Django A Gogo 2019 – Stephane Wrembel and guests @ The Town Hall
Following the success of last year’s program, Stephane Wrembel returns to New York City with Django a Gogo 2019: A Celebration of Guitar Mastery Through The Music of Django Reinhardt, at The Town Hall in New York City on Saturday, April 27, 2019 at 8 p.m.
This year’s program will not only feature Reinhardt’s classics and originals inspired by his work, but also an unusual glimpse of the legendary guitarist’s solo pieces. This is a music treasure rarely explored — and the subject of Wrembel’s latest research.
For this concert, Wrembel has assembled a new international all-star cast in the Django Reinhardt style, including Raphael Fays, David Gastine, Serge Krief (a disciple of Matelo Ferret, a Reinhardt accompanist), and his sons Lior Krief and Ezeckiel Krief, and Simba Baumgartner (Reinhardt’s great-grandson), whose debut CD, produced by Wrembel, releases on April 26. Also guesting are Josh Kaye (guitar/oud), David Langlois (washboard/percussion) and Daisy Castro (violin). Anchoring will be Wrembel’s long time collaborators Thor Jensen on guitar; Ari Folman-Cohen on bass and Nick Anderson on drums.
“It’s the culmination of a week we spend together playing music, sharing stories, sharing a journey, really, and it all builds up to something very special,” says Wrembel, who jump-starts the Django a Gogo festival with a guitar camp that offers Reinhardt aficionados a chance to workshop with these modern masters. “And at the end we’re on stage at The Town Hall. I’m not inviting people just to come play solos and help sell tickets. That’s not what I have in mind. I want an extraordinary show, a concert that tells a story.”
Wrembel, an authority on Reinhardt’s style, is perhaps best known for “Bistro Fada”, the theme song from the GRAMMY-winning soundtrack to Woody Allen’s 2011 Oscar-winning film, Midnight In Paris. He started Django a Gogo as “a very small event” in 2004, “not as a nostalgia thing,” he emphasizes, or a simple tribute to Django Reinhardt, the man, “but to his music. Something special went through him and whatever it was, it’s still alive in the music.”
The Town Hall concert will serve in part as a presentation of Wrembel’s latest CD, The Django Experiment IV. Released on his own Water Is Life label on January 23, 2019 (on what would have been Reinhardt’s 109th birthday), it’s the latest installment of Wrembel’s expansion and updating of Reinhardt legacy. But the Town Hall show will also feature a very special treat for Reinhardt fans: a sampling of Reinhardt’s solo guitar pieces, which Wrembel has been compiling, transcribing, and recording for Django l’impressionniste, an album scheduled for future release.
