Improvising with Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli
MY GRANDMOTHER USED TO TELL ME that, when I was three years old and on an outing with her to a toy store, I grabbed and tried to make off with a pretty, stuffed, violin-playing monkey — much like the storybook chimpanzee that throws itself on ladies’ hats decorated with artificial fruit. In fact, it wasn’t the monkey I wanted, but rather that irresistible violin which I tried, unsuccessfully, to wrench from the prehensile grasp and chin of that obdurate and well-made creature.
Three years old is the beginning of the end. At home I pined away, comforting myself with a little 78 rpm phonograph on which I incessantly played a recording of Mischa Mischakoff performing treacly standards like Dvořák’s “Humoresque” and Fritz Kreisler medleys.
Six months later, however, my Weltschmerz vanished upon receiving from my grandmother an 11-inch-long Mexican wooden toy violin (a relic which my mother, obviously sensing a legendary career in its formative stages, still keeps in one of her closets).
At seven, two things happened to change my life: first, I discovered Jascha Heifetz, whose electrifying recordings suggested to me, then and even now, the possibility of perfection. And second, my mother bought me a quarter-size violin, and I began taking lessons and practicing, scratchily and irritably, those miserable Ševčík exercises that are the bane of parents and next-door neighbors. I progressed to fifth positions, but prodigy I was not.
I was eventually to enjoy the communal experience of performing Haydn and Schubert string quartets with my 13-year-old colleagues (though the arguments over who would play first violin were hardly harmonious). But aside from the Bach unaccompanied sonatas and partitas (which I attempted to struggle through later on) and the Brahms, Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky violin concertos (which were always beyond my technical command), I began to lose interest in what I considered to be the mostly sentimental Romantic violin repertoire. And when, at 14, I flubbed my way through a Vivaldi concerto in front of an audience of parents and peers, I turned to “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Roll Over Beethoven” for solace. I started having fantasies about and casting furtive glances at sensual-sounding oboes and English horns, and realized that my love affair with the violin was over.
Or so I thought until January of 1976 when, almost by accident, I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the great jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli performing with the Diz Disley Trio. I had, of course, earlier admired Django Reinhardt’s and Grappelli’s Quintet of the Hot Club of France recordings of “Mystery Pacific,” “Nuages,” “Ain’t Misbehavin”‘ and “Hot Lips,” among others. But I hadn’t quite expected the faultless intonation, crisp upper-register sonorities, wine-dark lower-string timbres, rhapsodic phrasing and vespertine lyricism of that shining, graceful, Pierrot-like figure — reminding me lightly of my grandmother in former times — playing the most mellifluent version of “Body and Soul” I had ever heard.
That night at Carnegie Hall brought on one of those Proustian moments of involuntary memory, taking me body and soul back to my three-year-old’s obsession, as I repressed the thought of dashing onstage and running off with that beautiful violin.
In December of last year I was on the phone to Paris. “Hello, is this Stéphane Grappelli?”
“You’re calling from New York? You want to see me in Paris? Incroyable! Bien sûr, you’re invited, my dear, and bring Rockefeller Centaire when you come!”
JAZZ VIOLINISTS HAVE ALWAYS HAD to be usually resilient to survive,” Nat Hentoff has put the matter bluntly, “because until recent years their instrument has not been regarded as a legitimate jazz axe.” Considering the dominant position held by the piano and reed instruments, however, it is important to remember the efflorescence in the Twenties and Thirties of such inventive pioneer jazz violinists as Joe Venuti, Eddie South and Stuff Smith (once described as the “palpitating Paganini”), who in turn inspired Svend Asmussen and Ray Nance and, more recently, Michael White, Leroy Jenkins and Jean-Luc Ponty.
Stéphane Grappelli not only partakes of this hardly supernnuated tradition — a tradition he himself has shaped and developed — but today, at 69, the violinist is at the height of his imaginative and technical powers.
He lives in a compact, modest Upper West Side-looking apartment on the Rue de Dunquerque — an apartment filled with books, records and souvenirs from his travels. It is just one of Stéphane’s home bases (he has a room in Amsterdam and apartments in London and Cannes, where his daughter lives) and, in fact, he is continually traveling at a clip that would exhaust a person half his age. During the last three months of 1976, for example, Stéphane played in eight American and seven Canadian cities, then flew off for performances in Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam, Lyon, Stuttgart and Hamburg.
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