DC Share Revival: Review: Schnuckenack Reinhardt Quintet - Swingin' With Schnuckenack Reinhardt Quintet (1972)

Rating: 100/100 - Genre: Gypsy Jazz / Jazz Manouche, Swing

The Schnuckenack Reinhardt Quintet recorded Swingin’ With Schnuckenack Reinhardt Quintet in a way that places the group squarely within the post-war European take on Hot Club-style swing, and the record’s material, presentation and catalog trail tell a tightly detailed story about the band’s reorientation in the early 1970s. The record was issued in Germany on the Philips/Image imprint with the specific catalog number 6305 171. From the first grooves the listener encounters an intentional program of standards rather than original compositions, a choice that signals a deliberate engagement with the Great American Songbook as interpreted through Sinti violin phrasing and an amplified lead-guitar voice.

Franz "Schnuckenack" Reinhardt stands at the center of that project as the violinist and leader who for decades carried Sinti instrumental tradition into public concert life in Germany. Born in 1921 and active across the second half of the twentieth century, his formation of a quintet in 1967 established a working template: a violin frontline supported by a solo guitar, two rhythm guitars and double bass, and notably no drum set, the same instrumental plan that echoed the Hot Club approach and allowed rhythmic propulsion to come from interlocking guitar parts. Early lineups of the group included names that appear in contemporary scene accounts—Daweli Reinhardt, Bobby Falta, Spatzo and Hojok Merstein—and by the end of the 1960s the young solo guitarist Häns'che Weiss had joined, adding another chapter to the band’s personnel story before his departure in the spring of 1972.

The album program as preserved in the German Philips issue is consistent across several discographical snapshots: it is a standards-only sequence that places tunes such as Sweet Georgia Brown, I’ll See You in My Dreams, Limehouse Blues, When You’re Smiling, Goody-Goody, After You’ve Gone, Some of These Days, Nuages, Swinging Wild (The World Is Waitin’ for the Sunrise), What Is This Thing Called Love, All of Me and Bye Bye Blues into short, club-ready takes that generally fall in the two- to four-minute range. The Philips/Image pressing foregrounds popular swing standards and places Nuages—the piece most associated with Django Reinhardt—among them as an explicit nod to the line of tradition the Quintet operated within. The result is no set of extended studio experiments but a concise record of concise performances, where short heads and compact choruses leave space for exchange between violin and guitar rather than prolonged solo choruses.

The timing of releases and the band’s personnel events explains much about this repertory and the album’s sound. In late 1971 the group recorded material for the Da Camera Song series—specifically the LP issued as Musik Deutscher Zigeuner 4, with sessions dated to November 1971 and release to April 1972—and that project belongs to the same period as the Philips record. By May 1972 the first formation of the quintet dissolved, and Schnuckenack Reinhardt quickly assembled a new working group. That reconstitution brought back Bobby Falta as the lead guitarist and added Schmeling Lehmann and Ricardo Reinhardt on rhythm guitars alongside Jani Lehmann on double bass; this new roster concentrated the group’s playing in a slightly more jazz-oriented direction, an orientation that is audible on the Philips date. The lineup’s instruments—violin, single solo guitar, two rhythm guitars and bass—confirm the continuing absence of a drummer and therefore the continuing reliance on plucked rhythm and the violin’s bowed phrasing to supply both pulse and melodic statement.

The arrival of Bobby Falta into the solo chair coincided with measurable changes in how the ensemble projected its material. Falta’s approach—frequently noted in scene sources of the period—favored a louder, amplified guitar voice and phrasing that leaned toward bebop-aware lines; compared with the earlier acoustic sheen of Häns'che Weiss, Falta’s tone and attack alter the group’s overall color and give the single-guitar lead a more contemporary bite. Those choices are audible on the Philps recording, where the solo lines sit with a clarity and presence that cut through the arrangements and where the two-guitar rhythm work is set up to allow succinct call-and-response between bowed violin and electric single-string runs.

That major-label context matters. The Philips/Image release places the Quintet into the Phonogram/Philips distribution pipeline at a moment when European labels were reorganizing: Philips and Deutsche Grammophon were moving toward the PolyGram consolidation of the year, and the presence of a Philips catalog entry made the album available through channels that the smaller, specialized Da Camera Song series did not always reach.

On the media history side the program did not disappear with vinyl’s decline. In the mid-1980s the repertoire from the Philips sessions was repurposed on a West German Phonogram/Mercury compact disc with catalog number 824 190-2, a title that turned up in period listings of early PolyGram CD items and that demonstrates the label’s view that these recordings had continuing value for a consumer market migrating to the new format. The CD issue and later reappearing compilations mean that the record’s set of standards remained available beyond the LP era, and they confirm that the Philips program was not an isolated artifact but part of a continuing circulation in European catalogs.

Listening closely to the album reveals a few defining musical decisions. First, the record’s absence of original downhill from the leader’s pen and its exclusive turn to standards frames the Quintet as interpreters rather than songwriters on this occasion; across the program only Nuages—the Django composition included by every Sinti-swing lineage group sooner or later—stands as a direct connection to earlier continental repertoire. Second, the tracks’ short running times and compact improvisatory spans reflect an ethos of club practicality and of single-sided radio friendliness that was common for major-label jazz releases at the time: bite-sized heads, clear solo statements, and an emphasis on melodic phrasing rather than long, exploratory jams. Third, the ensemble’s balance—bowed violin in the foreground, an amplified single guitar cutting through, and two guitars in rhythm lock—makes the record a document of an ensemble that keeps the Hot Club chassis but updates its lead sound for a later decade.

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Monday, August 25, 2025

Review: Schnuckenack Reinhardt Quintet - Swingin' With Schnuckenack Reinhardt Quintet (1972)

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