Stéphane Grappelli - From Paris With Love
Stéphane Grappelli: From Paris With Love
In a career spanning more than a half century, Stéphane Grappelli established himself as the preeminent violinist in jazz. Beginning with his seminal work alongside guitarist Django Reinhardt in the Quintet of the Hot Club of France in 1934, his journey spanned many eras and trends in jazz, although Grappelli’s own stylistic playing and choice of material rarely varied from his beloved standards and Hot Club instrumentals. While World War II interrupted their collaboration, Grappelli and Reinhardt reunited after the war’s close, working together until Reinhardt’s death in 1953 ended one of the most magical partnerships in music history.
Over the remaining decades of his life, Grappelli continued to perform with a variety of groups, typically employing a guitarist as his musical foil. Sustained by his joie de vivre and convivial personality, he excelled in these post-Django years, playing with both his veteran peers and the Young Turks of jazz like David Grisman and Jean-Luc Ponty. Grappelli died in Paris at the age of 89 on December 1st, 1997.
This three-disc set compares some of those groups, in performances that span 40 years of Grappelli’s extraordinary career.
Disc One consists of songs recorded in January and February 1949, the last time Grappelli teamed up with Django Reinhardt in a recording studio. Reunited with his old friend during a month-long engagement in Rome at an underground spot called the Jicky Club, Grappelli and Reinhardt played the gig with a rhythm section consisting of three Italians: Gianni Safred on piano, Carlo Pecori on bass, and Aureilio De Carolis on drums, using brushes on a single snare drum instead of the usual trap set.
For the most part, the sessions recorded at RAI Studios in Rome, swung like days of old with the Hot Club of France quintet. The dizzying set list ranged from QHCF favorites like “Swing 39” and “After You’ve Gone” to French chansons like Charles Trenet’s “Ménilmontant” (named for a neighborhood in Paris’ 20th arrondissement) and Yves Montand’s “Clopin-Clopant,” and recent hits like Eden Ahbez’s “Nature Boy” (a success for Nat “King” Cole). Other highlights from the session include an uncharacteristically up-tempo, jubilant version of “Over the Rainbow” and the theme from Reinhardt’s aborted symphony, “Manoir de Mes Rèves” (aka “Django’s Castle”).
Disc Two begins with 11 sides recorded during two Paris sessions in 1954, with Grappelli fronting two different quartets. The first features Jack Diéval on piano, Benoit Quersin on bass, and Jean-Louis Viale on drums. Also featured are three unreleased tracks from 1954 that pairs Grappelli with Italian guitarist Henri Crolla in a quartet accompanied by Django Reinhardt’s favorite bass player, Emmanuel Soudieux, along with Baptiste “Mac Kac” Reiulles on drums.
Disc Two finishes off with a landmark summit meeting between Grappelli and Joe Venuti, the two primary forces in jazz violin during the 20th century. The session took place in Paris on October 22, 1969, at the beginning of Grappelli’s return to the limelight after a decade of performing on French radio and the BBC, while only making sporadic trips to the recording studio.
Disc Three consists of live performances from concerts by Grappelli in his later career. No one had been more instrumental in the revival of Grappelli’s career than guitarist Diz Disley, who performed with him for nearly a decade, from 1973 to 1982. Adding a bassist, Grappelli and Disley’s quartet revitalized the sound pioneered by Grappelli and Reinhardt 40 years before. On some tracks Stéphane is joined by English finger-style electric guitarist Martin Taylor, who joined Grappelli in 1979, along with English pianist Laurie Holloway, Frenchman Marc Fosset and American Jeff Green on guitars, and Jack Sewing from the Netherlands on bass.
The repertoire of mostly standards and contemporary material includes a lovely tribute to Django Reinhardt in a medley of the contemplative “Nuages” and the swinging “Daphne.”
— Cary Ginell