Gypsy jazz, the genre largely invented by one man, Django Reinhardt, simultaneously elevates and ruins guitar players. It’s a phenomenon I’ve learned about firsthand.
Gypsy guitarists have a thing for speed; notes fly out of their instruments with effortless grace, and learning the genre means facing that. It also means facing a lot of other daunting necessities, from intense knowledge of music theory to specialized picking technique. That’s the elevation bit.
A few years ago, along with fellow travellers Jack Brown and Matthew Shippee (both of whom now play guitar in Valley “alt-jazz” band Swing Caravan), I undertook climbing the steep learning curve of the genre. Many new callouses and dead strings (and three over-priced guitars) later, I can say only one thing with great confidence: no matter how high you climb, the peak still looks pretty hazy from there.
Make it well past base camp, however, and you still face two possibly insurmountable issues. The first is the ruination bit. Gypsy jazz can be a buzzkill when it comes to strumming campfire sing-alongs—playing “Louie, Louie” just doesn’t seem like much fun anymore. It’s hard to come down out of the clouds, to give up figuring out the major third of the dominant seven so you know where to start your ascending diminished run. When I returned to playing rockabilly, I had to unlearn some of the instincts born of all that thinking while picking, a surprisingly tough chore. (Although “Lonesome Train” sounds pretty good with all that diminished business.)
The second big issue in Gypsy jazz is escaping one’s American accent. This is swing jazz as played by a Belgian-born Gypsy, after all. Americans swing it all wrong, even if they invented swing. That’s where John Jorgenson comes in.
Jorgenson is a Nashville guitarist who was awarded the Academy of Country Music’s Guitarist of the Year award three consecutive years. In the ’80s, he started the Desert Rose Band and the Hellecasters, then toured as a multi-instrumentalist with Elton John. All the while, however, Jorgenson had a penchant for that music of Django Reinhardt.
Django-style Gypsy jazz has seen a remarkable renaissance in the past decade, as can be seen locally every summer, when Community Guitar Network’s Andrew Lawrence hosts the real deal—European Gypsy guitarists—in Northampton for Django in June. Jorgenson was way ahead of that curve. He bought a Selmer guitar like Django played, one of less than a thousand ever made, back in 1982. (He paid $2,200 for a guitar that would probably sell for more than $30,000 today.)
Jorgenson played Northampton several years ago as part of Django in June, and much has changed since. Though Jorgenson was and is an unmistakably virtuosic player, his American version of Gypsy jazz seemed staid, even a touch formulaic (that ascending diminished thing again) when contrasted with the mad stylings of the Europeans, like Stephane Wrembel, with whom he shared billing. He seemed like a solid entertainer in the midst of dead-serious innovators.
Jorgenson just released two new albums simultaneously, one a mix of originals and Gypsy jazz standards called One Stolen Night, the other a classical/Gypsy jazz collaboration with Orchestra Nashville called Istiqbal Gathering. He sounds much different than he did, even in that local appearance of a few years ago. Maybe it’s that his career seems focused primarily on this music now, or maybe it’s that his current band has gelled particularly well and propelled his playing into headier territory yet.
The latter seems particularly likely, and fans of Django in June will see familiar faces in Jorgenson’s band. Violinist Jason Anick joined violinist extraordinaire Tim Kliphuis on the Django in June stage a couple of years or so back, and in 2008 he got the invite to join Jorgenson’s Quintet. Simon Planting came to the first-ever Django in June as bassist for the Robin Nolan Trio, and Jorgenson has employed Planting and Robin Nolan’s brother Kevin (a rhythm guitarist) as part of his group as well.
Whatever the reason, Jorgenson has followed the Gypsy jazz muse to an interesting place. Like Robin Nolan, he seems to have gotten comfortable incorporating the hallmarks of the style while embracing the sounds that come naturally to him. As a result, his tunes are infused with an easy grace, like he’s really at home, on his own terms, in this most demanding of genres.
And believe me: that ain’t easy.
The John Jorgenson Quintet plays the Iron Horse in Northampton Wednesday, April 7 at 7 p.m.
