PAUL VERNON CHESTER

Manouche Maestro

QHCF - Quintette du Hot Club de France

Reinhardt approached Grappelli in the Montparnasse jazz-and-tango club Le Croix du Sud and told him he wanted a violinist “who plays hot” for a new band he was forming. Grappelli was chary of giving up his steady gig to join forces with this sinister-seeming young fellow, whom he described, according to biographer Geoffrey Smith, as looking like a “gangster straight out of an American film,” with “skin the colour of cafe au lait and greasy hair black as coal.” But they jammed together informally a few times during the next two years and discovered a great mutual affinity as jazz improvisor's.
 

Associate - Andre Ekyan was born in Alicante, Spain, October 1907.  No-one could have foreseen that he would become one of the most important pre-war pioneers in the French jazz scene and an important soloist on his instrument.  His mother was a Hungarian; his father was from Armenia. His official name was Echkyan. He was raised in France and as a kid he learned to play the clarinet and saxophone.

Encounters

Stephane Grappelli first met guitarist Django Reinhardt in 1931, however he said that he saw him perform as early as 1929. When Grappelli was performing at the “Le Croix du Sud” club in Montparnasse, Django was in the audience and asked Stephane to join his group. Stéphane was apprehensive, due to Django’s menacing appearance, and his reluctance to give up his steady gig. But the two began to perform together casually over the next few years, where they discovered how much they shared, especially in their love for the early jazz innovators.

Grappelli and Reinhardt formally began to perform together in 1934, with the assistance of Hugues Panassié and the other founders of the Hot Club of France. After several performances where they experimented with instrumentation, the two men constructed an unprecedented jazz lineup of three guitars, bass and violin, which they dubbed the “Quintet of the Hot Club of France.” Grappelli, Reinhardt along with guitarists Joseph Reinhardt and Roger Chaput, and bassist Louis Vola helped France develop its own sound as a jazz nation.

The quintet drew their inspiration from American jazz and Gypsy tradition. The quintet continued to influence the growth of jazz into swing, recording American pop songs throughout 1934-1939. These compositions would ultimately comprise the quintet’s stylistic heritage. The success of the quintet was largely due to Stephane and Django’s astonishing technique and expanding the harmonic boundaries of a string band. 

One of the quintet’s most famous songs was “Ultrafox.” On this track, Grappelli effortlessly plays the introduction melody, perfectly executing the medium tempo of the song. Stephane proves to be a powerful counterpoint to Django by taking the rapid language of Reinhardt and combining it with his more subtle technique.

Quintette du Hot Club de France
The quintet first photo shot - Place Pigalle, 1934.
Left to right:
Roger Chaput, Stéphane Grappelli, Louis Vola, Joseph Reinhardt and Django Reinhardt.
As the late Ralph Gleason said about Django's recordings, "They were European and they were French and they were still Jazz." Django with very Chic Flat Hat - like a Geordie Stottie Cake and those Hi Rise Pants

The enabling condition for the birth of the future Quintet was the orchestra which was put together by the go ahead Louis Van to play for the bloodless thés-dansants at Claridge’s Hotel in the Champs Elysées The group included the pick of the Parisian jazzmen, but clearly there could be no question of wild jazz performances in this palace of discreet luxury. Milk-and-water “table music” was the order of the day. For the musicians, the intermission were a welcome relief which soon took an interest of their own. “We were alternating”, Grapelli remembers, ‘with Manual Pizzaro’s Argentinian Orchestra. Django and I used to take our breaks stretched out on dusty sofas in a big disused room behind the stage. Of course, Django kept his guitar with him and sometimes he’d idly play a few notes to himself behind a screen. One day while I was tuning my violin we spontaneously started playing Dinah, just like that, to amuse ourselves…and once we’d started, we never stopped. Over the days the others began to join in - Django’s brother Joseph, Roger Chaput, and Louis Vola on bass. We were both fascinated by the sound we were making, and of course we played other pieces. From then on, we couldn’t wait for the intermissions.” After hours they would repair to a late-night musician’s hangout, the “Alsace” brasserie in Montmartre, to carry en the good work. None of the participants suspected the fame that lay in store for an all-strings group that come together in such a haphazard fashion.

The break-through might never have happened if organisers of the Hot Club had not found out what was going on and exerted themselves to promote the idea of “Jazz without drums or trumpet”. Even then, things didn’t go smoothly. In September 1934 rehearsals were organised at the “Florence” with a view to a recording audition with the Odéon company. But the firm decided against releasing the two sides that were produced by “Delaunay’s Jazz Quintet”, finding them decidedly “too modern”, despite Django’s precaution of adding a vocal refrain “to make it more commercial”. It was a bad setback for the musicians. but failed to discourage the enterprising Pierre Nourry who was more determined than ever to promote, come hell or high water, this “new hot Jazz sound’ And this was how the group was described on the poster for the famous concert at the Ecole Normale de Musique on December 2nd, 1934 - the event which definitively marked the launch of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France and from which can be dated their rise to fame. The audiences of the day, alarmed by the noisier forms of Jazz, fell victim at once to the charms of this new music. There were still doubters, such as critics John Hammond or Hugues Panassié, who found the sound too “gypsified”, or the critic who called Django “a clown with a mandolin” - but soon everyone was joining in the general fervour.

Charles Delaunay was a French author, jazz expert, co-founder and long-term leader of the Hot Club de France. The son of painters Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, Charles Delaunay was one of the founders of the Hot Club de France. Together with Hugues Panassié he initiated the Quintette du Hot Club de France with Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli

This band name was a misnomer. On a surviving copy of the demo records, an unknown hand had scrawled the name and style of music as “Delaunay’s (jazz)” purely for identification on the label. These test takes survived thanks to Delaunay. He found them just before they were cast out in the 1930s, when they had been forgotten; he played them on his jazz radio broadcasts and later released them commercially.

The musicians’ community, including American jazzmen passing through, or settled in Paris all as one man went overboard for Django’s exuberant inspiration. In 1935 alone the clubs where Dango was working attracted visits from soloists of the order of Louis Armstrong (at the Brick lop” in Montmartre), Coleman Hawkins and Arthur Briggs (at the “Stage B” in Montparnasse), Benny Carter (at “Chez Florence”), Bill Coleman. Frank 'Big Boy' Goudie, Fletcher Allen, and many others. What jam sessions! What memorable choruses were lost in the ether for ever !

First concert of the Quintet was at the "Ecole Normale de Musique" Poster below

Django 1934 - Note the Guitar Fretboard and Phonetic spelling of Django 2/12/34

Maurice Mouflard Trumpet.

The "Hot Club of France", a club where members listened to recorded and live music and discussed Jazz. It was founded by Pierre Nourry a friend of Delaunay's.

First Recordings
Dec 12th 1934

From now on
Black panther stomp
I saw stars
Okay toots
When my ship comes in
My carolina hide-a-way

Dinah
Tiger rag
Lady be good
I Saw Stars! - Bert Marshall Vocal

One of the sound engineer asked why they kept changing the performance between takes... on the second session the Ultraphone Director decided to lower the volume of the remaining songs (after Dinah), he was worried about defective recordings (too much dynamic...), that was a bad move according to Panassié since the volume of the remaining 3 songs is quite low compared to Dinah. According to Panassié, Dinah was the best recorded piece of the day

QHCF
Louis Vola, the bass player with the original Quintette Du Hot Club De France, an affable, 'Maurice Chevalier' type of man, he talks glibly of his fifteen-year old granddaughter who plays the piano and can relate many tales about Django. He really knew Django the longest, starting at Toulon, where Vola had a band. He heard the two gypsy brothers, Django and Joseph playing on the beach one night and invited them to jam after hours with some of the members of his band. One member of note was Stephane Grappelli. Vola subsequently moved to the Palm Beach Hotel at Cannes and hired Django alone, as an accompanist for his own accordion. Later, when Vola switched to bass, he hired Eugene 'Nanine' Vees, Joseph Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, in addition to Django - thus the Quintette Du Hot Club De France was born. Shortly after it was started on its recording career by Charles Delaunay and Pierre Nourry.

Quintette at The Hague 1937

The HCQ recording at the Decca studios, London January 1938.
Roger Chaput, Naguine, Django, Eugène Vées, Stéphane Grappelli, Louis Vola -

English Performance Memorabilia in the mutual colours

Decca Presents - uncut

The English Quintet L-R: Django, Alan Mindel (gtr), Teddy Wadmore (bs), Malcolm Mitchell (gtr) and Steph. There are two other photos of Django & Steph taken in the same dressing room and two photos of this group playing on stage. They toured the UK and Sweden in 1948. - Roger S Baxter

In 1948 Mitchell was called on to play with Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt for an eight-week tour of Sweden. All other references to this tour indicate the group was Malcolm Mitchell, Alan Mindel (gtrs) and Teddy Wadmore (bass). In fact, Mitchell wrote an article confirming that particular combination for Scandinavia.

Evolution of the Original Quintette

With the outbreak of war in 1939 Reinhardt made his way back from England to France, leaving Grappelli in Britain.  Django spent the first winter of the war playing in Jimmy's Bar in Montparnasse; but in spring 1940 the German blitzkrieg led to the speedy fall of France. He fled the city when the Germans occupied Paris on June 14th, but returned after the French surrender left northern France under occupation. …

Django was considering reforming some kind of quintet. He had hoped right up until May 1940 for Grapelli’s return, but Stephane had decided to remain in England. Django realized that such a project would require organizational skill that he himself did not possess. His first thought of getting Michel Warlop to help in this project, but of course he was otherwise committed. Georges Efrossé, then playing with Django’s friend Sarrane Ferret who was also a first class violinist – or was the true answer to form a new style of quintet? Django eventually decided to install the clarinet of Hubert Rostaing in place of the violin. Regrettably, this new quintet did not last long. Django decided, as he was pretty much a star in his own right, that freelancing was for him the best bet.

There was no point trying to replace Stephane Grappelli, so Reinhardt instead utilized Hubert Rostaing, a technically skilled and advanced clarinettist who also doubled on tenor sax.  Rostaing would play with Django on and off through to 1948.  And instead of having three guitars as before, Reinhardt cut back to two (using his brother Joseph Reinhardt) and added drummer Pierre Fouad.

The New Quintet in concert circa 1941 Hubert Rostaing, Eugène Vées, Django, André Jourdan, Francis Lucas

At first the group was also known as the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.  Its debut, Rhythm futur, is a piece that lives up to its futuristic name, at least harmonically.  It is clear from the start that Rostaing’s impressive technique and sound (sometimes hinting at Artie Shaw) works well with the guitarist.  The session also includes the minor-toned Blues.

The New Quintette with Josette Dayde - Coucou

The same group with a change in bassists and several guest appearances by Alix Combelle on clarinet and tenor, recorded thirteen selections on 13 and 17 December 1940. Combelle, who had sounded quite impressive on a famous 1937 four-saxophone date with Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter and Andre Ekyan, was an underrated clarinettist and a tenor with a big tone influenced by Hawkins.  Swing 41 really benefits from the inclusion of the two clarinets who blend together very well.  The clarinets take a mysterious introduction to a remake of Reinhardt’s most famous original, the haunting ballad Nuages.

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Last modified: 25/08/2010