by Peter Gerler

photo by Tom Stewart

“Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.”  Jelly Roll Morton

“Back in the early days we used to play soft and hot,” recalled the New Orleans bassist Pops Foster. “Most of the time it was so quiet you could hear the people’s feet shufflin’ on the floor.”

And so it was with the Jack Soref’s progressive gypsy jazz quartet in Brookline on February 5, 2012.  Soref’s arrangements whispered. Yet they leapt off the page.

Soref played a traditional petite bouche gypsy guitar, a style born in France. To his left, the adept John McGann switched between his own petite bouche, standard mandolin, and the fuller-toned octave mandolin (both tuned like violins). Ben Powell played violin, and Sven Larson worked the double bass. The group had come together for just this occasion.

The music seemed to come out of a forest. Guitar and bass took Sy Oliver/Jimmy Lunceford’s sweet Dream of You into a Parisian-based walking ostinato, then into medium-tempo swing. Powell’s violin solo grooved like a mouse on Sunday morning, and Soref’s guitar brought the mouse spouse scampering. McGann’s octave mandolin sounded like something found in a tree. (He is a professor of strings at Berklee and has arranged for the Boston Pops.)

Dinah took a trail through the trees, as Soref’s arrangement brought Coltrane-inspired chord changes. But you heard the great Harry Akst evergreen sneaking out from the shadows.  (Akst also co-penned Am I Blue?) Larson’s big bass swung like a man who has seen time. (He has studied Indian classical music and traditional blues and is one of Boston’s most in-demand bassists.)

The afternoon as a whole swung, as gypsy jazz, innovated in the 1930s by the Parisian virtuoso Django Reinhardt, rode on a foundational guitar rhythm known to players as “la pompe.” Swing rhythm drives jazz–on either side of the Atlantic. Gypsy jazz evolved from Eastern European, Spanish, and Romany (gypsy) melodies performed at scrappy dance halls in the Parisian outskirts—just as American ragtime and jazz grew up in red-light districts.Musettes (small bagpipes), cimbaloms, accordions, and violins played bourees and waltzes.

But the gypsy sound didn’t swing until a teenage Django heard the American music that had entered Europe during WWI. Such personalities as James Reese Europe, Josephine Baker with theRevue Negre, and even Sidney Bechet undoubtedly made their impressions. Then, through a restaurant window on Place Pigalle, Django heard Billy Arnold’s Novelty Jazz Band playing tunes likeCaravan, Carolina in the Morning, and Runnin’ Wild. It was Django’s true birth.

Back in Brookline, Soref’s lovely Sans Titre Encore might have been titled “Ode to Sunrise.” On the ripping Stomping at Atwoods, Powell’s violin cried alone. (He has performed with Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock, Keith Lockhart, and the Boston Philharmonic.)Metro Swing brought an image of children chasing each other through woods, McGann’s octaves and chords pulsing the air. And Them There Eyes blew the place out as Soref’s chart mixed it up with klezmer, George Benson-style throb, and Django-esque lullaby.

Soref, a Wisconsin native and recent Berklee grad, has just returned from Paris, where for six months he hung out and jammed with gypsies. “It’s very hard to impress the Parisians,” he says. He can barely take his hands off the guitar. He talks incessantly of alternate fingerings and altered chords. He’s appeared at the Brooklyn Djangology Festival, the Midwest Gypsy Swing Festival, as well as on NPR’s “Here and Now.” Reinhardt’s articulation and musicality have not been lost on Soref, who doubtless is attempting to enter an alternate universe.

But his “moral compass” is American. It’s always, “What does this have to do with Louis Armstrong? How is this music part of the tradition?” And the tradition comes from swing.

In Swing That Music, Armstrong wrote, “I want to explain that ‘hot,’ as swing musicians use the word, does not necessarily mean loud or even fast.”

And as the tradition goes, Django wept when he first heard Louis. “He was like a large animal, mute and dazed in the blaze of the sun,” a colleague recalled.*

So in Brookline, on Fats Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose, Powell slipped through the changes and the band tiptoed through Django’s traditional ending riff.  The encore—Soref’s What Now?–romped in sweet melody, McGann’s solo moving through city streets, Soref’s guitar sneaking in and out between buildings. Larson’s bass laid down footsteps.

The quiet echoed.

* Michael Dregni, Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend, 2004, Oxford University Press, p. 54

Jack Soref, together with his band Sinti Rhythm and other groups, appears often in the Boston area. For more info, check his website: www.jacksoref.com.