A Welcome Return From Obscurity by a New York Romany Jazz Outfit

For many years before the 2020 lockdown, the music school around the corner from St. Marks Park in the East Village put on a weekly series of free lunchtime concerts in front of the church just west of Second Avenue. These ran the gamut from jazz, to klezmer and various styles from the tropics. Back in the early teens, you would see homeless people converging on the space, seemingly out of nowhere, right before the end of the show. That’s because the organizers frequently gave away cookies when the band finished up. The series has returned this year, and it’s very unlikely that there will be cookies for the final show there on July 28 at half past noon. But if you live or work in the neighborhood, you can catch a rare appearance by a group who’ve played there a few times, Gypsy Jazz Caravan.

This may be their first show since the lockdown – beyond an old Reverbnation page, you have to go to the Wayback Machine to find out much of anything about them. They play mostly originals in the time-honored Django Reinhardt tradition, plus a few covers like La Vie En Rose where their sense of humor comes through. This blog was in the house (or, more specifically, in the shade of a tree across the street) for an enjoyably purist, pretty low-key show they played there on a steamy June afternoon in 2016.

Violinist Rob Thomas, lead guitarist Marc Daine, rhythm guitarist Glenn Tosto and bassist Mike Weatherly’s four tracks on the Reverbnation page give you a good idea of what they’re about. With the first one, Bossa Roma. they underscore how effective it can be when you switch out a brisk shuffle beat for a slinky clave groove in order to transform a wistful Romany jazz melody. Their La Vie En Rose cover has some characteristically sly flourishes, while Le Musette de L’Arrogance, a sprightly, biting minor-key waltz, has Thomas doubling Daine’s melody line with a stark melismatic edge..

If you want more Gypsy Jazz Caravan, their 2006 album Pour Les Zazous is up at youtube. The songs are a lot more diverse than all the shredders in the Django cult typically play. One of the highlights among the shuffle tunes is the enigmatic Torment in A Minor; another is the bittersweetly strolling Do the Promenade. If you want a sentimental waltz, White Hotel is for you. The best song on it is Land of the Lonely, with Daine’s spiky leads and Thomas’ shivery intensity. If you miss Stephane Wrembel’s legendary residencies around town, this may be as good as it gets for that style of music right now in New York.

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A Sizzling New Romany Jazz Album by Marbin

Marbin are a Chicago institution, pushing the envelope as far as the infinite directions a band can go in using Django Reinhardt as a stepping-off point. Their new album Fernweh (German for “wanderlust”) is streaming at Bandcamp and interestingly is one of their more trad, Belleville-influenced efforts, without the diversions toward the Middle East and klezmer that they’ve taken throughout their career. As well-worn as this material is, these takes are fresh and relentlessly inspired. Fans of this era’s best Romany jazz artists, like Stephane Wrembel, will not be disappointed. The solos on this record are just plain off the hook.

They open with a lively, shuffling Romany jazz take of All of Me with some electrifyingly rapidfire, crystalline soprano sax cascades from Danny Markovitch. Guitarist Dani Rabin gives the trio’s version of Stardust a long, sparkling, solo intro, Markovitch providing elegantly glissando-spiced solos around the guitarist’s feathery break.

Their version of Dark Eyes is a brisk launching pad for Rabin’s supersonic, light-fingered volleys and a triumphant Markovitch soprano solo out. They do Georgia On My Mind as an uptempo shuffle with some sizzling tremolo-picking from Rabin and a clever, conversational outro.

Rabin alternates between sageness and ferocity, Markovitch offering more spine-tingling spirals in this version of Minor Swing. They slow down over bassist Jon Nadel’s steady, calm pulse for Nuages, Markovitch floating over Rabin’s dynamically textured multitracks.

Rabin can’t resist some wry Wes Montgomery in Honeysuckle Rose, Markovitch on alto and then soprano. He spins and sizzles in a subtly crescendoing interpretation of I’ll See You In My Dreams; likewise, Rabin slays with his subtly blues-infused solo

Markovitch’s shivery trills and Rabin’s wry popcorn-machine blips elevate Confessin’ above the level of cheese. They wind up the record with a bristling, bustling take of Swing Gitane. Despite the disastrous effects of the lockdown, there’s still been a ton of good original jazz coming out this year. Even so, this collection earns a spot on the list of best albums of the year.

Playful, Inventive, Outside-the-Box Romany-Inspired Jazz and Reinvented Classical Themes

Violinist Gabe Terracciano‘s album Three Part Invention – streaming at Bandcamp – is a lot of fun, with very inventive arrangements and ideas springboarding off a familiar three-piece Romany jazz setup: guitar, violin and bass. Guitarist Josh Dunn has his Django Reinhardt parts down cold but also gets to indulge in some nimble classical guitar and other styles while bassist Ian Hutchison holds the center, even when he’s in rapidfire mode.

Throughout the record, there are some welcome and unexpected interludes for solo bass, particularly in Dance for Jimmy a bluesy strut with less obvious Romany jazz influence and spare, surrealistically descending solos from guitar and violin

The most obvious Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli influence is in the trio’s take of Crazy Rhythm. Violin and guitar double each other in the undulating but motoring Fleche D’Or, with some breathtakingly shivery violin work from Terracciano.

The piece de resistance here is the austerely airy, lingering, tantalizingly brief arrangement of Erik Satie’s iconically haunting Gymnopedie No. 3. They rename the famous baroque tune Invention No. 4 as “Beautiful Love,” moving from a rapid stroll to fugal exchanges between guitar and violin, Terracciano taking Bach to Belleville.

A lot of people have taken Beethoven’s Pathetique to new places; this one is a mashup of the baroque with distant Celtic tinges.

Terracciano switches to viola for a stark, spacious take of Alex North’s love theme from the 1960 movie Spartacus, leaving behind waltzing nostalgia for more incisive terrain and an all-too-brief, poignantly dancing bass-guitar interlude. And Sweet Chorus comes across as an emphatic, strolling take of Sweet Sue with biting violin and expansively chordal guitar.

Escape to Paris in the 1930s with Chloe Perrier

The point of chanteuse Chloe Perrier’s new album Petite Fleur, with her French Heart Jazz Band – streaming at Spotify – is that these are dark times, and she wants to give everyone a little escape to a better time and place. Les Deux Magots in the Quartier Latin, smoky and electric…but with sounds far more cross-pollinated than even the musical mecca that was prewar Paris could have conjured at the time.

Over the past couple of years, Perrier and the band have been playing a mix of classic chanson, Romany jazz and American standards, many of them reinvented with counterintuitive panache. Everything on the album has been thoroughly crowd-tested: until the lockdown, Perrier and the group maintained a tough schedule of club and hotel bar gigs. And even though this is an upbeat album, she’s never sung with more depth and gravitas than she does here.

The album’s opening track, Charles Trenet’s Menilmontant, is one that Perrier really excels with. This is a particularly bright, brisk version, with scurrying guitar from Akira Ishiguro and cheery clarinet by guest Jon Hunt over the scampering shuffle of bassist Jim Robertson and colorful drummer Rodrigo Recabarren. Perrier’s clear, unselfconscious, personable vocals are the icing on the cake.

She sings the old klezmer-jazz standard Comes Love in French, with a vivid wistfulness, over a syncopated, bouncy bolero beat, violinist Caroline Bugala adding cosmopolitan flair. The group revisit that milieu later on, in their version of Sway.

Perrier returns to the Trenet songbook for a relatively slow, swinging, Django-and-Stephane-tinged take of Que reste-t-il de nos amours and then follows that by reinventing Helen Merrill’s Just Squeeze Me as the coy Lorsque tu m’embrasses.

Then Perrier pays a jaunty visit to “le pays aux oiseaux” – you could do the same if the 44th Street club immortalized in the song hadn’t been shut down by Il Duce in Albany. She goes deep into the expat subtext of the old Josephine Baker hit J’ai deux amours over a steady shuffle, then she sings Coquette in English as the band leap and bound elegantly behind her.

Guilty, a knowingly enigmatic take on the big hit by British crooner Al Bowlly, was included on the soundtrack to the film Amélie. The inevitable version of La vie en rose here gets redone with a Djangoesque pulse, triumphant energy from Perrier and Bugala.

Ray Ventura’s Je voudrais en savoir d’avantage gets a verdant workout with sailing violin and guitar solos. Perrier and band close the record with an absolutely gorgeous, haunting bolero take of the Sidney Bechet-penned title track. Perrier’s going to cheer up a lot of people in her “deux amours,” on both sides of the pond, with this one.

Stephane Wrembel Releases a Lavish, Charecteristically Edgy New Romany Jazz Album at Drom Tonight

Guitarist Stephane Wrembel made a name for himself as a stormy, erudite interpreter of Django Reinhardt, but his own body of work encompasses far more than that, using Romany jazz as a stepping-off point for his own distinctive ventures into Middle Eastern sounds and psychedelic rock. His lavish, dynamically rich, often poignant new double cd The Django Experiment is streaming at youtube. Disc one is mostly an imaginative mix of Django classics; disc two is mostly originals, in more of a jazz vein than what audiences get at his ongoing, legendary most-every-Sunday night 9 PM-ish residency at Barbes. He’s playing the album release show tonight, June 10 at 8 PM at Drom; hopefully by now you have your $15 advance tickets because it’s an extra five at the door.

The first disc opens with Nuages, Wrembel’s elegantly spare, resonant lines over Thor Jensen’s spring-loaded rhythm guitar, Ari Folman-Cohen’s bass and Nick Anderson’s drums. Wrembel takes somewhat the opposite approach with his tremolo-picking on the waltz Gin-Gin, then he and Folman-Cohen have fun working the chromatic edges of Bouncin’ Around, a close cousin to Brother Can You Spare a Dime.

Nick Driscoll’s clarinet spirals around and intertwines artfully with Wrembel on the jaunty Dinette. By contrast, Wrembel and Jensen max out the modal melancholy in a majestically spacious take of Troublant Bolero, up to a characteristically careening crescendo. It makes a good segue with the first of Wrembel’s originals, Windmills, a brisk, deliciously broodng waltz.

The band goes back to the Django catalog for a bubbly, lickety-split take of Place de Broukere, followed by the bucolic desolation of Carnets de Route,Wrembel’s moodily magical mashup of Django and Pink Floyd. The up-down dynamics continue with the coyly strutting Djangology and then Wrembel’s plaintively mined take of Sasha Distel’s Ma Premiere Guitare. Disc one winds up with Wrembel’s wistful waltz Jacques Prevert followed by a roller-coaster ride through Django’s Minor Swing. the bandleader channeling Wes Montgomery up to a mightily plucked bass solo and finally a stampede out.

The second disc begins with the epically vamping Douce Ambience. It perfectly capsulizes the confluence of Middle Eastern modalities and Romany swing that Wrembel first began mining around ten years ago, the guitarist’s understated unease in contrast with Driscoll’s relentless centrifugal force on soprano sax, Anderson taking it out with a long hailstorm of a solo. Viper’s Dream is pretty close to the Django version, with a little wryly bouncing Tal Farlow thrown in.

A waltz by Bamboula Ferrret benefits from Wrembel’s judicious, occasionally tremolo-picked phrases mixed into an attack that’s equally precise and resonant: all those notes don’t just vanish into thin air. Boston, another waltz, begins wistfully, grows more elegaic and then Wrembel builds a long, growling upward drive. Then the band flips the script with the toe-tapping shuffle Double Scotch, Driscoll adding dixieland effervescence.

Reinhardt’s midtempo stroll Tears reveals itself here as the source of a Beatles hit that Big Lazy likes to take even deeper into the shadows. Nanoc, which is Wrembel’s Caravan, opens with a levantine slink and slithers further off the rails from there. Then he makes a surreal juxtaposition with Django’s Louis Jordan-influenced Heavy Artillery, which is anything but. After that, Minor Blues is middle ground, more or less, Wrembel adding an understated intensity, part Wes Montgomery, part psychedelic rock, with a long, practically frantic sprint out.

Interestingly, the album’s best track isn’t one of the barn-burners but Wrembel’s slow, hushed, allusively flamenco-ish Film Noir. Raising the ante again, Driscoll’s clarinet infuses Songe d’Automne with an indian summer breeze. The final cut is the enigmatically balmy ballad Anouman, ironically the closest thing to straight-up postbop here. Over and over, Wrembel reaffirms his status as paradigm-shifter and one of the world’s most engaging, original innovators in Romany guitar jazz.

A Somberly Memorable Final Album from Gato Libre

Trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and pianist Satoko Fujii‘s previous album with their Gato Libre quartet, Shiro, incorporated elements of flamenco, Middle Eastern, Romany and rock music within an improvisational context. The group’s most recent and final album, Forever, often more closely resembles Fujii and Tamura’s Ma-Do ensemble, which uses traditional Japanese melodies as a stepping-off point. This one is sadly notable for being one of the last recordings made by the group’s late bassist Norikatsu Koreyasu, and for whatever reason has a considerably more subdued, moody ambience. As before, Fujii plays accordion rather than piano here, alongside her trumpeter husband plus acoustic guitarist Kazuhiko Tsumura.

Much of this is a theme and variations set to slow, rubatoesque tempos; the quartet moving forward methodically if not necessarily with a specific meter. Tamura kicks off the opening number, Moor with a stately, anthemic theme over sheets of accordion and plucking from the guitar and bass, rising more rhythmically and then receding, a portentous overture. Court, the second track, follows the same trajectory to a brooding bass vamp withi eerily, distantly lingering accordion. Hokkaido is a cinematic mini-suite, pastoral accordion handing off to more energetic trumpet and then a flamenco-tinged guitar solo. Moseda follows a warmly bucolic, almost Beatlesque theme and then shifts unexpectedly into darkness with an absolutely delicious, chromatically bristling bass solo – it’s the closest thing here to the material on the previous album.

Nishiogi is another catchy one, pensive accordion over nimbly precise bass and fingerpicked guitar, with a long, expansive but purposeful bass solo. Japan is portrated as nebulous and dreamy but with an elegaic bittersweetness (Tamura and Fujii would soon leave their native land for Germany, perhaps explaining that mood) over a sober, marchlike rhythm. A more nostalgic tone poem, World, follows that, another moody bass solo giving way to flamencoesque guitar. The title track moves back and forth from waltz time, up and down, maintaining the nostalgic feel. It’s a memorable way for both the group and Koreyasu to bow out.

Energetic, Eclectic, Haunting Sounds from the Jason Seed Stringtet

While echoes of Django Reinhardt and Astor Piazzolla pervade the Jason Seed Stringtet’s new album In the Gallery, the Milwaukee guitarist’s compositions are even more eclectic than simply a blend of Romany jazz and nuevo tango. He’s put together a formidable string band, playing acoustic alongside Glenn Asch on violin and viola, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s Helen Reich on viola and and Scott Tisdel on cello, and the Chicago Symphony’s Dan Armstrong on bass. Although these players come from classical backgrounds, there’s a lot of improvisation, and the band has a lot of fun with it. Armstrong gets to bow just as much as playing basslines; Seed likes acidic close harmonies, especially with the high strings, making an uneasy counterbalance with his sinuously precise, catchy lead lines.

Seed opens the album with a solo introduction into the Goulash Rag, a biting, dancing theme that runs closer to bolero territory. Swirling high strings hand off to a cello solo over dancing bass; they take it out with a flourish. The subdued, brooding Tangoesque offers an appreciative nod to Bill Frisell’s Strange Meeting, Seed’s guitar elegantly intertwining amid the stark arrangement, with edgy solos for cello, viola and bass and then the first of the album’s many trick endings. Pictures of an Exhibitionist has a bit of a funk edge to go with the tango and the Romany guitar flavor, capped off with a sailing, glissando-fueled violin solo. Ishtar opens with a dark, droning Middle Eastern-flavored low-register taqsim and morphs into a klezmer-esque dance, Seed adding an acerbic flamenco edge, the ensemble taking it out with a shivery intensity. Krakow’s central theme is like Django at his most plaintive, with a darkly searing cello solo, the viola following in the same vein, Seed taking it up anxiously and then gracefully down again.

\Where the Corners Meet features Yang Wei on pipa, a spiky, circular theme growing to a wistful but animated crescendo, Tisdel artfully shadowing the fretted instruments as it builds to anthemic proportions. In the Right Line follows a moody folk-rock trajectory, while Caterpillar Kif is the album’s big showstopper. Agitated strings switch back and forth with a wryly bluesy theme that Seed once again takes in a flamenco direction; it gets funkier, then Tisdel takes it dancing to yet another trick ending.

One in Five might be the album’s most intense track, with a brooding rainy day guitar-and-cello duet into more flamencoesque guitar, Tisdel’s soaring chromatics against Seed’s pensive, spare, rhythmic pulse. The title track closes the album, and it turns out that this is one haunted gallery: Seed’s long, nebulously spacious solo intro hands off to Armstrong, who supplies chilling, stygian sustained lines all the way through to a darkly ironic ending. A lot of people – fans of art-rock, jazz, classical and global sounds – are going to love this album. It’s one of the year’s best, whichever category you might think it fits (and realistically, it doesn’t really fit any, which helps explain why it’s so enjoyable).

The Django Festival Allstars Return to Birdland with a Hot New Album Recorded There

It’s that time of year again when the Django Reinhardt Festival takes over Birdland, starting at 8 PM on June 25 and continuing through June 30. Fortuitously, the Django Festival Allstars have a new album out, Live at Birdland, recorded at last year’s festival. The sound quality is outstanding, as you would expect from this venue, and the playing is sensational, even by the rigorous standards of le jazz manouche. The track selection is eclectic and draws deeply on originals with contributions from several members of the band, rather than simply recycled Django Reinhardt classics. As timelessly enjoyable as the Django catalog is, it’s good to see this group pushing hard on the envelope at the forefront of the tradition.

There are three numbers associated with Django here. The band kicks it off with Swing Gitan, lead guitarist Dorado Schmitt adding a bluesy ominousness over the swirl of Ludovic Beier’s accordion, the two joining forces as the song winds out in flurry of tremolo-picking. Nuages, true to its name, builds a rich, Gil Evans-tinged reflecting-pool backdrop for Schmitt’s spacious hanmer-on work and guest Anat Cohen’s slinky soprano sax. There’s also Manoir de Mes Reves, essentially My Funny Valentine recast as a steady Romany jazz ballad. The other covers here are an accordion-fueled Beier arrangement of Caravan, with a droll new title, Camping Car, a feature for cellist Jisoo Ok, as well as an amped-up take of Out of Nowhere and a rather unexpectedly, hard-rocking, early 70s-tinged version of Them There Eyes.

But it’s the originals here that make this band what they are. Dorado Schmitt’s ballad For Pierre carefully sets up an austere feature for violinist Pierre Blanchard. Blanchard’s Balkanic Dance juxtaposes his biting lines against Beier’s nonchalantly sizzling chromatics. The plaintive Valse en Exil, another Blanchard tune, sets moody violin over elegantly dancing guitars, a lush backdrop rising and falling behind them. Schmitt’s El Dorado is a lively bossa in disguise, a rhythm they revisit as the album closes with Bossa Dorado, building suspense with a relentless intensity as they resist the urge to take it over the top.

The poignant, elegaic spaghetti western bolero Song for Etorre, another Schmitt tune, might be the album’s strongest track. The rest of the cuts include Pat’s Waltz, a bouncy Beier number built around rapidfire, clustering guitars; a hypnotically shuffling, Brazilian-flavored tune by co-lead guitarist Bronson Schmidt; and Dorado Schmitt’s funk-tinged Melissa. To call this one of the best jazz albums of the year seems almost unfair to the rest of this year’s releases, considering the sheer talent that this good-natured family bands bring to the material.

Gypsophilia Brings Their Great New Album and Electrifying Live Show to NYC

As fans of the music know, Canada is a hotbed for gypsy jazz. It’s the French connection. Eclectic Halifax septet Gypsophilia are one of the most exciting groups playing that style to come out of the Great White North, and they’re coming to New York for two June shows. June 6 they’ll be at Rock Shop in Gowanus at 9 PM with charismatically assaultive, noir bluespunks the Reid Paley Trio opening, then they’re playing at Drom the following night, June 7 on a fantastic triplebill with the Lemon Bucket Orkestra and Italian band Taluna for a ridiculously cheap $10.

Gypsophilia have a new ep, Horska, just out and will no doubt be airing out the songs on it in concert. Its title track is an absolute smash, a creepy noir theme that goes through all sorts of permutations over Adam Fine’s pulsing bassline, Sageev Oore’s menacingly distant piano interspersed between biting solos from violinist Gina Burgess, trumpeter Matt Meyer and an especially ominous, microtonal one from guitarist Alec Frith. They reprise the song at the end of the album in an echoey, effects-laden dub version that’s just as dark.

In between there’s the jauntily swinging, hi-de-ho romp Bir Hakeim, which is less Egyptian than Parisian, maybe inspired by the Paris Metro stop which commemorates the World War II battle. They follow that with the intricate Oh My Orna, crescendoing from a baroque-tinged waltz to a wistful theme carried by the violin and echoey electric piano. Corentin Cariou has a bit of Romanian feel, speeding up and slowing down again, followed by the edgy Stickm, another catchy minor-key tune that hits a peak with Meyer’s muted trumpet solo. There are seemingly thousands of bands paying homage to the Django Reinhardt legacy – many of them do it well, but few are as distinctive and interesting as Gypsophilia.

An Exhilarating US Debut by Budapest Bar

[Over the past couple of weeks, this blog has supplied its sister blog New York Music Daily with lots of content. Today it’s payback time]

Budapest Bar made their North American debut last night at CUNY’s sonically superb Elebash Hall just north of the Empire State Building. The Hungarian band works a cosmopolitan gypsy vibe, as opposed to a rural one, meaning that they play a more concert hall-oriented mix of styles which include both jazz and classical music. They outdid Nick Cave at noir, did the “most famous Hungarian song ever,” Gloomy Sunday, as an elegant funereal instrumental, and covered Haydn and Lizst, including the latter’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 complete with rapidfire cimbalom solo by Mihaly Farkas. A bit later on, the cimbalom virtuoso ended his solo with a blindfold on and didn’t miss a beat: it was the biggest crowd-pleasing moment of many.

Frontman Robert Farkas began with a boisterous number that he spiced with some droll flourishes, pulling a string over the bridge of his violin for some creepy horror movie door-closing tonalities, switched to guitar a couple of times midway through the show and ended with a high-spirited series of birdsong voicings on the final encore. Keyboardist Karoly Okros wore a path into the stage, alternating between piano and accordion – if he’s not the only guy who’s equally adept at Liszt and noir Americana, then Hungary has something on the US. Bassist Richard Farkas (this seemed to be a family event, no surprise in gypsy circles) held the careening monstrosity to the rails, whether with a terse minimalist pulse on the gypsy numbers or nimbly walking the scales on the jazz tunes. The speed, virtuosity and soul these guys and women channeled makes most American gypsy bands pale by comparison.

The band brought two singers. Juci Nemeth sang the higher, more ethereal numbers; Tania Saedi, with her sultry alto voice, handled the jazzier material with a sassy aplomb worthy of Ella Fitzgerald. But it was Nemeth who took the most spectacular flights of the night on a rapidfire, diabolical shuffle right before the encores. Gypsy bands in Budapest bars from the turn of the 19th century through the Nazi invasion played a vast spectrum of music from the dead-serious classical pantheon to the wildest jazz: this concert, with its tangos, swing tunes, explosive cadenzas and expert showmanship brought that world alive again in all its pyrotechnic glory.