After the war, he was briefly a sports journalist for Paris-Presse-Intransigeant and also played for the national volleyball B team in the 1950s. He spent some months in Portugal and discovered Brazilian music. He visited Brazil in 1959 and on his return to Paris got to know the principal Brazilian writers and composers of bossa nova.

With his first earnings he bought the mill, la Morvient, by the river in Le Boupère in the Vendée where he had spent part of his childhood. There he established a recording studio and welcomed other artists, using it to advance the talent of others and creating his own label Saravah in 1965. With the label he wished to mix musicians and styles, to multiply musical encounters. He worked, notably, with Pierre Akendengué, Areski Belkacem, Brigitte Fontaine, Nana Vasconcelos, Gérard Ansaloni, Jacques Higelin, Alfred Panou, Maurane, David McNeil, Elis Regina.

In 1966 he participated in the enormous success of the film A Man and a Woman which won the Palme d’Or at the 1966 Festival de Cannes. He married the actress Anouk Aimée the same year; they divorced three years later.

Soon after the label’s creation, Barouh realised that he was not a manager and so entrusted management to a teenage friend he had known when he was 15 playing volleyball. However, in 1972, he discovered that this friend had stolen 1,500,000 francs by means which prevented Barouh from being able to get any of it back, as he “had given him everything: signatures, etc”.

Barouh died in the Hôpital Cochin in Paris from an infarction on 28 December 2016, at the age of 82. He was buried a week later at Montmartre Cemetery.