DC Share Revival: Review: Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli - A Swinging Affair (recorded 1937-39, released 1980)

Rating: 90/100 - Gypsy Jazz/Jazz Manouche, Swing.

Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli appear on the sleeve of the 1980 Decca issue with a title that promises swing, but the record is less a new meeting than a carefully assembled historical window into their earlier studio work. Issued in Germany (Decca catalog 6.24725 AO) and presented in monaural transfers, A Swinging Affair was produced for the buyer who wanted a compact survey of the Quintette’s recorded voice: it gathers sides between 1937 and 1939. It's packaged by a team that credited Artifex Studio for the artwork, listed Colin Brown as producer and acknowledged remastering by John Wadley. From the first grooves the compilation signals its curatorial intent by juxtaposing American standards such as Stardust, Body and Soul, If I Had You and Tea for Two with Quintette originals and brisk instrumentals like Swingin’ with Django, Hungaria and Henderson Stomp, so the listener hears both the repertoire of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and the pieces that crystallized the group’s own approach. Because the transfers are drawn from pre-1956 masters and presented in mono, the record privileges a focused center image in which violin and guitar trade phrases with unusual clarity; that presentation choice in turn lets the acoustic percussive elements—the rhythm-guitar attack and the bass quarter-notes—register with an immediacy that stereo reprocessings sometimes soften.

The story of how that sound came into being begins in Paris in the early 1930s, when Quintette du Hot Club de France coalesced around two very different but perfectly complementary improvisers. Reinhardt arrived from a Manouche Romani milieu on the outskirts of Paris and developed a guitar voice that combined continental dance gestures, traces of Balkan inflection and the American swing pulse then filtering into European dance halls. A severe fire in his youth left him with functional use of two fingers on his left hand, and the way he adapted—favoring horn-like single-line phrasing, inventive chord voicings centered on index and middle-finger shapes, and rapid, incisive right-hand articulation—reorganized the role of the guitar from accompanist to frontline solo instrument. Grappelli brought a very different but complementary background: raised amid French dance orchestras and theater ensembles, he entered jazz with a melodic sensibility that privileged long singing lines, flexible time and a chamberlike ease; these qualities made him especially fit to state themes and supply counter-melodies that felt like continuations of a song’s phrase. When they first met informally in the early 1930s and then organized their work more formally in 1934—sessions that began in venues such as the Hotel Claridge and led to Ultraphone recordings that September—the combination produced a small-group sound that dispensed with percussion and piano and relied instead on a string-only lineup of violin, lead guitar, two rhythm guitars and bass.

That choice of instrumentation was not an absence for its own sake but a deliberate acoustic design: the rhythm guitars executed the percussive la pompe groove, supplying drive and pocket while leaving open the tonal space for the violin and lead guitar to converse in sharp, unmasked detail. The Ultraphone sides of 1934 established the rhetorical devices listeners still recognize in the compilation era: compact ensemble riffs, bright unison tags, and a balance between arrangements that read like written passages and improvisations that retain a sense of spontaneity. In performance the division of labor is often consistent: Grappelli will present the song’s theme with sustained bowing and a clear vocal-like arc, and Reinhardt will answer in filigree, compressing blues gestures and chromatic enclosures into short choruses that both outline the harmony and increase rhythmic tension. On instrumentals such as Swingin’ with Django the la pompe becomes a springboard for concise, highly wrought guitar choruses; on pieces named Hungaria or Henderson Stomp the minor-mode drama and rhythmic displacement in Reinhardt’s figures meet Grappelli’s capacity to make even the briskest tempos sing, so the interplay reads as fiery and light at once.

The absence of drums is central to how those details register. Without cymbal wash or backbeat accents, the up-strokes of rhythm guitar and the bass’s placement take on enlarged perceptual importance: micro-timing shifts and small accent choices become audible levers for swing and propulsion. That a mono compilation can preserve this effect, and sometimes do so with less phase smear than stereo remastering, is part of why labels in 1980 and the surrounding years turned to such packages as a way of reintroducing pre-war sources to new audiences. A Swinging Affair sits squarely within that wave of reissues: it is archival in intent, collecting material from the Quintette’s golden years and from a few reunion dates, and its sequencing deliberately alternates ballad readings of the American songbook with taut dance originals so listeners can hear how the same frontline voices negotiate different harmonic canvases and tempos.

Biographically, the chapters of the two protagonists’ careers explain why the recordings have held their appeal. Reinhardt’s technical adaptations—his narrow, horn-like single lines, his chordal vocabulary built around limited left-hand fingering—produce solos that feel economical and forward-leaning; they suggest an improviser who could compress chromatic enclosures and surprising voice-leadings into memorable statements. Grappelli acted as the tonal and lyrical binder, shaping cadences and reconstructing chorus endings so that a solo always resolved into a singing phrase rather than an exhibition of technique alone. Their pre-war studio period was meteoric; World War II dispersed them—Grappelli remained in England while Reinhardt returned to Paris—and the wartime hiatus produced separate careers that were equally productive in different ways. After the war they reunited at times, notably in Rome in 1949, and those sessions document that their telepathy remained intact even as jazz language around them had moved along other lines. Reinhardt’s brief but influential contacts with visiting American figures and his 1946 association with Duke Ellington underline how his European innovations registered overseas. Ellington’s remark that Reinhardt was "the most creative jazz musician outside the USA" has been cited in concert program notes and retrospective commentaries (Duke Ellington; cited in Elbphilharmonie program material).

Grappelli’s later career reinforced the pair’s broader public presence: he welcomed cross-style partnerships, reintegrated string ensembles, and even entered dialogues with classical figures—his recorded encounters with Yehudi Menuhin in the 1970s being a prominent example—thereby broadening the audience for violin jazz while preserving the lyricism that had marked his earliest work. Collectively, the two biographies illuminate their combination on record: Reinhardt’s harmonic nerve and rhythmic insistence matched Grappelli’s flowing, songlike phrasing so that the duo’s lines often sounded like parts of a single singing instrument rather than competing solos.

When the music itself is considered in harmonic and rhythmic terms, certain features recur. Reinhardt’s solos habitually compress chromatic approaches and diminished-form gestures into short statements that point the harmony forward; Grappelli’s responses frequently rephrase cadences so a chorus finishes like a sung line. On originals such as Swingin’ with Django the guitar’s compressed bluesy bursts and the violin’s airy paraphrase create a contrast with standard readings of If I Had You or Tea for Two, where the violin often carries the main melody and the guitar elaborates the inner harmony.

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Sunday, August 31, 2025

Review: Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli - A Swinging Affair (recorded 1937-39, released 1980)

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