaspar All Stars, with René Urtreger on piano) also carry his guitar, as does Jack Diéval's Jazz aux Champs-Élysées (Polydor, recorded June 24, 1957).

In 1956 he made his own records. Jazz d'aujourd'hui (Versailles, a 10-inch LP recorded on May 28 and on June 1 and 2) has arrangements and compositions by the American trombonist Billy Byers, who shared an apartment with him in Paris, and a rhythm section that includes Pierre Michelot and, on two tracks, the American bassist George Duvivier and pianist Gene DiNovi; Lionel Hampton wrote the liner notes. The Columbia EP Jean-Pierre Sasson Plays With Sacha Distel paired him with a second guitarist. In December 1956 (the 4th and 7th, according to English Wikipedia) he recorded Afternoon in Paris with John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, with the tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, bassists Pierre Michelot and Percy Heath and drummers Connie Kay and Kenny Clarke. It was issued in 1957 by Atlantic in the United States and by Versailles in France, credited to Lewis and Distel, and AllMusic's Alex Henderson rated it four stars. In September 1957 he co-led a quintet with the tenor saxophonist and flutist Bobby Jaspar, René Urtreger on piano, Benoît Quersin or Paul Rovère on bass and Al Levitt on drums, recording six pieces, most of them by Byers. A Discogs artist note says Jazz Hot magazine and several critics voted him best guitarist in the 1950s.

In 1957, Myers writes, Henri Salvador played him a Frank Sinatra album and he began to sing. In December 1958 he introduced "Scoubidou" in a recital at the Casino in Algiers, accompanied by a jazz trio; released in 1959, it made him a national name, and the Académie Charles-Cros gave him its Grand Prix that year. In 1961, at Roger Vadim's request, he wrote the tune "Marina" for the "L'Orgueil" episode of the film Les Sept Péchés capitaux; he recorded it on December 6, 1961 with Pierre Michelot, Kenny Clarke, the organist Raymond Le Sénéchal and the trumpeter Bernard Hulin. With English words by Jack Reardon it became "The Good Life", a No. 18 hit in the United States for Tony Bennett in 1963. His French version of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" gave him a No. 10 hit in Britain in 1970. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1997. From the 1960s on, the large majority of his records were French pop and variety albums.

The jazz recordings of his later years are fewer but real. Back to Jazz, recorded on November 12, 1968 in Paris and on November 19 in London and issued in 1969 on La Voix de son Maître (Pathé Marconi), is arranged and played by Slide Hampton, with a studio orchestra on the Paris sessions and a British big band on the London ones; it sets two Jobim songs and two of Distel's own tunes beside four Hampton originals. In 1983 he made My Guitar and All That Jazz, issued in the United States on Norman Granz's Pablo label (2310-892), recorded at Studio Davout in Paris with the pianist Maurice Vander, the drummer André Ceccarelli, the bassist Bernard Paganotti, the flutist François Jeanneau and two other guitarists, and including a new version of "Afternoon in Paris". French Wikipedia lists jazz concerts at the Petit Journal Montparnasse in 1992 and 1995, and in 2003 he released But Beautiful, an album of standards with Liza Minnelli and Dionne Warwick as guests. His last stage appearance, on May 7, 2004, was a duet with the singer Sanseverino at the Victoires du Jazz ceremony in Deauville. He passed away on July 22, 2004, aged 71, at Rayol-Canadel-sur-Mer, near Saint-Tropez.

On guitar Distel played in the relaxed, bop-based modern style of the early 1950s that he first heard on records by Stan Getz and Jimmy Raney. Myers, writing in 2012, judged him less nimble than his countryman René Thomas but richly melodic, clever with harmony and gently, ambitiously swinging, and thought that he carried what he had learned on the jazz guitar into his singing, in the manner of Nat King Cole. His first teacher on the instrument was Henri Salvador, and the American trombonist Billy Byers, with whom he shared a Paris apartment, wrote most of the music on his 1956 and 1957 leader dates. English Wikipedia's list of jazz musicians he worked with, taken from the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, runs from Kenny Clarke, Jimmy Gourley and Lionel Hampton to Martial Solal, René Urtreger and Barney Wilen. The Subgenres above describe the jazz side of his work only; after 1959 he was above all a singer of French variety songs, and that part of his career is outside what this profile tags.