Arts

Sweet summer night

Bryan Robertson

A perfect June evening welcomed Stephane Grappelli last Sunday to his outdoor concert in Regent's Park. From seven o'clock until the music started at eight crowds of people, mostly in their teens and twenties, converged toward the gates of the Open Air Theatre, a normally sober auditorium given up to Shakespeare where the bosky setting seems more conducive to comedy or pastoral antics than the stern constraints of the current production of Othello. On Sunday, with a festive and purposeful sense of getting on with something rather better while the cat was away, big queues lined up to sit on grass verges to the left and right of the stage. Every seat was sold.

Stephane Grappelli first began to play jazz on his violin back in the nineteentwenties. After the piercing and moody triumphs of trumpet, clarinet and saxophone, all readily accepted as jazz instruments, the jazz fiddle seemed at first an outrage on a sacred instrument as well as some kind of sweet sellout for jazz purists. Grappelli has been making ravishing sounds and contributing to jazz history ever since, notably with his friend, the late and great guitarist Django Reinhardt, and the rest of the Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris. They gave a peculiarly Gallic clarity and charm to jazz, choosing always distinctively lyrical numbers with a strong melodic line. If we all knew, back in the 'thirties, that the real action was in New York or New Orleans, the jazz sophistications of Paris seemed to offer a delightful alternative.

The views across the park, just outside the theatre, with dense herbaceous borders, lily ponds, cascading roses, weeping willows and sunlit lawns, struck the right kind of idyllic note and everyone dawdled in looking very serene. Inside the auditorium, the packed audience simplified itself into ubiquitous clumps of blue denim, punctuated by the usual primary notes of red, green, yellow and awful turquoise. A habitual drabness in dress these days from both sexes makes outdoor crowds seem sullenly dull in colour, after the flowerbeds. Facing us was the tall, functional, abstract building used as a set for Othello, looking more like an anti-tank trap in Bognor than anything in Venice. When the warm-up musicians came on and the lights hit the stage, wanly at first in the evening sunlight, the set looked more like a big and ugly Tart moderne' concrete villa in the South of France, blankly unshuttered and deserted between tenants.

The warm-up pianist walked on, introduced the other two members of his trio, on bass and drums, and they launched into the usual hard-driving account of 'Take the A Train'. The impression of a concert party version of this impervious old number came at first from an over-amplified bass drum and some clangy piano tone, but the trio soon got into their stride with some fairly brisk stuff, the piano bubbly at best, only rarely harsh, with discreet plonking, tapping and swishing from bass and drums. If M. Grappelli provides a difficult act to follow, he is a tough act to precede, and we applauded these good musicians politely, noted that the pianist favoured the declamatory arabesques of Errol Garner rather than the hard bounce of Oscar Peterson, and greeted half-time eagerly, shuffling out for refreshments in the softening light.

Around nine o'clock, a reassembled packed house settled itself: sunset appeared through the trees, the sky became momentarily more brilliant, bird song came resonantly from on high. The house lights created a warmer ambience, and the obligatory young stalwart in T-shirt stood to the left of the stage clasping his arms purposefully. Diz Disley, the guitarist, walked on in a hectic patterned shirt to introduce the bass player, Phil Bates, and Ike Isaacs, also playing guitar. As always, the bass player looked like the intellectual of the group.

After the usual spiel and settling down, Grappelli walked on with his violin, in a quietly patterned white shirt, light brown and cream checked trousers, and sharplooking reddish tan shoes. Tall, relaxed, suntanned, moderately long white hair combed back behind a brown dome of a head, and a benign expression, he resembled a tall, birdlike Max Ernst playing the role of Yehudi Menuhin: a combination of lean alertness and amiable sensuality.

Retiring for a few seconds to the back of the stage while the lead guitar swung into the first number, `This Can't Be Love', Grappelli sauntered forward, after surveying his younger colleagues like a benevolent professor, and the heady old magic began. The quality of his playing is as electrifying as ever : the sound of the violin soaring over the strong and intricate rhythm backing was like the song of a passionate and sometimes enraged bird, rasping and swooping ever upward. He has a confiding, wayward and ultimately unpredictable sense of rhythm, both intimate and powerful, and he is not afraid to fling in a dangerously Max Bruchlike sweetness of phrasing and intonation to both discountenance and illuminate a rhythmically strong and moody passage from guitars and bass, so that the spirit of the music is always complex—bouncy, aggressive, lyrical and serene. His ineffable technique and overall grasp of music produces an astringently clear-headed openness of texture. Every now and then, through a

combination of raspy attack and intricate counterpoint, any group that Grappelli is playing with, and therefore dominating, sounds unnervingly like a bunch of Palm Court musicians going mad in a sedate salon de the in the rue St Honore. It is this aura of gentility gone bananas that is perennially endearing about his playing, so that as we question whether this is really jazz, remembering our Sidney Bechet and fix Biederbecke, the unnerving honeyed steel of Grappelli's sound makes nonsense of our doubts.

The second number, Errol Garner's 'Misty', ushered in some nice melodic fooling around by Grappelli, with the theme assuming many identities before he glided softly into a serene aria of great feeling and warmth. Baroque flights of sound cascaded into the air, dizzying scurries sped down, with, always, a phlegmatic and dry command of phrasing. This is elegiac playing. extremely diverse in mood. Grappelli secured tightly disciplined backing from the other musicians who were all clearly enjoying themselves as well as the maestro.

By now, the sky above had the pale golden glow of a Claude painting, pink sunset flashed through dark trees, the peach light on stage grew stronger and richer; the stage set, in stronger lighting, looked as if that villa could be in business at any moment with bluesun-blinds unfurling. Nothing happened, but the atmosphere was more atmospherically nocturnal for the third number 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love'. This old nostalgic burn-up came over vividly, fresh as paint, with studied references from Grappelli to those marvellous cliché-ridden hesitancies and lolloping surges of tune. He has a knack of isolating melodic phrases that have become buried in cliché, setting them in inverted commas, and making them extraordinary. A few Hurray Henrys (a jazz musicians' term for out of towners, in New York jazz clubs, who beat time, usually inaccurately, and irritate the performers) in the audience had begun to beat time silently but the audience was mostly quite still, totallY enthralled.

'Tea for Two' came next (yes), followed briskly by 'Killing Me Softly' (with your song), 'Birth of the Blues', and 'Walking MY Baby Back Home', and all richly inventive, strong and lithe in execution. We also heard two fine compositions by Reinhardt. `Manoir de mes rives' and 'Daphne' which stood up well to the other works of holy writ.

Then Grappelli came forward and told US that in 1938, playing at the London Palladium with Django Reinhardt, he had heard a brilliant pianist, Fats Waller, and listened for the first time to 'a new composition • 'Honeysuckle Rose', and he and his col

leagues dived into action, bringing us the ttl; destructible innocence and tenderness, al'

over again, of this period piece: pretty, cheerful, and filled with the simple mad 01): timism of the 'thirties. Grappelli plaYe°,. ardently, and seemed to have thought 0' each phrase for the first time, half swocalY

and rhapsodic, half edgy and slangy. The audience was as riveted by this as by `Swee'

Georgia Brown', and he ended up with Rogers and Hart and Jerome Kern-401d Man River', no less, and it worked. The bitter sweet sound seemed to belong more intimately to the bowl-like auditorium as the evening progressed and the mood tightened.

After cheering ovations, Grappelli loped off, jumping up a high step and waving, leaving behind the rare impression of purity, the true artist, and some kind of unsentimental insight into music which disrupts all the barriers of time to meet the youthfulness of his fellow musicians and audiences, fortyfive years on. Arousing memories as he does, Grappelli is a great coordinator of time but doesn't lean on it : his loving artistry makes a happy nonsense of , nostalgia with sheer classical poise.