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Gypsy jazz king Django Reinhardt. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
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Maybe the baby ate the Django
In search of authenticity, do some historical jazz acts end up losing it?
BY LEN SOUSA
There's a certain anachronism in listening to Django Reinhardt on CD. The Belgian jazz guitarist, most famous for his two-finger playing style and fostering the spread of Gypsy jazz, made his most-memorable recordings during the 1930s. As a result, the songs still retain their characteristic vinyl-etched hiss and crackle. So popping Reinhardt's "Best Of" into a modern stereo is something of a time-traveling experience.
Within this musical anomaly are contemporary bands like Minor Swing. Based out of southern Rhode Island, the group plays a repertoire of Gypsy jazz standards in the vein of Reinhardt and his longtime collaborator Stéphane Grappelli. Featuring mostly string instruments and delivered with a punchy flair found in most Eastern European music, Gypsy jazz is a genre that saw its heyday pass over half a century ago but still retains a surprising amount of popularity to this day.
Chuck Rejto, rhythm guitarist and self-proclaimed den mother to several local jazz groups, began Minor Swing three years ago. Other band members include guitarist Bob Davis, fiddler Joe Fontaine, bassist Steve Morawiec, and rhythm guitarist Paul Kolesnikow. Like original Gypsy jazz bands, the group omits a percussion section entirely - allowing the vamping rhythm guitar to set the beat for each song. But these gypsies don't just play. Dressing for the part, they imitate the look of '30s Gypsy jazz musicians in a style akin to Dick Tracy meets Bill Munroe. The combined result has won them accolades and bookings at several local area restaurants, clubs, dance halls, and art centers, including a gig with the Common Fence Music Series Saturday, Nov. 18.
"[The] group plays material straight off the recording and arrangements of [Reinhardt's] the Quintette du Hot Club de Paris circa 1935," Retjo says.
Listening to Reinhardt's CD crackling from my stereo, I'm continually impressed by his delicate fretwork on tracks like "When Day Is Done" and "Blues Clair." It was a fire at age 18 that cost the promising guitarist two fingers on his left hand and forced him to learn a new way to play. Unable to read either words or music, Reinhardt along with many of his Gypsy jazz contemporaries, learned everything by ear. Eager to reach back to this fabled jazz tradition, I ask Rejto how he and his bandmates learn to play their songs. His answer is predictably less romantic.
"With the spread of computers and musical tools for learning," he explains, "more and more players are accessing the information needed to understand and play at (Gypsy style) tempos and speeds. This includes reading sheet music, tablature, and using studio equipment to listen to the notes at reduced speeds."
Not quite traditional, but times have clearly changed. Reinhardt was younger than Rejto is now when he was in Paris during World War II. Hitler's regime had famously outlawed jazz music throughout the Reich in those years (no surprise since many jazz stars were either black or Jewish), and I picture the musician stowed away in a small club, secretly playing to a small crowd. In a sense, Gypsy jazz became the illicit sound of liberation for many during the Nazi occupation. Hopeful for some insights into this colorful history, I ask Rejto about the lineage Minor Swing and other Gypsy jazz bands are tied to musically and if he might share his perspective on it.
"Only French people who are associated with WWII in some way are going to get this part of the equation," he relates dryly. "The continued popularity of Gypsy jazz is tied to its ability to embody a flavor and zest for life unique to the culture and history of the gypsies."
I manage to ignore the thought of jazz history as a math equation and consider his textbook answer. Why should only those directly affected by those events be the ones to "get" it? Shouldn't the musicians who insist on keeping the spirit of Gypsy jazz alive also feel some deeper connection to its cultural history? Isn't this what often separates jazz from other musical genres - a feeling of community and lineage. Or am I expecting too much from a group considered the best in local jazz?
Feeling a bit in over my head, I turn to an old acquaintance who introduced me to jazz several years ago. Anthony Mohen, a violinist and philosophy grad student at Tufts University, is a walking trove of jazz history and has attended more jazz shows in Europe, New York, and Boston than anyone else I know. He boils things down: "As someone who had to reverse-educate myself in jazz, having only started listening to it a century after it began, I've always been in a position of searching both the old and the new and appreciating them side by side ... I don't think (modern Gypsy jazz) can be classified simply as a traditionalist or throw-back movement, but then I'm critical of classifications like that generally. It's always seemed to me that a lot of jazz is having a framework or style or method of playing as a background to push you to innovate."
So Mohen believes in the innovators as well as the traditionalists. But shouldn't purists want to keep the original jazz spirit alive as well? Modern Gypsy jazz bands seem to simply imitate their favorite musicians and essentially turn themselves into costumed caricatures.
The word "gypsy," for better or for worse, evokes a sense of wandering and restlessness - a feeling of being out of place with the larger community. Reinhardt was raised a Basque Gypsy just outside of Paris and never found much success in any other jazz style but his own before his untimely death in 1956. In a funny way, contemporary Gypsy jazz players fit into this tradition as well. Like Reinhardt's CD playing on a modern stereo, they feel out of place - an auditory record of another time rather than the real thing. While it might look and sound like real Gypsy jazz, it simply doesn't feel like the real thing - which begs the ultimate question: Is this really what Gypsy jazz is all about? For some, the jury's still out.
Minor Swing joins Manege a Trois for Beaujolais Acoustique, Saturday, Nov. 18, at 7 p.m. at the Common Fence Point Community Hall, 933 Anthony Road, Portsmouth. Tickets $16. 683-5085.
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