Stéphane Grappelli - Biography
By Stuart Kremsky
Looking back at his long career in the front ranks of jazz improvisers, the ebullient and elegant violinist Stéphane Grappelli noted that he was proud of having performed alongside some of the greatest pianists in the history of the music. Grappelli had played with them all, from Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Errol Garner and Oscar Peterson, to modernists like Martial Solal and McCoy Tyner. But the man who continued to perfect his art throughout his life and whose improvisations could attain, in Whitney Balliett’s words, “a controlled ecstasy,” is invariably remembered as the counterpart to the innovative guitarist Django Reinhardt in one of the greatest small groups in pre-WWII jazz, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.
Stéphane Grappelly (changed to Grappelli sometime in the Sixties) was born on January 26, 1908, in Paris, France to Italian parents. His mother died when he was four. Two years later his father was called up for military service in the First World War, and the boy stayed at an orphanage until his father’s safe return. The lad was rewarded with a three-quarter size violin, and with his father’s help soon learned his scales. Enchanted by the instrument, his knowledge and technique advanced rapidly. His only formal musical study was a three-year course at the Paris Conservatory starting in 1920. Grappelli’s first pubic performances were as a busker in the courtyards of buildings, which led a job as second violinist in a small cinema orchestra. He also played piano, and he found work in cafés and restaurants. In 1923, when his father decided to move to Strasbourg with his new wife, the 15-year-old Stéphane elected to remain in Paris, where the music of the streets and the jazz that he heard on records attracted him and led him to pursue a career in jazz.
When he was 19, Grappelli, playing piano, joined the house band at Ambassadeurs, a well-known Parisian club, where he was exposed to more American popular music. Still working as a pianist, he joined the popular dance band Grégor et Ses Grégoriens. The group toured France, and made it to Argentina in 1931, where they recorded with famed tango master Carlos Gardel. When band-leader Grégor Kelekian heard Grappelli play violin one night after the show, he encouraged him to concentrate on the instrument. Back in Paris, Grappelli began to work with band leader Alain Romans as a violinist and alto saxophonist, while continuing to record with the Grégoriens until 1933, now on violin.
In 1931, Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt walked into the Montparnesse club where the Romans band was playing and sat in for a little while. Two years later, still on the lookout for a hot violinist, he encountered Grappelli again when they were playing in bands on the same bill at a Parisian hotel. Then, as Grappelli told it, “One day he was strumming on his guitar, and I started to improvise with him.” The pair liked what they heard, and continued to play together during breaks. Soon Reinhardt invited his brother, Joseph, also a guitarist, to join them. ''That was the first time I heard Django take a solo,'' Grappelli later said. The series of informal sessions, which grew to include bassist Louis Vola, led to the group’s first performances in November 1933, after which they added another guitarist, Roger Chaput, to make it a quintet.
There were not all that many dyed-in-the-wool jazz fans in Paris in the early Thirties. In 1932, some of the most resolute enthusiasts formed the Hot Club of Paris. It was the first group to recognize jazz as a bona fide art form. With Hugues Panassie and Charles Delaunay leading the way, it became an influential organization in the history of jazz in Europe. They produced the first magazine devoted exclusively to the music (Jazz Hot), Delaunay edited the first real discography, and they had their own label, Swing Records. The group also organized a successful series of concerts, initially set up by American pianist Freddy Johnson. Reinhardt began being featured at these shows in February, 1934. When Johnson gave up his role as session organizer towards the end of the year, the Hot Club’s Pierre Nourry set about to find a group of French musicians to represent the club. The string ensemble that Reinhardt and Grappelli were developing seemed to fit the bill, and Nourry arranged for the group, listed on the label as Delaunay’s Jazz, to record two songs in September 1934 as an audition for the Odéon label. Although the recording didn’t generate much interest, when the Hot Club presented the group as “Jazz Hot” in early December, the engagement was a smashing success. Before the month was out, the band, as “Django Reinhardt et le Quintette du Hot Club de France avec Stéphane Grappelly,” made its debut for the French Ultrasound label. The group went on to make 20 songs for the label over the next 10 months. Jazz historian Mike Peters has noted that these records “caught fans and musicians totally off guard, nothing like them had been heard in jazz before.”
The Quintet of the Hot Club of France is one of the most significant European ensembles in all of jazz. The unique sound of this all-string ensemble, as established through their Thirties recordings on Ultrasound and subsequently on the HMV, Decca, and Swing labels, launched a whole sub-genre of “gypsy jazz” or “gypsy swing.” The quintet gave Grappelli the freedom to combine his natural sense of swing with the whole gamut of influences he’d soaked up in Paris. For the first two years of the group, reviews gave more critical attention to Grappelli’s soloing than to Reinhardt’s. The guitarist and violinist could not have been more dissimilar. Grappelli had developed into a man who preferred order to chaos, valued things of beauty, and was notoriously frugal and tight with a franc, just the opposite of the gambling Reinhardt, who could not be bothered with details like where and when the next gig was. But when they joined on the bandstand or in the studio, all the friction caused by their disparate personalties vanished in the service of the music. As he told Peter Watrous of The New York Times in 1988, “Now I can just remember 50 years ago with Django Reinhardt. We used to forget to sleep sometimes. We were tired when we would go to work at night!” The quintet toured Europe throughout the Thirties, and played with visiting American jazzmen including tenor saxophone master Coleman Hawkins, trombonist Dickie Wells, and alto saxophonist and trumpeter Benny Carter.
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the quintet was on tour in England. The announcement of war quickly sent the quintet, minus Grappelli, back to France. According to Peters, the violinist was “always vague as why he decided not to return to Paris.” In any case, London would be Grappelli’s home for the next seven years, putting an end to the golden period of the quintet. Grappelli quickly established a place for himself in London during the war, performing in music halls and clubs and appearing on the BBC and in several films. He also recorded for Decca, often with a young George Shearing at the piano.
With the war over, Grappelli and Reinhardt reunited for new recordings in London for Swing and Decca in early 1946. The pair worked together intermittently over the next few years, including record dates for Swing and concert tours of Europe. The quintet’s last official recording session was held on March 10, 1948. (All of the quintet’s recordings for EMI-related companies are in the 6-CD boxed set The Complete Django Reinhardt and Quintet of The Hot Club of France Swing/HMV Sessions 1936-1948 [1999 Mosaic].) Grappelli and Reinhardt reunited for the last time for a months-long tour of Italy that commenced in January 1949, with the pair backed by an Italian rhythm section. In a final burst of creativity, some 60 titles were recorded for Italian radio during the tour.
Grappelli returned to Paris, where he would live for the rest of his life. He recorded regularly in both orchestral and small band setting during the Fifties and Sixties for the Barclay label, including encounters with American musicians like drummer Kenny Clarke and saxophonists Don Byas and Lucky Thompson. Grappelli had a low profile in the United States as a result of Barclay’s limited distribution. A 1957 recording session teamed Grappelli with one of his idols, violinist Stuff Smith, along with the state-of-the-art rhythm section of Oscar Peterson on piano, Herb Ellis on guitar, Ray Brown on bass, and Jo Jones on drums. Unreleased at the time, some of the music eventually surfaced in the Eighties on Pablo as Violins No End. Grappelli participated in the 1959 One World Jazz album on Columbia, designed to showcase the new technology of over-dubbing by recording different parts in various cities. In 1963, he was a member of Duke Ellington's Jazz Violin Session (Atlantic), a Paris date that joined him with Svend Asmussen and Ray Nance and an Ellington-led trio. His main gig for much of the Sixties was at the Paris Hilton.
Starting in 1969, Grappelli began to be more active in jazz circles, embarking on a series of albums for the Black Lion label beginning with two collaborations with guitarist Barney Kessel, I Remember Django and Limehouse Blues (both were reissued along with a 1973 concert recording as I Got Rhythm, a 3-CD set.) In October, Grappelli recorded with jazz violinist Joe Venuti, and that November participated in a very modern session with vibraphonist Gary Burton’s group, Paris Encounter (1970 Atlantic).
A chance meeting with British guitarist Diz Disley at the Cambridge Folk Festival was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration. With Disley’s encouragement, the two embarked on a series of tours, including trips to Australia, Europe and the US. Karl Dallas of Melody Maker credits Disley as having "single-handedly created a revival of interest in the music of Stéphane Grappelli ...” They also recorded extensively over a period of years, beginning with Stéphane Grappelli and Friends (1970 Philips) and ending with Live In San Francisco (1982 BlackHawk). Grappelli had an intensive collaboration with violinist Yehudi Menuhin, documented in a series of EMI recordings from 1975 to 1984. The violinist was extremely active for the last decades of his life. When he wasn’t at his Paris flat or relaxing at his house in the South of France (“I don't garden, but I like flowers, and I like vegetables.”), Grappelli spent a lot of time on the road. He was interested in playing with a lot of different musicians, and his wishes were fulfilled as he worked with a wide range of stylists including mandolinist David Grisman, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, guitarists Joe Pass, Larry Coryell, Philip Catherine, and Martin Taylor, violinist Vassar Clements, and many more.
Stéphane Grappelli passed away at the age of 89 in Paris on December 1, 1997, from complications of hernia surgery. Even in the final years of his life, confined to a wheelchair, he performed with a mastery honed over decades of playful and refined improvisation. His recorded legacy continues to define what it means to swing with elegance.
