Life at the Gypsy Jazz Camp (Part One)

When jazz.com’s Bill Barnes told me was running off to Gypsy jazz camp, I had visions of rugged but glamorous days spent in caravans and romantic evenings by the campfire listening to inspired string music. The camera pans back to show bow-top trailers and a dark woods in the background.

Okay, I admit it. I grew up near Hollywood, and it probably shaped my impressions of the life of the Romani people. As I later learned, Bill's Gypsy jazz gathering took place at Smith College, and there wasn't a single bow-top trailer anywhere in sight. But if it didn’t look like a scene from a movie, the music lived up to the highest expectations.

More interesting, this event is another sign of the remarkable resurgence of interest in the music of Django Reinhardt and his modern-day heirs. Make no mistake about it, Django is hot right now, and seems to be getting hotter all the time. Barnes tells us more about this fascinating subject below, and fills us in on the real happenings at a modern Gypsy jazz camp, in the first installment of his article below. T.G.

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John Jorgenson plays Gypsy jazz in Truro

By Melora B. North

TRURO -

Back in the ’30s, French Sinto Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt made music that would change the course of history. Brought up in Gypsy encampments around Paris, he intertwined the cultures of his environment to create a musical genre reminiscent of a dance on the strings with heated abandon.

The sounds are light and frothy, deep and throaty, a contradiction that perfectly melds together to move the spirit and ignite a passion for a romp on the guitar a la Roma music. It is the flight of Reinhardt’s pick that has captured the heart of guitarist John Jorgenson, who will be performing a concert of American Gypsy jazz with his quintet at the Payomet Performing Arts Center, Highlands Center, Truro, for Gypsy Weekend.

The concert is at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 28. Admission is $20-$25. Call (508) 487-5400 for tickets.

A native of Southern California, Jorgenson got his degree in woodwinds from University of Redlands, a liberal arts college in his hometown which he says was small, “only about 35,000 people, a good place to grow up.”

It was as a child that he learned to play piano and dabbled in clarinet, but it was at age 12 that he got his first guitar, and that was just the beginning. Today Jorgenson says he can play several instruments, but the public will get to see him shine on the clarinet and guitar this time around.

“I can play about 10 instruments, though my levels of proficiency differ,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t have the sports gene. When the other kids were out playing sports I guess I was practicing. I used to ski but that ended when I broke my shoulder three weeks before my first tour with Elton John. We had to cut a guitar part.” But that didn’t end things for Jorgenson with the famed singer-pianist; it was actually the start of something quite good.

“I was originally signed up to tour with Elton John for 18 months. It turned out to be six years,” says Jorgenson. “He first heard me when I was playing with the Desert Rose Band, a band I co-founded with Chris Hillman from the Byrds. Six years later he asked me to tour with him. He’s fantastic, funny, very smart and very respectful of other musicians. It was a good job.” And it opened a lot of doors.

Through John, Jorgenson got to meet the late opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.

“They were doing a duet,” says Jorgenson. “It was the coolest thing being backstage in Italy when he came backstage and all of a sudden you heard this voice. Elton was teaching him a song!”

Over the course of his career, Jorgenson has performed with other notables such as K.D. Lang, Roy Orbison, Barbra Streisand, Bonnie Raitt, Earl Scruggs and Benny Goodman, an eclectic assortment of talent to be sure. He has collaborated with Billy Joel and Sting, and three times he has won the American Country Music award for Guitarist of the Year. He even has a Grammy with Peter Frampton. But it is his affinity for Reinhardt that seems to keep coming to the forefront.

“Django is the godfather of my style,” says Jorgenson, who was asked to re-create Reinhardt’s music for film. He did the music for “Gattica” and “Head in the Clouds.” In fact, he played Reinhardt in “Clouds,” which starred Charlize Theron and Penelope Cruz.

“They asked me to re-create a couple of pieces from an old score,” says Jorgenson. “The director wanted to show the guitarist on stage. They cut my hair and dyed it black. I had a mustache and they did make-up on my hands to make them look burned and scarred.” (At age 18 Reinhardt was rescued from a terrible fire that ravaged the caravan he was living in at the time with his first wife. He would later learn to play guitar with just two fingers despite the doctor’s declaration that he would never play again.) “I played with my two fingers. The film is a period piece, great fun. I did my best.” And his best was convincing.

“I’m Scandinavian, Scotch and Irish,” says the blonde with a laugh. “They did such a good job on the make-up, my wife Dixie [Gamble] didn’t even recognize me.”

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Django all the way

Susan Whitall / Detroit News Music Writer

He was an illiterate, superstitious gypsy born in a caravan at a crossroads in France, and he played with a mangled left hand; but Django Reinhardt is acknowledged as one of the greatest guitarists of all time. And although his heyday was back in the 1930s and '40s, Reinhardt's influence continues to resonate, with DjangoFests popping up in most major cities.

In Detroit, the fifth annual Django Reinhardt Festival, spearheaded by guitarist Evan Perri and his swing jazz band Hot Club of Detroit, will happen at the restored Depression-era club Cliff Bell's in Detroit tonight and Friday.

This year's lineup includes jazz guitarist Howard Alden, known for the Django-influenced soundtrack he performed for the Woody Allen film "Sweet and Lowdown," featuring Sean Penn. Penn played Emmett Ray, a fictional jazz guitarist who was supposedly so cowed by Reinhardt that he fainted the two times he met him.

"It was a fun six months," Alden says of the film. "I thought it would be two or three days of doing the soundtrack in the style of Django Reinhardt, but I found out that (Allen) wanted me to follow Sean around on the set of the movie and teach him how to play guitar. He'd never touched a guitar before in his life, but after a few months, he could play a few of the melodies note for note."

What makes Reinhardt's music so seductive? The Romany guitarist, a veteran of the rowdy Parisian bals musette (dance halls), became infatuated with the American jazz he heard in the early '20s. (His response when hearing Louis Armstrong on record for the first time was, "Ach moune, ach moune!" -- "My brother, my brother!")

Reinhardt started playing jazz with a swing that eluded most European musicians of the time, the kind of rhythm that flowed so easily in the jazz played by Americans, especially African Americans. Before Reinhardt, jazz was mostly horn-based; he helped usher in an era of string jazz.

Reinhardt's gypsy jazz, and the swing jazz played by groups such as Hot Club of Detroit, is as unlike modern pop music as it could be, too -- upbeat, sophisticated and unabashedly emotional.
"The music is different; it seems to be very happy," says Hot Club guitarist Paul Brady. "It's the perfect music for playing in bars and clubs. It makes people want to hang out and party. When you add Django Reinhardt, here's this two-fingered gypsy who's supposed to be the greatest jazz guitarist ever, a guy with only two fingers on his left hand -- there's a weird mystique surrounding his name."

The New York-based Alden, 49, who plays on Friday at DjangoFest, doesn't play guitar in the style of Reinhardt exclusively, but he is acknowledged as one of the best at it, performing at many DjangoFests around the country. Alden sees an upsurge of interest in the swing era, swing guitar and a more acoustic sound.

"People come at it from so many different angles," Alden says. "Some come at it more from a country and bluegrass style, a lot are bringing in more Eastern European sound, concentrating more on the gypsy than the jazz. It's great because the music can cross so many borders that way. It's not a snobbish, focused-jazz thing. And it can be real personal; you can just have the sound of the instrument and yourself. It can be as intimate or as big as you want it to be."
Brady believes the appeal of Reinhardt-style gypsy jazz (or jazz manouche) is to young guitarists bored with rock but put off by jazz snobbishness. They find it fun to play because it's so guitar-centered.

"The guitar is able to pull in this group of people that might not otherwise be into jazz or classical music," Brady says. "It's a link to the guitar in pop and rock music. It's a flashy style, very fast and virtuosic, so you attract the interest of rock guitarists. On top of that it's a very fun, upbeat music that everybody gets a kick out of."

You can reach Susan Whitall at (313) 222-2156 or swhitall@detnews.com.