Music That Wanders Through Time

Miles Kington
The Independent, Wednesday, 23 June 2004

One of the most intense musical experiences of my life happened in a small cafe/bar in Paris about two years ago. I was over there doing some work on a possible radio project on Django Reinhardt, and the researcher I was with wanted to get some live gypsy jazz on tape for possible use for background atmosphere. It's the sort of thing you can easily find in any tape library, of course, but some radio people still have integrity, and also enjoy a night out, so we went off to a bar which had the right sort of group playing that evening. When the band arrived, we asked the bandleader if we might tape some of his music just as background atmosphere for a programme we might be making ...

We could have saved our breath. At the sight of a microphone and portable tape machine the bandleader reacted with all the enthusiasm of Horatio Hornblower spotting a skull and crossbones. Piracy! Theft! Copyright! Broadside! No way! Absolument defendu! So we made the international sign of surrender (rueful eyebrows, both hands up, palms facing out), put away the machine, and we sat down to just eat, drink and listen.

It was a trio (lead guitar, rhythm guitar and double bass) and they did indeed all look interestingly gypsy-like, and the music they played that night was so powerful and so sparkling, quite apart from being only ten feet away, that he and I and the predominantly young student crowd were quite scoured by the experience. And later my researcher friend revealed that unbeknownst to him he had accidentally left the tape machine running for a couple of numbers under the table, and although the results would never be usable, I still have a tape of those two numbers which I occasionally play to convince myself that the music really was as good as my romantic imagination remembers it, even recorded under a table, and by God it was.

What is extraordinary about that kind of music, that gypsy jazz, or Parisian swing, or Hot Club music, or whatever you call it, is that it still exists at all. Its most famous flowering was in the 1930s when the genius of Django Reinhardt's guitar combined with the artistry of Stephane Grappelli's violin to produce a musical hybrid with all the intensity of gypsy music and the showbiz glamour of jazz. It was one of the great sounds of the era.

And I suppose it might well have faded away with the era. After all, there were other fashionable sounds around at the time - grass skirt Hawaiian orchestras, gangs of harmonica players, zither players, novelty piano music a la Zez Confrey and Billy Mayerl - which might also have spawned a tradition or even a heritage industry. But you do not, as far as I know, get festivals of Hawaiian music or zither gatherings in the English countryside.

And nor, you might well retort, do you get gypsy jazz gatherings in Gloucestershire. Oh, how wrong you would be! I have been amazed to find press releases fluttering onto my desk in recent weeks proclaiming an International Gypsy Guitar Festival at the Gloucestershire village of Gossington, the fourth such annual event in a row, on the weekend of July 30/1st August. I have been equally amazed to find that there is another - rather grander - gypsy music festival called L'Esprit Manouche at Birmingham, in Moseley Park, on July 10th and 11th, featuring such stellar gypsy music names as Angelo Debarre and the Ferre brothers, Elios and Boulou.

And I have been even more amazed to find that there is a place in London whch puts on this music almost every night. It's called Le QuecumBar, it bills itself as "Europe's only venue outside Paris presenting Django Reinhardt Hot Club Gypsy Swing" and it's at 42-44 Battersea High St. I see they've got guitarist Angelo Debarre with the wonderful English violinist Chris Garrick on there on July 6th and 7th. By God, I almost wish I lived in London again. And I haven't said that seriously for ten years or more ... (More of this tomorrow, perhaps ...)

 

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