[Dixielandjazz] Stephene Wrembel

[Stephen G Barbone]

For those in, or visiting the NYC area, Stephene Wrembel is worth a  
listen. Especially if you are into Django Reinhardt and/or Gypsy Jazz.  
Wrembel is one of the hidden musical wonders of New York, He's been  
performing there for years, largely unnoticed.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

November 25, 2008 - NY TIMES - By Ben Ratliff


Swinging Through Melodies, the Gypsy Guitarist Way

Musicians tailor their art to a room’s dimensions, and Stephane  
Wrembel’s is Barbès-size. For the last several years, almost since the  
opening of this Park Slope bar in 2002, Mr. Wrembel, a Django  
Reinhardt-inspired guitarist, has been playing weekly gigs in the back  
room. On Sunday night, with his quartet the Django Experiment, he tore  
it up as usual, exploiting his home-court advantage.

Mr. Wrembel uses a guitar like the master’s, with a small, oval sound- 
hole and an almost metallic tone. The Reinhardt subculture is a  
curious phenomenon: it’s extremely specialized — and the French-born  
Mr. Wrembel has gained some fame within it — but no specialized  
knowledge is required of the audience. (His slow, habanera-rhythm song  
“Big Brother,” which he played in the second set, appears on the  
soundtrack of the recent Woody Allen film “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”)  
Gypsy swing, gallant and charging, always leaning on a strong melody,  
doesn’t need any explanation.

The group brings some rock aggression and some Middle Eastern tonality  
to Gypsy swing. It’s a basic small-group setup: an acoustic bassist,  
Ari Folman-Cohen; a drummer, Richard Lee, playing an international kit  
with a dumbek, a conga, a cajon for a bass drum and small cymbals; and  
two guitarists. The leader improvised against the locomotive rhythmic  
chording of Koran Hasanagic, who sometimes soloed himself, with fast  
fingers but a quiet sound.

This was music mostly meted out in strict eight-bar chunks, as  
Reinhardt and his groups would have done; though this is jazz for  
sure, the band wasn’t conjuring radical changes to any song’s  
structure. But Mr. Wrembel’s solos were radical enough: long, fast,  
intense and full of charisma.

“A Child’s Dream,” a minor-key, slightly Arabic-sounding waltz from  
his recent album “Terre des Hommes,” put the emphasis on the  
“experiment” in the band’s name: the music became a cloud of drones  
and frenetic strumming. By contrast, “All of Me,” taken nearly at a  
run, was Reinhardt up and down. If anything, it was faster and  
noisier, reveling in well-chosen, dissonant harmonies and the  
knifelike force of the guitar’s sound.

The Django Experiment performs every Sunday at Barbès, 376 Ninth  
Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn; (347) 422-0248, or  
barbesbrooklyn.com.