For those not familiar with the subtleties of jazz, a lot of what award-winning guitarist Stephane Wrembel is doing on guitar may sound like he’s assembled a Django Reinhardt “cover band.” But the reality is, Wrembel has added his own stylistic nuances and built upon the foundation left behind by Gypsy jazz pioneer Reinhardt.
Jazz devotees and newcomers alike can hear Wrembel’s unique style at the Middlesex County Jazz Festival at Parker Press Park in Woodbridge on Sunday, September 29, from 3 to 6:30 p.m.
Reinhardt (1910-1953) was a legendary, French born and raised guitarist who created his own sub-genre, Gypsy jazz, and after a bad burn on his left hand left two fingers immobile, Reinhardt relearned the craft of playing jazz guitar with just three fingers.
Enter Maplewood resident Stephane Wrembel, born in 1974 and raised in Fontainebleau, France, the same area where Reinhardt had been living at the time of his death. Wrembel began taking classical piano lessons at age 4, thanks to his school teacher mother and computer/IT specialist father. Like a lot of kids from that era, even in France, he was enamored in his early teens with the music of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin — he switched to guitar at 14 — and it wasn’t until he was in his late teens he discovered the complexities of jazz and the genius of Reinhardt’s guitar playing and compositions. Wrembel has been in the USA now for 24 years and graduated with high honors from Berklee College of Music in Boston.
“I was always a big fan of Pink Floyd, and I began studying piano when I was four, because my mom wanted us to have music education. She always said that music is part of education so you must do an instrument — whatever your education is — you also need to do music,” he explained by phone from his home in Maplewood.
Wrembel gets upset that so many internet resources cite Reinhardt’s birth place as Belgium, when in fact, he was born in Paris.
“Fontainebleau is where Django Reinhardt was based, where he grew up, and where he lived much of his life and where he died. There are a lot of [Romani] gypsies there, and many of his extended family is still there,” he explained.
Every year now for the last decade, he has gone back to their mutual hometown, near Paris, to perform at the Django Reinhardt Festival, held annually in June since 1968. Fontainebleau is famous for castles, not wine, Wrembel noted. Not only was Django French, he argued, “He was also very Parisian.”
“I liked the Police and I liked Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd,” explained Wrembel, now 50. “When I was 19 and decided to seriously study guitar, I picked up on Django and decided to become a professional musician. I wanted to explore jazz but had no idea where to start. I knew of Django’s music, so that’s where I started.”
He recalls his personal epiphany with Django’s brilliant compositional voice and guitar playing when he was 19.
“I asked my guitar teacher if he could show me some Django, so he showed me the chords for some tunes, and I was like, ‘Whoa! This is amazing!’ This is what I want to do! Since there was no internet in the early 1990s, I went to the record store and found a record called ‘Django 1949.’ I found a song on that called ‘Minor Swing,’ a song we had worked out and was my point of reference to his music. I started to transcribe it immediately because there seemed to be these notes that I had never heard before that I thought were not possible to make with the guitar chords that I was shown. How can anything sound like that?”
“It’s like when you hear something in the background, and you know it’s there, but then you begin to focus in and work on it,” he added.
Later that year he went to his first Django Reinhardt Festival where he saw a band that really blew his mind, “and I saw other gypsies play. I knew back then that I would be spending my life working with this art form.”
Unlike others at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, he didn’t enroll and immigrate to America until he was in his early 20s, so he had the benefit of some perspective and a clear vision of his own artistic path.
“When I graduated, I had a very good GPA, I guess we say, I had 3.98 GPA, so I was a good student there and I met a lot of good people there. I was 26, it was 2002, and I had a career that was starting to take off,” he explained.
Asked if his career in retrospect seems a series of baby steps or a series of big breaks, Wrembel said the latter is the case.
“‘There were definitely some big breaks in my career. Doing the music for the Woody Allen movie [2008’s ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona,’] that was a big step, as well as playing at the Oscars ceremony and later playing Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.”
After graduating from Berklee in 2002, he released his debut album, “Introducing Stephane Wrembel,” which drew high praise from Vintage Guitar magazine and put his music on the map.
Of his show on Sunday at Parker Press Park, part of a county-wide celebration of jazz and blues, orchestrated in part by people from the non-profit New Brunswick Jazz Project, Wrembel will be accompanied by the exact same musicians that appear on his “Django New Orleans” recording, released in 2023. His nine-piece band includes two guitars, violin and instead of bass, a sousaphone player, along with trumpet, saxophone, drums and percussion.
“We have the brass instruments because the brass instruments come from New Orleans. Not only does it reflect our musical constructs about music from New Orleans, but I hand-picked these players; it’s also about individual players,” he said, and their abilities to work as part of an ensemble.
The vocalist is Sarah King, the same as on the recording. Others in the band include Josh Kaye on guitar, Adrien Chevalier, violin; Nick Driscoll, saxophone/clarinet; Joe Boga, trumpet; Joe Correia, sousaphone, Scott Kettner, drums and David Langlois, washboard and percussion.
After all these years, why is Django’s music so important to the world of jazz and modern music in general, in America and Europe?
“Django is to the guitar what Bach is to the keyboard,” Wrembel argues. “He is the greatest guitarist who ever lived, and he had complete and total mastery of harmony. He grew up in a time when Debussy was still alive as well as a lot of other classical composers, and he was also influenced by the French impressionists and philosophers. He really is a genius like Mozart or Beethoven or Bach for his sense of melody and his sense of harmony. He was a Gypsy and he played guitar, so they called his music jazz, not classical.”
Stephane Wrembel’s Django New Orleans, Middlesex County Jazz Festival, Parker Press Park, 400 Rahway Avenue, Woodbridge. Sunday, September 29, 3 to 6:30 p.m. Other festival concerts Wednesday, September 25, 5:45 to 8:30 p.m., Papaianni Park, 100 Municipal Boulevard, Edison; Thursday, September 26, 6:30 to 9 p.m., Carteret Performing Arts and Events Center, 46 Washington Street, Carteret; and Saturday, September 28, 1 to 5:30 p.m. on Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick, and 6 to 9:30 p.m., Metuchen Plaza at New and Pearl streets, Metuchen. Free. www.middlesexcountyjazzfestival.org.
