Stéphane Wrembel has built a career on a distinction most guitarists never bother to make: the difference between playing Django Reinhardt’s music and understanding why Django played it that way. Over four nights in October, he brings that distinction to Rochester in the most demanding form available to him — the Rochester Concert Series at Lovin’ Cup, four consecutive evenings, each devoted to a different program from a different era of his own catalogue.
This is not a residency in the loose sense of an artist parking somewhere for a week. It is a chronological argument. Wrembel is walking an audience through his compositional development in sequence, and he is doing it in a room small enough that the audience can hear him think.
Four Programs, Four Eras
Thursday, October 8 — Terre des Hommes
The 2008 album, performed as the eleven-movement suite it was conceived to be rather than the collection of tracks a listener might assemble from it. Wrembel organizes the work around a structure he calls the Eternal Cycle, moving from “A New Life” through “Apocalypse.” Suite form asks something specific of an audience — you are meant to hear the movements as an argument that accumulates, not as discrete pieces. Hearing it whole, in order, is the point.
Friday, October 9 — Origins
The 2012 program opens with “The Voice from the Desert,” which Wrembel frames as “a symbolic journey through dreams and inner landscapes” carrying “a mystical, almost Castaneda-like energy.” That is the sort of language that usually signals a press release doing work the music cannot. With Wrembel it tends to be descriptively accurate — the writing genuinely does move through modal territory that sits some distance from the Hot Club repertoire most listeners associate with the gypsy jazz label.
Saturday, October 10 — Dreamers of Dreams
The 2014 album opens on “Let There Be Light” and closes on “Equinox,” and the arc between those two titles announces its ambitions before a note sounds. Wrembel drew the material from Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s “Ode” — the poem that gives us “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams” — and from Ancient Egyptian cosmology and astronomical imagery. It is the most expansive of the four programs, and the one where the distance he has travelled from Fontainebleau is most audible.
Sunday, October 11, 12:00 PM — Django Brunch
Note the time: this one is a matinée, not an evening show. After three nights of original composition, the run closes by going back to the source. Wrembel grew up in Fontainebleau, the town Django Reinhardt called home, and learned this music the long way — travelling through Europe, playing with Romani musicians in the French countryside. The Django material is not a tribute set bolted onto the end of the week. It is the grammar the other three nights are written in.
About Stéphane Wrembel
The New York Times has called Wrembel “perhaps the most creative improviser in Gypsy jazz today.” The Aquarian went further — “Stephane Wrembel just might be the greatest acoustic guitarist alive.” Superlatives of that order usually invite scepticism, and they should. What makes them defensible here is that Wrembel’s reputation rests on composition as much as on execution: he is not primarily an interpreter of a canon, he is a writer who happens to work in an idiom most people encounter as repertoire.
The Venue
An acoustic guitar in a small room is an unforgiving proposition — there is nowhere for a player to hide, and there is also nothing between the instrument and the listener. Lovin’ Cup is the right scale for this music, which was written for rooms where the audience can hear fingerboard noise and breath and the decay of a chord. Gypsy jazz in a large hall loses precisely the detail that makes it worth hearing live.
Tickets
Each night is ticketed separately, $30–$35. The three evening programs begin at 8:00 PM; the Django Brunch on Sunday is at 12:00 PM. Attending the full run means hearing an eighteen-year compositional arc in four sittings — but each program stands on its own, and a listener who can make only one night is not missing a prerequisite.
More shows across the region: Finger Lakes concerts.