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2012 SAG Awards: Red carpetStephane Wrembel at the Birchmere
(Marlon Correa/ TWP ) - French-born jazz guitarist Stephane Wrembel brought his Gypsy-jazz style music festival “Django a Go-go” to The Birchmere in Alexandria, Va.
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Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Mike Joyce, No doubt most of the 400 people who attended Stephane Wrembel’s Django A Go-Go Festival at the Birchmere on Sunday night were eager to tell friends about the extraordinary tag-team virtuosity they had just witnessed. And no doubt most of them encountered the same response: Stephane who?
The 37 year-old French-born guitarist, who lives in Brooklyn, is best known for contributing music to the Woody Allen films “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “Midnight In Paris.” But don’t bet on that being the case much longer. Relaxed and engaging, Wrembel spoke with a thick accent and favored a sharply percussive fretboard attack. He played guitar in Gypsy camps during his youth and has since developed the speed, dexterity and downstroke-powered picking technique necessary to put an old warhorse drawn from Django Reinhardt’s stable of favorites into racing, headlong motion.
Loading...CommentsWeigh InCorrections?Yet in the opening set, which featured his own quintet, Wrembel reached far beyond Manouche guitar traditions, performing original (and, in some cases, as yet untitled) pieces that reflected his interests in Japanese culture and thoroughly modern jazz interplay. His music, at its most animated, was riddled with dramatic juxtapositions — he sometimes deployed them as a filmmaker might use jump edits — and abrupt tempo shifts that triggered bursts of chromatic acceleration. Percussionist David Langlois, meanwhile, fashioned a witty, washboard brand of counterpoint, at times conjuring the sound of a tap dancer performing on a tin-plated floor nearby.
When the mood was inspired by something ruminative (“Tsunami”) or romantic (“Bistro Fada,”), Wrembel’s soulful lyricism and melodic flair gracefully emerged. Most of the fireworks were reserved for the second set, when Wrembel augmented his band with three world-renowned guitarists — seven-stringer Howard Alden, Spain’s Biel Ballester and France’s Sebastian Felix — and three violinists, including the French virtuoso John Intrator.
Alden, who taught actor Sean Penn how to play guitar for the 1999 Allen film “Sweet and Lowdown,” punctuated the performance with lighthearted solo recitals of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “12th Street Rag.” But there was no shortage of dazzling, dovetailing showcases when the guitarists divided up rapid swing-time choruses or when the fiddlers were given free rein.
The past may not be all it’s cracked up to be, as “Midnight In Paris” makes clear, but the audience certainly wasn’t inclined to see things that way when the ensemble saluted Reinhardt’s genius with a beautifully woven arrangement of “Nuages” and the exhilarating encore “Dark Eyes.”
Joyce is a freelance writer.
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