If newsprint could play audio, it would be easy to explain why seeing French Gypsy jazz guitarist Dorado Schmitt is a very good idea. His song “Bossa Dorado,” a true classic of modern Gypsy jazz, is an infectious listen. It comes sneaking in with a James Bond-esque dose of minor key cool, then unspools a melody that’s equal parts rose-between-the-teeth Barcelona and South American suavity, a sleek and wistful rhythmic romp that is, despite its place in the Gypsy jazz canon, not quite Gypsy or jazz.
The man who composed that unique tune, one that never seems to lose its lustre no matter how many times you listen, is an authentic and masterful practitioner of a unique tradition, and you can hear his personality in every note of “Bossa Dorado.”
The violinist who provides the counterpoint to Schmitt’s guitar leads, Pierre Blanchard, explained it this way in a recent interview: “[Dorado’s] music is like him, full of fire, generosity and gentleness mixed. Yes, he really is a gentleman on the guitar as in life.”
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For fans of the Belgian Gypsy jazz guitar genius Django Reinhardt (whose 100th birthday would have been this year), it’s the best of times in these parts. Thanks to the efforts of Andrew Lawrence, a talented guitarist and founder of Community Guitar, Northampton fills up every June with aspirants to Reinhardt-style Gypsy jazz virtuosity, who pack into Smith College to learn the demanding particulars. A weekend of high-caliber concerts follows, complete with European practitioners of this rarefied musical art. Bands from the region have also taken up the challenge, bringing Django-fuelled sounds to Valley stages, bands like the Gypsy Wranglers, Swing Caravan, Vol de Nuit, Ameranouche and Sinti Rhythm, even Vermont kids’ musician Lewis Franco, who wrote kid-friendly lyrics for the Reinhardt instrumental “Swing 42.”
If you’re a fan of the style, you know how unusual this kind of concentration of Gypsy jazz is. Gypsy jazz has become an international phenomenon, and its popularity has increased dramatically in the United States over the last decade. All the same, it’s a subgenre of jazz, one that’s considered extremely old-fashioned, even quaint to the uninitiated—all-jazz radio shows rarely play more than a tune or two from Reinhardt, and almost never play music from the vast number of current practitioners of the style.
If you aren’t a fan, that may be because you haven’t heard much of it. Straight-ahead jazz can prove daunting to those who prefer mainstream pop, full as it is of frenetic phrasing and note overload, but Gypsy jazz often proves immediately accessible, even to people who don’t tend to like jazz. The acoustic guitar-centric genre is built on a lively rhythm straight out of pre-World War II swing, coupled with the tangy, Eastern-tinged scales of traditional Gypsy music. It’s somewhere between Louis Armstrong, klezmer, and a Gypsy camp hoedown—in other words, a dizzying good time.
Thanks to the less-travelled nature of this particular end of the musical world, knowing such context is often necessary to explain just who these Gypsy players are. The sounds are unfamiliar, and the names unfamiliar and highly unusual to boot—European Gypsies, an oft-maligned group, tended to adopt names for official purposes in the countries they inhabited. The pairings of their jaw-popping traditional names and European surnames are often far from Smith and Jones: Stochelo Rosenberg, Schnuckenack Reinhardt, Fapy Lafertin and Tschan-Tschou Vidal, for instance.
Then there’s Dorado Schmitt. Schmitt grew up with the Gypsy tradition all around him, and was introduced to the style by his father. After a detour into pop in the 1960s, Schmitt rededicated himself to the Gypsy tradition, and has since become a giant of the genre. Like Django himself, Schmitt overcame great adversity: in the late ’80s, a bad car accident put him into a coma. After a long recovery, he returned to performing with guitar, violin, and a rarity in Gypsy jazz, voice. He’s been in high demand for years, and is one of only a few Gypsy players to regularly visit these shores.
Blanchard says, “Dorado is really for me the musician who represents the spirit of Django. We can feel the same soul in his art. He likes to sing with his guitar and to compose as Django. But of course he has his own personality, and it’s not easy to resist his charisma.”
Blanchard is himself a jazz player and composer of no small renown, one who’s played with a long list of big-name musicians that includes Lee Konitz, Ornette Coleman, Max Roach and the violinist for Django’s Hot Club of France, Stephane Grappeli. Though Blanchard is classically trained, he was drawn early on to improvisation. “I had a taste for ‘blue note’ and improvisation very early, through rock violin players like David Laflamme (It’s A Beautiful Day) and Jerry Goodman (The Flock),” says Blanchard. “Of course, later I had more interest for Stephane Grappelli and J.L. Ponty, but I always knew I’d be on this musical planet.”
When Schmitt and his band visit Northampton this week, the broadly inclusive nature of Gypsy jazz will be on full display in Schmitt’s compositions, but also in the flavor of the musical collaborators he brings to the stage: “I always had an interest for all kinds of ways to improvise on the violin. I like very much Indian and Arabic music expressions,” says Blanchard.
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Dorado Schmitt and his group, which includes Gypsies and non-Gypsies, will no doubt deliver diverse and many-colored sounds in their performance, and it’s worth noting that they do so in a time when their homeland is roiling with strikes and with an official return of anti-Gypsy sentiment. The Gypsy, or Roma, have long faced troubles in Europe, from a long period of enslavement in Romania and elsewhere to the Holocaust (when they, along with Jews, homosexuals and other offenders of the Third Reich were sent to concentration camps). Right now, the French government is engaged in expelling non-French Roma and destroying the camps where they live, their remarkable contributions to French culture and music notwithstanding.
Blanchard, not surprisingly, views this development with dismay. “This is just amazing. The explanation is only electoral [politics],” he says. “It could appear as well as stupidity, because most French people don’t like to proceed this way with human beings. So… what to say more?”
The music of Gypsy jazz, of course, emerges from that people’s long term struggle, and it’s no wonder such depth of expression can be found there. The music is lively and upbeat, yet infused with a melancholic, minor-key yearning, a contradiction that keeps its energy high, its sounds surprising. It’s rare that a musician of talents so prodigious and so alien to American ears visits Northampton.
Django Reinhardt at 100: Dorado Schmitt and the Django NY Festival All-Stars: Oct. 30, 8 p.m., $25-35, Calvin Theatre, 19 King St., Northampton, (413) 586-8686, www.iheg.com.
