This the website of Djangoism, a band playing the music of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli, who are based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Look at the pages about us, our music, where we are playing and also enjoy this blog about all aspects of gypsy jazz:
When Angelo Debarre played in Sheffield at the end of last year I was lucky enough to have a lesson on rhythm guitar from Dave Kelby. It was a very useful lesson which gave me lots of useful practice tips, if you are a rhythm guitarist then a single lesson from Dave could save you hours and hours of practice time, I wish I had had one ten years ago.
I won’t tell you all his ideas because they are his IP and you should get lessons from him but one theme was the need to practice upstrokes for rhythm guitar. A downstroke is fairly self-evident and relatively natural - it goes with gravity after all. An upstroke is not so natural yet we rarely devote any specific practice to upstrokes. Dave says, and I am sure it is true, that if your upstroke is inefficient or incorrectly aligned it will sap a lot of your strength during a gig and reduce the top speed at which you can play (the lead instruments would always like to go faster in our band). He showed me a warm-up technique that Fapy Lafertin had shown him which again you could learn from a lesson from him. I have found some other good exercises from an instructional DVD for banjo by Buddy Wachter (banjo playing? don’t ask!). In this exercise he damps the strings of the banjo over the fretboard so you concentrate only on the strumming hand. He then sets a metronome going and plays equal weight even time up and down strums across the strings. He starts off with straight quavers, then goes up a gear to quaver triplets, semi-quavers and finally semi-quaver triplets. I have been doing this a bit to develop tremolo on the banjo, it gets quite addictive and it feels like playing a drum so it becomes a pitchless percussive exercise - which is a huge element of rhythm guitar anyway. It doesn’t sound that interesting but getting perfectly synced with the metronome does produce a trance-like satisfaction. The great payoff comes when you go back to playing Django rhythm guitar it suddenly seems a lot easier and your top speed will have increased substantially.
Sorry for the short notice but Djangoism, after a Winter rest period, are playing this week:
Thursday 17th April 2008
Sizzlers Jazz Club at the Quarter
North Church St
Sheffield
Tel 0114 737277
Bar until 2:00 am
Music starts 9:30 pm
Entry £2.00
Angelo Debarre is touring the UK from 21st November with the violinist Christian Garrick, Dave Kelbie - rhythm guitar and Andy Crowdy - double bass. He is promoting his new CD which was recorded live at Le Quecumbar on his tour earlier in 2007.
For those in the Midlands & North of England Angelo is playing at the Merlin Theatre in Sheffield on Sunday 25th November at 7.30pm. Tickets are £10 and available on the door or can be reserved by phoning 07835 966810
One of the pleasures of running this site is that I get email and comments from players and bands all over the world. Today I got an email from Barry Warhoftig who co-leads the Hot Club of Philadelphia. They have a great video clip of themselves playing Manoir de Mes Reves on YouTube. Wonderful playing with a great feel and a nice 40s look to the video, you can really tell that they are not just running licks on the solos - this is very thoughtful playing.
I have only just found out about this event so it might already be fully booked. Trefor Owen, the Welsh mainstream jazz guitarist, organises this event and this year he has a special day on gypsy jazz. On Wednesday 15th July there is a gypsy jazz masterclass with Robin Nolan, then a gypsy jazz jam session and in the evening a concert with Robin Nolan, Andreas Oberg and Gary Potter. It all takes place at the North East Wales Institute in Wrexham. For further details ring 01745 812260, there is a little more information here.
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