Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli: “Swing from Paris”
If you’ve ever seen the movie “L.A. Story,” this record will sound familiar. Reinhardt, with his blistering two-fingered acoustic guitar runs and relentlessly chunking chords, was the defining voice of gypsy jazz, the whitest of the jazz subgenres – but that doesn’t mean it don’t swing. Grappelli’s violin melodies helps keep the tunes distinct; on tracks where he’s absent, it’s easy to get lost. This record is a retrospective of the duo’s output in the late 1930s, so there’s a lot that’s familiar here. The creatively-named “Improvisation” and “I’ve Had My Moments” stand out.
