Press Release
Festival Celebrates Spirit of Django
By Andrew Gilbert
Special to the Mercury News
Fri, Jun. 04, 2004
After several close calls, Django Reinhardt is finally getting the Hollywood treatment.
Well, not Reinhardt exactly, since the legendary Gypsy jazz guitarist died in 1953 at the age of 43. But in ``Head in the Clouds,'' a film that hits theaters in September, guitarist John Jorgenson portrays Reinhardt performing in a Paris nightclub, as Charlize Theron and Penélope Cruz dance to the music of the Hot Club of France, the seminal Gypsy swing band that Reinhardt founded in 1934 with French violinist Stephane Grappelli.
While Jorgenson is best known as a founder of the country-rock Desert Rose Band and for his six-year stint as Elton John's lead guitarist, he's been performing and championing Reinhardt's music since the late 1970s.
Understandably thrilled by the chance to play his musical hero in an A-list Hollywood movie, he now sees signs everywhere that Reinhardt's music is gaining recognition beyond the Hot Club's devoted fans. Jorgenson brings his quintet to Henfling's Tavern in Ben Lomond on Thursday and is a featured performer at Django Fest San Francisco June 11-13, perhaps the most promising indication that Gypsy jazz is gaining a firm foothold in the Bay Area.
``The interest in Django's music is definitely growing, I think partially because his fans now have access to each other around the world through the Internet,'' says Jorgenson in a phone conversation from his home in Nashville. ``I'm hoping people will go see this film because they want to see Charlize Theron and then might hear some music and go, `What's that? It sounds cool.' That seems to me the only way nowadays music that's not in the mainstream gets to be heard by people who don't already know it.''
Hollywood certainly has a proven track record when it comes to focusing attention on long-overlooked music. There's no better case than Scott Joplin's rags, which were a largely forgotten style of 1890s pop music before ``The Sting'' (1973) sparked a revival, restoring the music to its rightful status as an authentic American art form.
Similarly, the Coen Brothers' 2000 hit ``O Brother, Where Art Thou?'' introduced bluegrass and old-time gospel music to generations that came of age after the folk movement of the 1950s and '60s.
Even Django's near cinematic misses have helped push his music to the forefront. In Woody Allen's 1999 film ``Sweet and Lowdown,'' Sean Penn plays a 1930s jazz guitarist so obsessed by Reinhardt that he faints when he finally meets him, though the encounter takes place off screen. And last year's sleeper animated hit ``The Triplets of Belleville'' features a theme that powerfully evokes the Hot Club sound, even acknowledging its debt to Reinhardt with a small caricature of the guitarist in the opening sequence.
If you listen for it, Hot Club-style music can be heard everywhere, though Reinhardt usually goes uncredited.
``It's surprising how many commercials use a pastiche of Hot Club music,'' Jorgenson says. ``I did a series of commercials for the Kia car company with David Grisman, and it was all based around that style.''
Next weekend, however, Reinhardt's legacy will be squarely in the spotlight, as the Bay Area's first festival devoted to the Hot Club sound takes over the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Sponsored by See's Candies and produced by Redwood City native Nick Lehr, the festival brings together some of the finest Django-style guitarists in the United States, several of whom are also offering workshops for musicians interested in learning more about Reinhardt's approach.
In addition to the John Jorgenson Quintet, Django Fest features the Robin Nolan Trio, the Hot Club of San Diego, the Seattle-based trio Pearl Django and Paul Mehling's popular Hot Club of San Francisco, which has developed an extensive repertoire of original tunes inspired by the music of Reinhardt and Grappelli.
``I'm really trying to make this music current,'' says Mehling. ``I'm always trying to find stuff that Django didn't perform, trying to expand this genre, to boldly go where no Gypsy swing band has gone before.''
That's not just a metaphoric mission. Over the past three years, Mehling's band has toured extensively out of town, where it's finding enthusiastic audiences drawn by the Django connection. ``We can go to small towns in Nevada and draw 300 people,'' Mehling says. ``Most may have never heard of the Hot Club of San Francisco, but they read we're doing the music of Django Reinhardt, and they'll come to check us out.''
Lehr has been a major force in building Django awareness on the West Coast. He became captivated by Reinhardt's music while living in Amsterdam in the early 1990s, and when he moved to Seattle he started Django Fest Northwest in 2001, just a year after the first U.S. festival devoted to Hot Club music was held in New York. When he moved back to Redwood City, he thought the moment was ripe to expand Django Fest to the Bay Area, with the ultimate goal of creating a West Coast festival circuit in the summer and fall.
``That's our mission, to bring this great music to the awareness of the general public,'' Lehr says. ``I think a lot of people have heard it in commercials, movie soundtracks like `The Triplets of Belleville,' and don't really know what it is. They think it's wonderful guitar music, but it's much more unique than that.''
Even by jazz's expansive standard, Reinhardt was a larger-than-life figure. Many of the stories about him involve his perpetual irresponsibility. A heavy drinker and a ladies' man, he was impulsive and unpredictable, often showing up late for gigs or not at all. When Grappelli was forced to search for his band mate, the violinist often found him playing billiards, a game at which he excelled.
Born to a Gypsy family traveling in a horse-drawn caravan through Belgium in 1910, Reinhardt sojourned throughout France, Italy and North Africa as a child. As part of a family of performers, Django started playing violin and banjo as a child. By the time a fire swept through the caravan in 1928, maiming Reinhardt's left hand, he was already a gifted guitarist. He taught himself to play using a revolutionary two-finger technique that turned his physical limitation into the basis of a spellbinding style that was as witty and soulful as it was expressive and urbane.
Between 1934 and the outbreak of World War II, Reinhardt and Grappelli's Hot Club of France recorded more than 200 sides, including sessions with the great American jazz artists Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Rex Stewart and Barney Bigard. During the Nazi occupation, Reinhardt played all over Europe, avoiding the Nazis' roundup and genocide of his kinfolk. He and Grappelli teamed up again after the war, but the highlight and great disappointment of his late career was his American tour with the Ellington Orchestra in 1946 as a featured soloist.
Though the music was glorious, he was disillusioned with his reception in the United States. He returned to Paris, eventually dropping out of the music scene and retiring to the village of Samois sur Seine near Fontainebleau, where he spent his time fishing and painting. His last recording, made just a month before he died of a brain hemorrhage on May 16, 1953, included elements of bebop, a style he helped inspire.
Django Fest San Francisco
Where: Little Fox, 2209 Broadway, Redwood City
When: 8 p.m. June 11-13
Tickets: Each night $20-$22; festival pass $52
Call: (650) FOX-4119
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