Pierre Jobin, who had been the agent of Félix Leclerc and who devoted forty years of his life to the dissemination of French-language songs from here and elsewhere, died on Tuesday. It was her daughter, Sarah-Kristel Marcoux, who announced her death on Wednesday on her Facebook page, adding that her father had Alzheimer’s disease.
For forty years, as an artist’s agent, cultural host, theater director or radio host, Pierre Jobin has created a whole environment so that francophone song and theater flourish in Quebec City – and in Quebec, that he loved so much.
He notably directed the Théâtre de l’Île d’Orléans from 1973 to 1991, and the Petit-Champlain, in Quebec, from 1979 to 1984, then from 1989 to 1996. He also founded the agency Productions Quebec and brought in and knowing in the province the Pierre Barouh, Pierre Perret, Ricet Barrier, Yves Duteil, Anne Sylvestre, Claude Nougaro and Anna Prucnal.
He also launched the careers of promising young Quebec beginners. He was also Félix Leclerc’s agent from 1973 until his friend’s death in 1988. At the end of the 1990s, Pierre Jobin sold his house on Île d’Orléans and bought an old bank in Vieux-Limoilou to open in 1999 a small 80-seat song box called Aux oiseaux de passage, like the song of Brassens.
“This passionate about songs, lover of words, this great dreamer will have touched the hearts and souls of so many people,” writes his daughter. He will have made us discover so many artists, will have given us the audacity to go towards beauty, towards what the song or the theater have more beautiful to offer. If he believed in something, he would go for it! “