Bireli Lagrene
Ronnie Scott’s, London
Guitarist Django Reinhardt was one of the most prominent early European jazz musicians and still remains one of the instrument’s most renowned exponents, most famously for his work alongside violinist Stephane Grappelli in the epoch defining Quintet du Hot Club de France who mesmerised 1930s Paris with their exhilarating, swinging gypsy jazz fuelled by the guitarist’s blend of flamboyance and melancholia alongside technical sophistication and nostalgic sentimentality.
Paris has had a Django festival for 30 years so it was fitting that London finally got round to holding its own International Gypsy Swing Guitar Festival last month in honour of Django’s 100th birthday (January 25) – the same as Robert Burns – with an array of dazzling exponents of the great man’s legacy with interpretations covering Latin rhythmic forms such as bossa nova, bolero and rumba at the Le Quecumbar in Battersea.
The son of a traditional manouche-Gypsy family, Bireli Lagrene emerged as prodigious child interpreter of Django’s repertoire, winning a Gypsy music festival when he was 14, which led to a tour of Germany documented on the 1980 album Route to Django. He subsequently moved to New York working and touring with fusion heavyweights Larry Coryell, Al di Meola and Jaco Pastorius.
His recent residency at Ronnie Scott’s showed a musician who has come full circle in a trio of double bass and saxophone which delivered a set of exquisite standards, including bop classics such as “Ornithology” and “Donna Lee”, which Lagrene recorded with Pastorius. Billy Joel’s soft-lounge classic “Just the Way You Are” was a deft interpretation with saxophonist Frank Wolf’s soprano gliding richly and effortlessly over the guitarist’s expansive, polychromatic chordal textures.
Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” had some wonderful humorous twists from Lagrene, while “All of Me” knitted a swing undertone to some lush post-bop phrasing, rooted in some understatedly dexterous manoeuvring from bassist Jurgen Attig.
This was guitar mastery of the highest order, an elegant deconstruction of standards, remoulded and reinvigorated with breathless virtuosity.
James McGowan
