Stephane Grappelli - The Later Years

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THE IMPROVISER (Part 3)
- Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli (1908-1997)

By Christopher M. Wright
© 2004 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

Part 3 - Winds of Change

Stéphane Grappelli decided to stay on in London instead of returning to France at the start of World War II, but he was not out of danger. The Nazis bombed London and other English cities repeatedly from September 1940 to May 1941 in an attempt to break the morale of the population. Three and a half million homes were destroyed in the Blitz. Fifteen thousand civilians died, 3,000 in one night. People crowded into subway stations which were turned into makeshift air raid shelters.

Grappelli's number could have come up at any time - a bandleader was killed when a bomb struck the café where the bandleader was working. Another bomb killed Gwendoline Turner, a woman Grappelli loved. Reportedly, he cried for two years over her loss.

Grappelli and his accompanists often had to stay all night where they were playing because bombs were raining down on the city. When the air raid sirens sounded, the band would leave the stage at a measured pace (so as not to cause a panic) and join the patrons in the bomb shelter. Grappelli took turns going to the flat roof with buckets of sand to put out the fires started by incendiary bombs. That is, until a British colonel found out that Grappelli was French and banned him from the roof.

Grappelli's career after the Hot Club is best understood as a series of musical partnerships. His first significant collaboration was with the blind pianist, George Shearing. Because many bandleaders were called to military service during the war, Grappelli temporarily became an orchestra director. He hired Shearing and a drummer who had a cutting edge 'bop' drumkit. Grappelli had a life-long pattern of associating with musicians on the cutting edge, who were often younger than himself. The band went beyond standard repertoire, playing many Shearing tunes, and the two greats became friends.

Shearing led Grappelli through the blackouts during the Blitz. One day, someone found Shearing sitting in the dark reading a book in Braille, completely oblivious to the fact that the lightbulb had burned out.

Shearing's harmonic adventurousness fit well with Grappelli's musicality which took flight when the players around him could lay down complex harmony. "I need good chords to inspire me," he once said. Grappelli would complain later in his career about a particular group of players who failed to spark his imagination.

Grappelli's band also entertained the troops. One special concert started at 10:30 p.m., after their regular job. They had to drive through the countryside, which was blacked out to prevent bombing. The band had to find its way in the dark without any road signs. The signs had all been taken down to make it harder for Nazi troops to find their way around if they invaded.

After the war, Grappelli stayed on in England for a few more years and even had his own radio show ('Sophisticated Swing') on the BBC. The music scene in Paris was depressed after the war, so Grappelli went for the steady money he could make working the nightclubs and music halls of London with George Shearing. The two enjoyed a long-lasting musical association. There were occasional reunions (and a falling out) in later years.

Grappelli's career languished through the 1950s and 60s. He still topped Melody Maker's popularity poll as late as 1954, but audiences and interest waned when rock'n'roll replaced jazz as the popular music of the day. Jazz itself moved on from Big Band swing and dance music to bebop, a more rarified art form that never caught on with the masses. (Old joke: How do you make a million dollars in jazz? Start with two million.) Grappelli kept playing dance music but, after it was clear that rock'n'roll was here to stay, he was more than a little out of place playing old standards in his checkered sports jackets and brown cardigans.

His technique steadily improved and there were some nice moments (recording with Duke Ellington in 1964, for example), but his fortunes would not revive until pop music audiences fragmented some years later and a new, more open-minded generation would come to appreciate the timeless beauty of his music.

Meanwhile, there were bills to pay. Now pushing 60, and with no record deals or albums for years, Grappelli entertained diners at the rooftop Hilton Hotel restaurant in Paris, his main gig from 1967 to 1972. This was the low point of his career and it coincided with the years when rock'n'roll was in its fullest creative flowering.

Things began to pick up for Grappelli in 1969. He made his American debut at the Newport Jazz Festival, which had bowed to popular taste and put rock acts like Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin on the program. He met 26-year old jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton at Newport. Grappelli was itching to play with younger musicians. Burton had his doubts but an album was recorded in Paris a short time later. "We were a bit nervous that Stéphane would have difficulty playing over the more complex harmony structures of more contemporary pieces and we started on the first piece ... with some hesitation," Burton said. "Well, Stéphane read through it as if he had played it all his life, and we knew this was going to be a piece of cake.... By the end of the day, I knew we had a great record," he said.

The heavens all lined up for Grappelli in the 1970s. Several trends converged in his favor:

	albums came to be preferred over singles, making extended improvisation commercially viable
	it became more common for older artists to connect with younger fans (e.g., B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry)
	rock'n'roll lost its stranglehold on popular music and audiences started to fragment into jazz, folk, country, bluegrass, easy listening, and world music, among other styles
	sound technology advanced, allowing Grappelli with his acoustic violin to reach vast new audiences at music festivals who had never heard of the Hot Club

Diz Disley, a British guitarist with his own trio, is credited with helping to return Grappelli and gypsy jazz to prominence. Disley asked Grappelli to play in a Hot Club lineup (violin, guitars, and bass) at the Cambridge Folk Festival in the U.K. in 1973. Grappelli was nervous about how he would be received by the young crowd, but he didn't have to worry. "They all went nuts!," Disley said. "Everybody stood up, screamed and clapped and cheered. Thousands of people. Stéphane was flabbergasted, thrilled to bits." Disley's trio became a sort-of home base for Grappelli who continued to record with other artists between international tours with Disley. Grappelli was now wearing bellbottoms and floral shirts (the latter would remain his trademark). The Beatles and Stevie Wonder tunes entered his repertoire.

In 1973 at the age of 65, Grappelli recorded 11 albums and a film score. One of the albums, 'Parisian Thoroughfare', received a five-star rating in Down Beat magazine. He was a celebrity again.

Grappelli became a crossover hit. He appealed to old-line Hot Club fans, hep jazz cats, and young kids alike. In addition, he found a following among devotees of classical music by virtue of his recordings with violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin. They performed duets on U.K. television in the early 1970s and went on to record six albums together from 1973 to 1980.

Menuhin could not improvise, so an arranger wrote out 'improvisational' parts for him to sight-read. The result was crowd-pleasing, easy listening fare that sold well. Jazz purists sniffed but, for Grappelli, it was another opportunity to make great music and not be boxed into any one style. On Grappelli's death, Menuhin said, "His music was like coming to a spring of wonderful water. It was inspiring, it was pure, it was organic, it was communicative. It was magic, too, because he could never repeat himself."

Grappelli was still on top in 1981 when he was voted 'Best Violinist' in Down Beat's reader and critic polls. He toured the world nonstop. The list of collaborations and recording along the way is long. Here are just some of the high points from Grappelli's later career:

	worked with Earl Hines, McCoy Tyner, Oscar Peterson and other leading jazz figures
	collaborated with masters from other genres including western swing fiddler Vassar Clements, classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pop star Paul Simon
	recorded with other violinists like Jean-Luc Ponty and Joe Venuti (the latter association yielding the noted 'Venupelli Blues')
	made a number of landmark albums including 'Stephanova', 'Skol' with Oscar Peterson, 'Talk of the Town' with pianist Alan Clare (which was remastered as 'Stardust' in 2000), 'At the Winery', 'Vintage 1981', and a box set under the title 'Sweet Georgia Brown'
	fulfilled a wish to revisit the Big Band sound which he did with Claude Bolling (whose 'Suite for Flute & Jazz Piano' stayed on the classical charts for more than a decade)
	Grappelli also played the piano and recorded an album of piano music in 1990 entitled 'My Other Love' with 15 songs including three of his own.

Grappelli was 82 in 1990 and his technical abilities, like playing in tune, began to slip. He was aware of the passage of time, but never thought of retirement. "One day maybe my bow will drop, but I will play music to the end," he said. He still had seven years of touring and recording ahead of him. Martin Taylor, a guitarist who worked with Grappelli for years, said, "As soon as he started playing, he just came alive. He would leave the stage 20 years younger. Amazing."

Grappelli suffered a mild stroke in 1993 which affected the movement of his right hand, but he was back at work in a month. It was the first of at least three cerebrovascular events that would eventually affect his speech, his mobility, and his playing.

He was still at the top of the Down Beat popularity polls in 1995. In 1996, he appeared at the Massachusetts Jazz Festival and some members of the audience gasped when he was rolled onto the stage in a wheelchair looking too frail to pick up a bow. "When he did so, the results were astonishing," one reporter wrote. Grappelli received standing ovations after both sets.

In 1997, he suffered another stroke after returning to Paris from touring Australasia. He died of heart failure in December 1997 at the age of 89, but the legend lives on.

His career spanned 75 years. It began on the streets of Paris and wound through Carnegie Hall, Down Beat's Hall of Fame, appearances before royalty, and France's highest civilian honor (Commander of the Legion of Honor) bestowed just three months before he died.

The awards and accolades are impressive, but more so is the music - the joyful, buoyant music captured in 1,145 releases over 66 years of recording. Stéphane Grappelli had a gift for making people happy with his music and that is why his music will endure. It is effervescent - bubbly - and perfectly suited to the image of the champagne brunch that popped into my head the first time I heard it.

The Improviser

It was said that Stéphane Grappelli could improvise on any tune. He was known for improvising in double-time and for his quick runs, low-register double stops, and harmonics. Some called him a genius capable of deep structure and layering in his work. Guitarist Ike Isaacs pointed to Grappelli's understanding of harmony. "Stéphane is really a pianist on the violin because he thinks both vertically and horizontally," Isaacs said. "When I play with him colla voce [freely], he responds instantly to chord variations. He has a great harmonic sense and
very acute ears."

Grappelli was something of a musical chameleon and incorporated many disparate influences in his 75 years of playing - even downward slides when playing with musicians from India. As another violinist put it, there were "bits of Bach, blues, ... flat fives and flat ninths, harmonics, all the jazz stuff, and then, on top of that, all the Impressionist stuff, Debussy and so on, all just effortlessly pulled together." Grappelli said of his own technique, "The movement is like water. I always visualize that."

Sometimes Grappelli went into other tunes spontaneously because he forgot what he was playing. One time, on stage, Grappelli asked guitarist John Etheridge in the middle of a piece what the song was. "I had to tell him," Etheridge said. "He'd completely forgotten."

Grappelli was endlessly inventive. "[T]he extraordinary thing, when we recorded, Stéphane never repeated himself," Yehudi Menuhin said. "I don't think he could." One critic called Grappelli a 'musical Houdini' because he could launch into an improv at a hundred miles an hour but always
find a way out.

Perhaps Grappelli's secret was his ability to lose self-consciousness, to veer off into a transcendental state. A booking agent recalled Grappelli telling his players to stay with him when he went into his improv 'because I don't know where I am,. I'm in another world.'

Part 1 - "Malnourished Waif, Dressed in Rags"
Part 2 - The Hot Club Years

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