By Mike Zweri
June 20 (Bloomberg) -- The musette is the musical expression of the beret, the baguette, and the yellow corn-paper Gauloise cigarette. It is, says Didier Lockwood, ``as French as the Tour de France.''
Lockwood, a violinist, composer, and educator, is officially described as ``godfather'' to the Festival Jazz Musette des Puces that takes place in the Paris flea market in the suburb of Saint- Ouen on June 23 and 24.
Musette is bouncy, merry music, perfect for dancing and partying. It is now a kind of folk music, fixed in the time of its heyday, the first half of the 20th century.
Elements of the tango, the waltz, the mazurka, and flamenco were incorporated into the gypsy culture to give birth to the musette. The accordion was king, followed by guitars, clarinets, violins and bass fiddles as the style segued into what was called Gypsy Swing. Similar to the tango, it excluded drums. It is useful to remember that Chet Baker once said: ``It's got to be a pretty good drummer to be better than no drummer at all.''
When Jean `Django' Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France combined the musette with jazz in the 1930s, it became the only major jazz style not born in the U.S.
Gypsy Swing generates its magical percussionless groove (the accordion was dropped) by several guitars playing the ``pompe,'' an insistent strumming of four beats to the bar.
Adding Charisma
The quintet was still a quartet when Reinhardt complained to his co-leader, the violinist Grappelli, that it wasn't fair that he had only one guitar playing the pompe behind his solos, and Grappelli had two. So they added a third guitar, and that clinched the group's charisma.
Grappelli took Lockwood under his wing when he heard him play at the age of 21, when he was with the jazz-rock fusion group Magma. Lockwood has since played and recorded with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Elvin Jones, Claude Nougaro, Michel Petrucciani, and Frank Zappa.
His Centre des Musiques Didier Lockwood, south of Paris near Melun, teaches improvisation to an international assortment of students. He has been made a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur.
Lockwood compares the musette to Irish traditional music, sounds that will not disappear, but ``which needs to be exposed to a wider and younger public.''
David Reinhardt, Ninine Garcia, Stochello Rosenberg, Christian Escoude and Marcel Azzola among others will perform afternoons and evenings in the brasseries, bistros, bars and streets of the market, surrounding Saint-Ouen and the neighboring 18th arrondisssement.
The festival's costs are covered by councils, tourist boards, cultural organizations and private sponsors, making the music free of charge. Lockwood calls it a ``fete populaire.''
Double Outlaw
Reinhardt was, like Artie Shaw, one of those jazzmen who was good and genuinely popular at the same time. His popularity topped out during the German occupation of France (Grappelli spent the war in London), when posters for his concerts were on the walls of Paris next to Maurice Chevalier posters.
Reinhardt ate in the best Italian restaurants, stayed at the best hotels, and won and lost fortunes playing billiards. Being a gypsy and a jazz musician in wartime Paris, he was a double outlaw at a time when jazz was a metaphor for freedom.
The 28th annual Django Reinhardt Festival in Samois-sur- Seine, an enchanting river port west of Paris, will take place from June 28 through July 1, a week after the market festival. Reinhardt had settled down in a house in Samois when he died aged 43 on May 16, 1953, while fishing in a rowboat on the river.
Many gypsies continue to claim to be his cousins. Most of them play guitars, and they like to gather their caravans in Samois for the festival.
Featured musicians include Mike Reinhardt, Tchavolo and Dorado Schmitt, Alma Sinti, Wawau Adler, and Florin Niculescu.
(Mike Zwerin is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Labels: France, Gypsy Swing, Music
