Continued: CD Reviews

The Twin Cities Hot Club's eponymous CD (no date) features a quartet: violinist Gary Schulte, bassist Matt Senjem, rhythm guitarist Reynold Philipsek and solo guitarist Robert Bell. They are all highly proficient and endowed with enough natural swing without a second rhythm man. Bell alone generates a powerful drive, well amplified by his compatriots. Schulte has a flamboyant and florid lead style, while Bell counters with a restrained and modest lead voice. Their repertory is firmly focused on the Hot Club of France book, but they freely reinterpret the warhorses. On uptempo numbers, they adopt an obvious two-beat rhythm, accentuated by Bell's elliptical, staccato picking. At times there is a Zen-like sparseness to the band's texture, with silences operating as dynamic forces. The riff tune "Artillerie Lourde" demonstrates this vividly, as does the string-jazz touchstone number. "Minor Swing." Bell is also highly capable on the sentimental-lyrical numbers like "Sweet Chorus" and "Butterfly." A well-rounded and interesting band.

Bell's solo album Gypsy Tendercies (2004) was made by dubbing solo guitar lines over a pre-taped rhythm-guitar plus bass background with Bell playing both guitar parts and Matt Senjem providing the bass part. The CD revisits some TCHC numbers -- "Jersey Bounce," Artillerie Lourde" and "Minor Swing." The comparison is instructive, as Bell is the sole lyric voice and must spread his talents wider and suppress his tendencies toward a laconic lead. He still retains an understated approach, and his staccato picking is even more incisive than with the full quartet. The absence of the fiddle lead makes Bell display his talents for invention and his ability to push the trio (pre-recorded or not!) along subtly. Bell spreads out his romantic sensibility in pieces like "I'm Confessin’," echoing Louis Armstrong's classic version. He also renders "Ain't Misbehavin'" as a thoughtful ballad, not a jump number. His brief original tune "Minor Blues" is like an echo or answer to the classic "Minor Swing" and frames a nifty high-velocity bass solo. This is more than an interesting footnote to the band CD.

The final Minnesota group is the eldest, Parisota Hot Club, with Swing in Djune, recorded in 2002. A few years later, violinist-leader Raphael Fraisse (yes, he was French) was diagnosed with aggressive leukemia, and he died within the next several years. His quartet was staffed by Bobby Ekstrand and Robert Henry, who swapped solo and rhythm guitar roles, and Bill Grenke, string bass. Fraisse played an electric-blue electric fiddle and shaped his band into an impressive unit. On this CD they play right from the middle of the Django-Grappelli band book and offer accurate but personalized versions of the core classics with hyper-romantic readings of "Troublant Bolero," Douce Ambiance" and other slow-drag numbers and underscored impressionist effects on "Nuages." They also deliver enough lively, light bounce on numbers like "Swing 42" or "Minor Swing" to delight the zazous (jitterbugs, bobbysoxers). Fraisse had a light touch and the gift of leading assertively without overwhelming the rest of his group. Parisota Hot Club made a later CD before the disease sidelined Fraisse. The individualistic sound of PHC will be sorely missed.

The final CD in our survey is a taste of the future of gypsy jazz, perhaps. It is a band based in New York City, Gypsy Jazz Caravan: Pour les Zazous, recorded in 2006. It is made up of Marc Daine, leader, solo guitar and mandolin; Glenn Tosto, rhythm guitar; Rob Thomas, violin, and Mike Weatherly, string bass. All tunes on this album are originals crafted by Marc Daine, and while this is pastiche music, it is so well absorbed from the general Django-Grappelli style as to be indistinguishable from the old numbers. Daine and cohorts have soaked up all the nuances of style and idiom and produced a kind of generic music that would fool experts and casual listeners alike. The revival has reached the stage where the music is widely known, and the quartet format with lead swapped between guitar and fiddle immediately evokes recognition in X notes (as they used to say on Name that Tune). Daine provides a clear, plangent lead, and Thomas lays down a suave violin lead as counterpoint. Numbers like "Pour les Zazous" or "Torment in A Minor" seem right out of the Hot Club of France's earliest discs. Some seem aimed at 1930s dance routines, like "Do the Promenade" or "Europa Swing," but it is purely "imaginary history" we hear, the musical equivalent of magic realism. "Modernistique" is a belated bow to art deco/style moderne preoccupations of ca. 1935. We have reached a point where everyone is comfortable with the ongoing life of a jazz genre invented some 70 years ago!

Of course, Django and Grappelli themselves developed, mutated and transformed themselves in the 15 or so years of their partnership. They heard more U.S. jazz-string masters such as Eddie South and Stuff Smith, they implanted themselves firmly in the worldwide Swing craze and then leapt onto the bebop bandwagon when it left the station. Django moved from the Selmer-Macaffero guitars (both smallmouth and bigmouth, with the wooden resonators) to electric guitars. Their music omnivorously digests all the new jazz and pop movements of the 1930s and `40s. They would recognize themselves in the mirror of Marc Daine's re-inventions and in the fervent and respectful playing of all the young gypsy jazz acolytes onstage (and on CD) today.

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Check www.clearwaterhotclub.com to order the Sam Miltich/Clearwater Hot Club recordings and www.bellrobert.com for the Robert Bell/Twin Cities Hot Club recordings. The Hot Club of San Francisco CD is available from www.hcsf.com or www.Reference Recordings.com (1-800-336-8866), and the Gypsy Jazz Caravan CD can be obtained by logging onto http://cdbaby.com. The Parisota Hot Club CD is available from www.parisota.com. Even more CDs by these fine bands are available on these websites.

June 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag

P.O. Box 19068, Minneapolis, MN 55419.