THE IMPROVISER (Parts 1 and 2)
- Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli (1908-1997)
By Christopher M. Wright
© 2004 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved
Part 1 - "Malnourished Waif, Dressed in Rags"
When I first heard the music of Stéphane Grappelli, I pictured an elegant champagne brunch with corks popping, ice sculptures slowly melting, and waiters in cummerbunds and bow-ties bustling about. As it turns out, I was not far off the mark. Between 1967 and 1972, Grappelli's main gig was in a restaurant on the 10th floor of the Hilton Hotel in Paris where he entertained socialites, tourists, and other upscale diners.
The 'rooftop of Paris' was actually quite a come-down for a man who had already invented an entire genre of music ('gypsy jazz') and made musical history. But the wheel turned once again and his fortunes improved after 1972. Grappelli went on to perform or record with such luminaries as Yehudi Menuhin, Michel Legrand, and Yo-Yo Ma. He won real affection, long applause and spontaneous cheering from audiences all over the world for the next two decades. He was inducted into the Downbeat Hall of Fame, played for the Queen of England, and received the highest civil distinction in France - Commander in the Legion of Honor.
Grappelli's career spanned almost 75 years. He performed on the streets and in restaurants by the age of 15 and kept right on working until the end. His last performance was only three months before his death in 1997 at the age of 89.
Whenever anyone describes Stéphane Grappelli's music, the word 'elegant' is invariably used. However, Grappelli's early years were anything but elegant. He was born in Paris on January 26, 1908 to an Italian father and French mother. His mother died of cancer when he was three. His father, a freelance writer and something of a dreamer, put him in orphanages while away on assignment, but the strong-willed child repeatedly ran away.
Then came World War I - 'the war to end all wars', the war of mustard gas and trench warfare that claimed 10 million lives from 1914 to 1918. A thousand French soldiers were dying every day. Grappelli's father joined the army and entrusted his six year-old son to the care of Isadora Duncan, the eccentric American dancer whom his father had met on a writing assignment. Duncan, whose visionary and improvisational approach to dance still has adherents today, ran a school for children on the outskirts of Paris where she set about to liberate her young charges (known as the 'Isadorables') and their self-expression. Her dancing has been called sensuous, wild and instinctual. Her improvisations call to mind campy, bacchanalian scenes of woodland nymphs and togas.
She was a free spirit and gave Grappelli an early taste of improvisation, but he didn't care for the costumes ' "We were asked to personify angels which I was not," he remembered as an adult. "She dressed us in Greek costumes, with a wreath of flowers on our heads and a white peplum [short, ruffled overskirt]."
Isadora Duncan closed her school and returned to America after her third child died at birth (her first two drowned). His father still at war, Stéphane was once again packed off to an orphanage. "Here my misery started. It was practically a jail," Grappelli recalled later in life. He slept on the floor and often went without food. "There were many times when I had to fight for a crust of bread. It was abominable," he said. Discipline was strict and the young boy's bed-wetting was announced to all at morning assembly. He ran away again to take his chances on the streets begging and scrounging for food.
Try to imagine this existence - you're seven or eight years old, roaming the streets of a big city without shelter, improvising for food, the war is getting closer, and you don't know whether you'll ever see your father alive again. Grappelli later described himself as "a malnourished waif, dressed in rags." There were many children on the streets of Paris at that time.
The experience stamped his character in important ways. He always preferred working to not working and did not turn up his nose at lesser opportunities when his fortunes dipped. Why work constantly? To achieve financial security and make sure that he did not end up back on the street.
After the war, father and son moved into a Paris apartment. His father continued to freelance and travel frequently. Grappelli was once again effectively left to his own devices. He spent a lot of time in the Montmartre district of Paris best known for its wild nightlife. It was also home to or frequented by Renoir, Satie, Picasso, Van Gogh, Debussy, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Here Grappelli was surrounded by artists, musicians, accordion players, risqué cabaret songs, dancing girls, gypsy guitarists, and harlots. A creative crucible yes, but like the streets, another circumstance that could easily lead a person astray - especially a young person who lacked adult supervision and support. But Stéphane Grappelli thrived once more and that speaks volumes about the man and the choices he made for himself.
Life on the street had taught Grappelli that a musician could always earn a little money for food. "When I saw a pianist constantly solicited for his services, I made up my mind: 'I must learn that,'" he later recalled.
Before he owned a violin, Grappelli prevailed upon café and cabaret owners in Montmartre to let him practice on their out-of-tune pianos. With no formal instruction, he set about to find the melody, another early experience that would help him unlock his improvisatory genius. Grappelli learned the French 'Can-Can' and enough other tunes to earn a few francs playing in cafés.
The elder Grappelli recognized his son's musical talent and took him to classical performances where Stéphane heard the music of Debussy and Ravel. His father also bought him a three-quarter size violin and later a book on how to read music. Stéphane got a musician in a café to tune the instrument for him, then learned to play by fooling around and taking cues from a street performer. "I watched where he put his hands," Grappelli once told an interviewer. "That was my first teacher." Grappelli was largely self-taught but did sit in on some classes at the Paris Conservatoire where he received a second medaille de solfege in 1923.
Grappelli supported himself as a street musician throughout this period, showing his street smarts by putting coins in his own cap to give him some credibility and spark donations. An Italian singer and guitarist asked him to join forces and the duo made some good money playing in restaurants. They played romantic lyrical tunes and popular classics by ear, displaying a lyricism that remained at the heart of Grappelli's mature style.
He also accompanied silent movies. Remember, this was an age when most people heard music only from live musicians. Radio was in its infancy and the music devices of the day - gramophones - were expensive. The primacy of recorded music as we take it for granted now had not yet arrived on the scene. So it was that silent movies were accompanied by live orchestras. He learned every idiom of music on that job, from cowboy songs to romantic ballads like Tea for Two. The other players took a break in the early evening, but he accompanied the newsreels by himself on piano. He got in trouble for making the music up as he went along instead of following what was prescribed for him.
Meanwhile, the French were going crazy over jazz, an American import that came with U.S. soldiers who fought in World War I. Unlike Americans at the time, the French people accepted the black musicians who played this new music. The 369th U.S. infantry - the segregated 'Harlem regiment' - had transited through Paris with its band known for playing military marches in ragtime. The jazz scene thrived in Paris after the war.
The story is told how Grappelli discovered jazz when he was 15 and pushed the wrong button on an early jukebox called a 'Multiphone'. The device served up Louis Mitchell's Stumblin' and Grappelli was captivated by the syncopated rhythms and improvisatory polyphony of the New Orleans jazz style. Grappelli would also have heard live jazz in the cabarets of Montmartre. He started improvising on French tunes, syncopating the rhythms and interlacing the melodies with counterpoint at the piano along with a friend. (At the time, Grappelli believed there was no place in jazz for the violin) Through this experience, he learned something very important about his musicality - that he drew inspiration from the musicians around him. "The way [my friend] was playing, it would make me change the way I play," Grappelli later recalled. This was to remain true throughout his entire career, which can be summed up as a series of fruitful collaborations.
In 1928, Grappelli heard jazz violinist Joe Venuti perform and a whole new world opened. That there could be jazz on strings was quite a revelation to Grappelli. Venuti's playing showed Grappelli how to bend notes and play bluesy flat thirds and fifths.
Grappelli's own career continued to develop. He took various gigs around the Paris club scene and made some recordings at the age of 21. At this point, Grappelli was primarily a pianist. He hadn't played the violin seriously for three years when, one night, he filled in for a pianist who was sick. Grégor, the bandleader, kept him on. The band, Grégor et ses Grégoriens, was more about showmanship than music, with musicians in tutus and dog tricks part of the act. Grégor learned that Grappelli had formerly been a violinist and asked him to play something on a borrowed fiddle. A couple of tunes later, Grégor decided he wanted the Grappelli sound in his band and bought him a violin.
Stéphane Grappelli played off and on with the Grégoriens until they disbanded in 1933. By then, Grappelli was 25 years old and a professional working musician with some recordings under his belt. He had already found his musical voice. The inimitable and immediately recognizable Grappelli style was already evident on an early recording from the period. Also, he had already met legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt with whom he was exploring musical ideas. The two would go on to achieve greatness and make musical history with their Hot Club recordings.
Part 2 - The Hot Club
"My life started when I met Django," Stéphane Grappelli told his biographer, referring to legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. "Before him, I was a musician playing here, playing there, but I realized when I was with Django, we can produce something not ordinary," Grappelli said. The 'something not ordinary' turned out to be the world's first supergroup (the Hot Club) and an entirely new genre of music (gypsy jazz) still being mined today.
Grappelli and Reinhardt met in Paris and began to work out their musical ideas together backstage and at Reinhardt's wooden gypsy caravan. They picked up other players and their sessions evolved into a loose-knit jam band without a name. The basic lineup consisted of Django Reinhardt on lead guitar, Stéphane Grappelli on violin, two other rhythm guitars, and string bass. Other players and vocalists were added on an ad hoc basis throughout the band's 1934-39 run.
It was unprecedented for jazz to be played by an all-string ensemble. But Grappelli told an interviewer in 1973, "You know, in my opinion, the guitar and violin are the two best instruments together; they complement each other exactly."
The group was booked at the École Normale for a dance, but people didn't dance - they listened intently instead. The band was signed for a return engagement in 1935 and came back as 'Le Quintette du Hot Club de France' after becoming the 'house band' of a jazz appreciation society, according to one version of events.
'Jazz' was the popular music of the day and different from what we call 'jazz' today. Early jazz was perhaps epitomized by the music of trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong. The term 'hot' was used to denote music for listening as opposed to music for dancing.
The Hot Club caused a sensation. "Grappelly's [as he spelled his name at the time] first chorus... is really out of this world," critics raved. "Stéphane is unbelievably majestic.... Even when he plays straight the most vulgar tune he is hot. He cannot be anything else but hot." Another wrote, "this man just sings.... Grappelly has a real genius for melodic invention." Other reviews called the Hot Club "one of the best groups in Europe" and said "their work ranks with the best of the Americans."
Years before Beatlemania, fans went wild. One concertgoer wrote "as the concert went on, the audience got more and more excited.... They were going absolutely crazy, screaming, shouting and stomping their feet.... We were all standing up and shouting and cheering at the end of each tune... The audience would not let them go... They played several encores. It is a night I will never forget."
Despite their touring success, the Hot Club found it hard to get a recording contract. They were too modern for record company tastes. People were accustomed to hearing jazz played on brass instruments. "We were absolutely new, playing American music with strings," Grappelli told an interviewer looking back. When the first deal came, the label was obscure and the money was small. Reinhardt negotiated a royalty but Grappelli did not, a mistake he would never forget. One of the four songs recorded, 'Dinah', became a hit. Critics praised its humor and elegance. 'Dinah' was recorded in one take, as was common in those days. There were no multi-track tape machines, no overdubs or edits, and no insertion of computer special effects. The master recording was made by a needle cutting into a wax pancake that came straight from the refrigerator.
Other signature Hot Club tunes included 'Honeysuckle Rose', 'Sweet Georgia Brown', 'Djangology', 'Daphne', 'Limehouse Blues', 'China Boy', 'It Don't Mean A Thing', 'Them There Eyes', 'Three Little Words', Django's haunting 'Nuages', and 'Swing '39'. Reinhardt and Grappelli co-wrote some of the material but the group also used pop songs from George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Duke Ellington as jumping off points for improvisation.
Reinhardt and Grappelli fans spar over who was the greater musical figure. The two giants fed off each musically but were also undeniably competing with each other at the same time. Grappelli consistently received more praise from music magazines and placed higher in a readers' poll. Django's ambition was to conquer America, the country where jazz began and which remained the pinnacle of the jazz world. He never made it and eventually became withdrawn while Grappelli continued to work steadily at greater or lesser musical tasks.
Reinhardt astonished other guitarists with his lightning-quick two-finger runs. He played so fast he made his fingers bleed. "He'd go running up those very sharp strings so fast that he hurt himself, but he didn't take any notice," Grappelli once said.
Django's playing was all the more amazing because his left hand was badly injured in a fire. He took a common law wife at age 18. She sold flowers that she made out of celluloid, a highly flammable substance. One night, Django came home to his wooden caravan which was filled with the flowers. According to one version of events, he lit a candle and was horribly burned in the ensuing inferno. He held up a blanket to protect his face from the flames, leaving his left hand twisted and partially paralyzed.
This tragic accident led him to invent new guitar techniques that would launch him into musical history. He used his mostly undamaged first and second fingers to play the melody. "He could do impossible things with those two fingers," Grappelli recalled. "He found his own way of playing chords, sometimes using his two crippled fingers as well...." He played chords for dramatic effect, not accompaniment. Curiously, he could play more complicated jazz 9th chords more easily than he could simple 3-note triads. He moved his entire hand as a unit up and down the fretboard and used open strings in the flamenco style. The result was 'parallel harmony', a ground-breaking technique also explored by Claude Debussy.
Grappelli and Reinhardt were invited to a party given by a woman who liked to put guests with contrary tastes together in the same room. She invited Django and classical Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia and asked them both to play. Django, Grappelli recalled in 1973, "produced such a fantastic sound and improvisations that Segovia was amazed and asked, 'Where can I get that music?' Django laughed and replied, 'Nowhere, I've just composed it!'"
Grappelli and Reinhardt were both primarily self-taught, but Stéphane could read whereas Django could not. There were no music books for Django who had only spent one day in school his entire life. But his playing was free and characterized by frequent tempo changes. He could play across the barline because he had never seen one. This fit nicely with Grappelli's inclinations to be free with rubato himself. Reinhardt liked loud, large-bodied guitars which were perfect for gypsy jazz. He eventually used electric guitars which he would overamplify to distortion.
Grappelli and Reinhardt had an amazing rapport, observers said. Each anticipated the other seamlessly and made it look easy. It was the perfect musical partnership. "You know when you have the jitters, sometimes your fingers refuse to work," Grappelli said in a 1973 interview. "It's inexplicable. It may only last a fraction of a second. I can't understand it myself, why now sometimes I'm nervous and sometimes I'm not. But with Django, I was never nervous. His first note was so fantastic, he put me in such a mood that I forgot the audience."
It may have been a musical match made in heaven but the earthly relationship was fraught with difficulties. Django is described as moody, petulant, and temperamental, especially when he didn't get top billing. One time in England, the band was announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt, and The Hot Club of France." Django didn't begin to play because he was not announced first. So Grappelli started without him, telling him afterwards, "Don't do that again, because I don't need you to work." Grappelli was philosophical about it. "[T]hat was Django Reinhardt," he reminisced to his biographer, "what can you do? Sometimes I enjoyed so much to play with him when he was on good form. C'est la vie. It was difficult."
Reinhardt was difficult in other ways. In London, he failed to show up for a performance at the Palladium, a great music hall. He also got upset when accompanists played a wrong note. "Especially annoying to him was a wrong note in the bass," Grappelli told an interviewer. "To him, a wrong bass note was an insult and he was often so rude to the bass player that they would leave, and so I was obliged many times to look for new bass players," Grappelli said.
Despite all of this, the two remained great friends. "If I had a friend in my life, it was him," Grappelli told his biographer. Reinhardt died young in 1953. Grappelli said in an interview 20 years later, "it's not just that I feel his presence, but I feel that he protects me and inspires me to go on."
Personnel changes were frequent, but the Hot Club stayed together until 1939. The group recorded over 100 tracks, made a film, and was broadcast on radio in the U.S. and Britain.
The group toured abroad, traveling to Holland, Belgium, and Scandinavia. In England in 1939, the quintet enjoyed success in music halls and variety shows amongst the jugglers and magicians. The band added a 12-year old vocalist, Beryl Davis. They played the cavernous Kilburn State Theatre, recorded for Decca, and were favorably reviewed in Melody Maker - "[Grappelli's] romantic tone and thoughtful interpretation put him in a class by himself in European music."
The Hot Club's English idylls were brief, however, as Germany declared war in September 1939. Django returned to France, but Grappelli decided to stay in Britain. There wasn't much drawing him back to Paris. His father had recently died. The family home was no more. A female friend had disappeared with a child Grappelli had fathered. All that was left for Stéphane in Paris was an empty flat. The Germans were poised to invade. England before the Blitz, on the other hand, seemed a fortress by comparison and no one expected the war to last very long. At 31, Grappelli stayed on in London where there were more opportunities to work than there were in France. There were several Hot Club reunions and recordings after the war - notably 'Djangology '49' - but the band never worked together on a regular basis again.
Grappelli may have gone on to develop further as a musician as many critics have suggested, but I prefer the historic Hot Club recordings. There's something about them, an ebulliency and a magic that Grappelli's later recordings, while wonderful in their own right, do not have. Made in the 1930's, the Hot Club recordings are a little primitive with respect to sound quality. But the spirit of the thing is what matters and the Hot Club had it in spades. They still sound fresh 70 years later. They were true originals and their music stands the test of time.
WATCH FOR:
Part 3 - Winds of Change
- Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli (1908-1997)
By Christopher M. Wright
© 2004 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved
Part 1 - "Malnourished Waif, Dressed in Rags"
When I first heard the music of Stéphane Grappelli, I pictured an elegant champagne brunch with corks popping, ice sculptures slowly melting, and waiters in cummerbunds and bow-ties bustling about. As it turns out, I was not far off the mark. Between 1967 and 1972, Grappelli's main gig was in a restaurant on the 10th floor of the Hilton Hotel in Paris where he entertained socialites, tourists, and other upscale diners.
The 'rooftop of Paris' was actually quite a come-down for a man who had already invented an entire genre of music ('gypsy jazz') and made musical history. But the wheel turned once again and his fortunes improved after 1972. Grappelli went on to perform or record with such luminaries as Yehudi Menuhin, Michel Legrand, and Yo-Yo Ma. He won real affection, long applause and spontaneous cheering from audiences all over the world for the next two decades. He was inducted into the Downbeat Hall of Fame, played for the Queen of England, and received the highest civil distinction in France - Commander in the Legion of Honor.
Grappelli's career spanned almost 75 years. He performed on the streets and in restaurants by the age of 15 and kept right on working until the end. His last performance was only three months before his death in 1997 at the age of 89.
Whenever anyone describes Stéphane Grappelli's music, the word 'elegant' is invariably used. However, Grappelli's early years were anything but elegant. He was born in Paris on January 26, 1908 to an Italian father and French mother. His mother died of cancer when he was three. His father, a freelance writer and something of a dreamer, put him in orphanages while away on assignment, but the strong-willed child repeatedly ran away.
Then came World War I - 'the war to end all wars', the war of mustard gas and trench warfare that claimed 10 million lives from 1914 to 1918. A thousand French soldiers were dying every day. Grappelli's father joined the army and entrusted his six year-old son to the care of Isadora Duncan, the eccentric American dancer whom his father had met on a writing assignment. Duncan, whose visionary and improvisational approach to dance still has adherents today, ran a school for children on the outskirts of Paris where she set about to liberate her young charges (known as the 'Isadorables') and their self-expression. Her dancing has been called sensuous, wild and instinctual. Her improvisations call to mind campy, bacchanalian scenes of woodland nymphs and togas.
She was a free spirit and gave Grappelli an early taste of improvisation, but he didn't care for the costumes ' "We were asked to personify angels which I was not," he remembered as an adult. "She dressed us in Greek costumes, with a wreath of flowers on our heads and a white peplum [short, ruffled overskirt]."
Isadora Duncan closed her school and returned to America after her third child died at birth (her first two drowned). His father still at war, Stéphane was once again packed off to an orphanage. "Here my misery started. It was practically a jail," Grappelli recalled later in life. He slept on the floor and often went without food. "There were many times when I had to fight for a crust of bread. It was abominable," he said. Discipline was strict and the young boy's bed-wetting was announced to all at morning assembly. He ran away again to take his chances on the streets begging and scrounging for food.
Try to imagine this existence - you're seven or eight years old, roaming the streets of a big city without shelter, improvising for food, the war is getting closer, and you don't know whether you'll ever see your father alive again. Grappelli later described himself as "a malnourished waif, dressed in rags." There were many children on the streets of Paris at that time.
The experience stamped his character in important ways. He always preferred working to not working and did not turn up his nose at lesser opportunities when his fortunes dipped. Why work constantly? To achieve financial security and make sure that he did not end up back on the street.
After the war, father and son moved into a Paris apartment. His father continued to freelance and travel frequently. Grappelli was once again effectively left to his own devices. He spent a lot of time in the Montmartre district of Paris best known for its wild nightlife. It was also home to or frequented by Renoir, Satie, Picasso, Van Gogh, Debussy, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Here Grappelli was surrounded by artists, musicians, accordion players, risqué cabaret songs, dancing girls, gypsy guitarists, and harlots. A creative crucible yes, but like the streets, another circumstance that could easily lead a person astray - especially a young person who lacked adult supervision and support. But Stéphane Grappelli thrived once more and that speaks volumes about the man and the choices he made for himself.
Life on the street had taught Grappelli that a musician could always earn a little money for food. "When I saw a pianist constantly solicited for his services, I made up my mind: 'I must learn that,'" he later recalled.
Before he owned a violin, Grappelli prevailed upon café and cabaret owners in Montmartre to let him practice on their out-of-tune pianos. With no formal instruction, he set about to find the melody, another early experience that would help him unlock his improvisatory genius. Grappelli learned the French 'Can-Can' and enough other tunes to earn a few francs playing in cafés.
The elder Grappelli recognized his son's musical talent and took him to classical performances where Stéphane heard the music of Debussy and Ravel. His father also bought him a three-quarter size violin and later a book on how to read music. Stéphane got a musician in a café to tune the instrument for him, then learned to play by fooling around and taking cues from a street performer. "I watched where he put his hands," Grappelli once told an interviewer. "That was my first teacher." Grappelli was largely self-taught but did sit in on some classes at the Paris Conservatoire where he received a second medaille de solfege in 1923.
Grappelli supported himself as a street musician throughout this period, showing his street smarts by putting coins in his own cap to give him some credibility and spark donations. An Italian singer and guitarist asked him to join forces and the duo made some good money playing in restaurants. They played romantic lyrical tunes and popular classics by ear, displaying a lyricism that remained at the heart of Grappelli's mature style.
He also accompanied silent movies. Remember, this was an age when most people heard music only from live musicians. Radio was in its infancy and the music devices of the day - gramophones - were expensive. The primacy of recorded music as we take it for granted now had not yet arrived on the scene. So it was that silent movies were accompanied by live orchestras. He learned every idiom of music on that job, from cowboy songs to romantic ballads like Tea for Two. The other players took a break in the early evening, but he accompanied the newsreels by himself on piano. He got in trouble for making the music up as he went along instead of following what was prescribed for him.
Meanwhile, the French were going crazy over jazz, an American import that came with U.S. soldiers who fought in World War I. Unlike Americans at the time, the French people accepted the black musicians who played this new music. The 369th U.S. infantry - the segregated 'Harlem regiment' - had transited through Paris with its band known for playing military marches in ragtime. The jazz scene thrived in Paris after the war.
The story is told how Grappelli discovered jazz when he was 15 and pushed the wrong button on an early jukebox called a 'Multiphone'. The device served up Louis Mitchell's Stumblin' and Grappelli was captivated by the syncopated rhythms and improvisatory polyphony of the New Orleans jazz style. Grappelli would also have heard live jazz in the cabarets of Montmartre. He started improvising on French tunes, syncopating the rhythms and interlacing the melodies with counterpoint at the piano along with a friend. (At the time, Grappelli believed there was no place in jazz for the violin) Through this experience, he learned something very important about his musicality - that he drew inspiration from the musicians around him. "The way [my friend] was playing, it would make me change the way I play," Grappelli later recalled. This was to remain true throughout his entire career, which can be summed up as a series of fruitful collaborations.
In 1928, Grappelli heard jazz violinist Joe Venuti perform and a whole new world opened. That there could be jazz on strings was quite a revelation to Grappelli. Venuti's playing showed Grappelli how to bend notes and play bluesy flat thirds and fifths.
Grappelli's own career continued to develop. He took various gigs around the Paris club scene and made some recordings at the age of 21. At this point, Grappelli was primarily a pianist. He hadn't played the violin seriously for three years when, one night, he filled in for a pianist who was sick. Grégor, the bandleader, kept him on. The band, Grégor et ses Grégoriens, was more about showmanship than music, with musicians in tutus and dog tricks part of the act. Grégor learned that Grappelli had formerly been a violinist and asked him to play something on a borrowed fiddle. A couple of tunes later, Grégor decided he wanted the Grappelli sound in his band and bought him a violin.
Stéphane Grappelli played off and on with the Grégoriens until they disbanded in 1933. By then, Grappelli was 25 years old and a professional working musician with some recordings under his belt. He had already found his musical voice. The inimitable and immediately recognizable Grappelli style was already evident on an early recording from the period. Also, he had already met legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt with whom he was exploring musical ideas. The two would go on to achieve greatness and make musical history with their Hot Club recordings.
Part 2 - The Hot Club
"My life started when I met Django," Stéphane Grappelli told his biographer, referring to legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. "Before him, I was a musician playing here, playing there, but I realized when I was with Django, we can produce something not ordinary," Grappelli said. The 'something not ordinary' turned out to be the world's first supergroup (the Hot Club) and an entirely new genre of music (gypsy jazz) still being mined today.
Grappelli and Reinhardt met in Paris and began to work out their musical ideas together backstage and at Reinhardt's wooden gypsy caravan. They picked up other players and their sessions evolved into a loose-knit jam band without a name. The basic lineup consisted of Django Reinhardt on lead guitar, Stéphane Grappelli on violin, two other rhythm guitars, and string bass. Other players and vocalists were added on an ad hoc basis throughout the band's 1934-39 run.
It was unprecedented for jazz to be played by an all-string ensemble. But Grappelli told an interviewer in 1973, "You know, in my opinion, the guitar and violin are the two best instruments together; they complement each other exactly."
The group was booked at the École Normale for a dance, but people didn't dance - they listened intently instead. The band was signed for a return engagement in 1935 and came back as 'Le Quintette du Hot Club de France' after becoming the 'house band' of a jazz appreciation society, according to one version of events.
'Jazz' was the popular music of the day and different from what we call 'jazz' today. Early jazz was perhaps epitomized by the music of trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong. The term 'hot' was used to denote music for listening as opposed to music for dancing.
The Hot Club caused a sensation. "Grappelly's [as he spelled his name at the time] first chorus... is really out of this world," critics raved. "Stéphane is unbelievably majestic.... Even when he plays straight the most vulgar tune he is hot. He cannot be anything else but hot." Another wrote, "this man just sings.... Grappelly has a real genius for melodic invention." Other reviews called the Hot Club "one of the best groups in Europe" and said "their work ranks with the best of the Americans."
Years before Beatlemania, fans went wild. One concertgoer wrote "as the concert went on, the audience got more and more excited.... They were going absolutely crazy, screaming, shouting and stomping their feet.... We were all standing up and shouting and cheering at the end of each tune... The audience would not let them go... They played several encores. It is a night I will never forget."
Despite their touring success, the Hot Club found it hard to get a recording contract. They were too modern for record company tastes. People were accustomed to hearing jazz played on brass instruments. "We were absolutely new, playing American music with strings," Grappelli told an interviewer looking back. When the first deal came, the label was obscure and the money was small. Reinhardt negotiated a royalty but Grappelli did not, a mistake he would never forget. One of the four songs recorded, 'Dinah', became a hit. Critics praised its humor and elegance. 'Dinah' was recorded in one take, as was common in those days. There were no multi-track tape machines, no overdubs or edits, and no insertion of computer special effects. The master recording was made by a needle cutting into a wax pancake that came straight from the refrigerator.
Other signature Hot Club tunes included 'Honeysuckle Rose', 'Sweet Georgia Brown', 'Djangology', 'Daphne', 'Limehouse Blues', 'China Boy', 'It Don't Mean A Thing', 'Them There Eyes', 'Three Little Words', Django's haunting 'Nuages', and 'Swing '39'. Reinhardt and Grappelli co-wrote some of the material but the group also used pop songs from George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Duke Ellington as jumping off points for improvisation.
Reinhardt and Grappelli fans spar over who was the greater musical figure. The two giants fed off each musically but were also undeniably competing with each other at the same time. Grappelli consistently received more praise from music magazines and placed higher in a readers' poll. Django's ambition was to conquer America, the country where jazz began and which remained the pinnacle of the jazz world. He never made it and eventually became withdrawn while Grappelli continued to work steadily at greater or lesser musical tasks.
Reinhardt astonished other guitarists with his lightning-quick two-finger runs. He played so fast he made his fingers bleed. "He'd go running up those very sharp strings so fast that he hurt himself, but he didn't take any notice," Grappelli once said.
Django's playing was all the more amazing because his left hand was badly injured in a fire. He took a common law wife at age 18. She sold flowers that she made out of celluloid, a highly flammable substance. One night, Django came home to his wooden caravan which was filled with the flowers. According to one version of events, he lit a candle and was horribly burned in the ensuing inferno. He held up a blanket to protect his face from the flames, leaving his left hand twisted and partially paralyzed.
This tragic accident led him to invent new guitar techniques that would launch him into musical history. He used his mostly undamaged first and second fingers to play the melody. "He could do impossible things with those two fingers," Grappelli recalled. "He found his own way of playing chords, sometimes using his two crippled fingers as well...." He played chords for dramatic effect, not accompaniment. Curiously, he could play more complicated jazz 9th chords more easily than he could simple 3-note triads. He moved his entire hand as a unit up and down the fretboard and used open strings in the flamenco style. The result was 'parallel harmony', a ground-breaking technique also explored by Claude Debussy.
Grappelli and Reinhardt were invited to a party given by a woman who liked to put guests with contrary tastes together in the same room. She invited Django and classical Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia and asked them both to play. Django, Grappelli recalled in 1973, "produced such a fantastic sound and improvisations that Segovia was amazed and asked, 'Where can I get that music?' Django laughed and replied, 'Nowhere, I've just composed it!'"
Grappelli and Reinhardt were both primarily self-taught, but Stéphane could read whereas Django could not. There were no music books for Django who had only spent one day in school his entire life. But his playing was free and characterized by frequent tempo changes. He could play across the barline because he had never seen one. This fit nicely with Grappelli's inclinations to be free with rubato himself. Reinhardt liked loud, large-bodied guitars which were perfect for gypsy jazz. He eventually used electric guitars which he would overamplify to distortion.
Grappelli and Reinhardt had an amazing rapport, observers said. Each anticipated the other seamlessly and made it look easy. It was the perfect musical partnership. "You know when you have the jitters, sometimes your fingers refuse to work," Grappelli said in a 1973 interview. "It's inexplicable. It may only last a fraction of a second. I can't understand it myself, why now sometimes I'm nervous and sometimes I'm not. But with Django, I was never nervous. His first note was so fantastic, he put me in such a mood that I forgot the audience."
It may have been a musical match made in heaven but the earthly relationship was fraught with difficulties. Django is described as moody, petulant, and temperamental, especially when he didn't get top billing. One time in England, the band was announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt, and The Hot Club of France." Django didn't begin to play because he was not announced first. So Grappelli started without him, telling him afterwards, "Don't do that again, because I don't need you to work." Grappelli was philosophical about it. "[T]hat was Django Reinhardt," he reminisced to his biographer, "what can you do? Sometimes I enjoyed so much to play with him when he was on good form. C'est la vie. It was difficult."
Reinhardt was difficult in other ways. In London, he failed to show up for a performance at the Palladium, a great music hall. He also got upset when accompanists played a wrong note. "Especially annoying to him was a wrong note in the bass," Grappelli told an interviewer. "To him, a wrong bass note was an insult and he was often so rude to the bass player that they would leave, and so I was obliged many times to look for new bass players," Grappelli said.
Despite all of this, the two remained great friends. "If I had a friend in my life, it was him," Grappelli told his biographer. Reinhardt died young in 1953. Grappelli said in an interview 20 years later, "it's not just that I feel his presence, but I feel that he protects me and inspires me to go on."
Personnel changes were frequent, but the Hot Club stayed together until 1939. The group recorded over 100 tracks, made a film, and was broadcast on radio in the U.S. and Britain.
The group toured abroad, traveling to Holland, Belgium, and Scandinavia. In England in 1939, the quintet enjoyed success in music halls and variety shows amongst the jugglers and magicians. The band added a 12-year old vocalist, Beryl Davis. They played the cavernous Kilburn State Theatre, recorded for Decca, and were favorably reviewed in Melody Maker - "[Grappelli's] romantic tone and thoughtful interpretation put him in a class by himself in European music."
The Hot Club's English idylls were brief, however, as Germany declared war in September 1939. Django returned to France, but Grappelli decided to stay in Britain. There wasn't much drawing him back to Paris. His father had recently died. The family home was no more. A female friend had disappeared with a child Grappelli had fathered. All that was left for Stéphane in Paris was an empty flat. The Germans were poised to invade. England before the Blitz, on the other hand, seemed a fortress by comparison and no one expected the war to last very long. At 31, Grappelli stayed on in London where there were more opportunities to work than there were in France. There were several Hot Club reunions and recordings after the war - notably 'Djangology '49' - but the band never worked together on a regular basis again.
Grappelli may have gone on to develop further as a musician as many critics have suggested, but I prefer the historic Hot Club recordings. There's something about them, an ebulliency and a magic that Grappelli's later recordings, while wonderful in their own right, do not have. Made in the 1930's, the Hot Club recordings are a little primitive with respect to sound quality. But the spirit of the thing is what matters and the Hot Club had it in spades. They still sound fresh 70 years later. They were true originals and their music stands the test of time.
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Part 3 - Winds of Change