Gypsy Soul, Alive and Well...
YEARS AGO, I REMEMBER seeing Yul Brynner on the TV talking about the philosophy of the Gypsies. Brynner claimed to have been a quarter Romany and was elected to the position of President of the Roma, and he loved to speak from the high place of this authority. “The Roma have a saying,” he said. “Everybody else builds big boxes to live in, with walls of bricks and mortar, and they leave a tiny little keyhole through which to see the rest of the world…”
One of Brynner’s avocations was playing Gypsy songs on the guitar and singing the night away. In this he was no doubt emulating that most famous of Gypsy musicians to reach fame in modern times, Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) who practically invented the jazz guitar and yet never left behind his penchant for Gypsy music and unconventional behavior.
With all their wandering ways and Dionysian fiddle-frenzies, the Roma have left some deep ruts scratched across the surface of the spirit world. Now, following one of these trails carved into the ethereal sod, we see another wagon approaching, bells a-tinkle, amply-cleavaged women smiling and waving and bending and flashing come-hither looks. The brightly painted contraption stops, and down steps an energetic young swain, with a guitar, a voice, a complicated rhythm. He is the reincarnation of reincarnations, Django Novo, pausing to rest on his way from, Oslo? to, to, to RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE.
I FIRST FOUND DJANGO on Garageband.com. On Garageband, if you want to get your music reviewed, you have to review other people’s music. You never know beforehand what is coming at you. One night I got a tune from Django Novo, called Coco, or, as it has since then been rechristened, Coucou. I couldn’t believe how great this song was, as I wrote a review for it that didn’t come close to capturing the roiling maelstrom of delights and associative imagery that floated around my mind as a result of a mere four minute experience, for days thereafter:
“What a great song! This tune, and the supremely confident, breathy delivery of it, takes me back to the 1920's faded grandeur of Stresa on Lago Maggiore; the swank hotels, palm trees, priests in black hats, and hustlin' aristocrats on the make in the park across the street. I hear overtones of Marlene Dietrich in the melody, the voices of talented but endearing people who have become expatriates from life, all those men and women without a country who will somehow contrive to wangle their way onto the planes out of Casablanca, or wherever they are...”
Django Novo: Who is this guy? First of all, he’s more than just a voice, because out of whole cloth he makes these songs that have all the feel and atmosphere of the expatriate bars in Paris, in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He says he’s Dutch, but the English of the lyrics he writes is flawless, quirky, idiomatic, polished, and crafty with slang. His arrangements are filled with eloquent silent moments that speak for all the things better left unsaid. The skill of the fingers on all those acoustic stringed and percussion instruments just takes my breath away. He somehow cloned himself, or painstakingly pieced together an ensemble, that makes, THAT SOUND. It doesn’t matter if he isn’t the one playing the solo: he kind of channels his sensibility into the others, while he sings. And the singing: so many times when these would-be antique crooners sing breathy and quiet, their vocal timbre turns dark and they slide in there just under the pitch, and I think: “O God, what is worse than a microtone flat?” But this dude has a pitch as true as a cable on a suspension bridge to heaven.
And it’s no good, comparing him, saying, “He’s like…” I mean, Leon Redbone is like a lot of music hall crooners from that era, but he growls a lot, and his whole demeanor is kind of arch, with the mustache wax and all, and he always made me feel like he had got a degree in dance hall music or something, it was all so studied; and Randy Newman, he is a force to himself, but he’s building on a tradition of his dad having written the score for half the movies ever made, and let’s face it, Randy’s kind of crotchety, now turning into sort of a geezer, as these rum-soaked characters of his lament the trashy girls they never laid, or laid too many times. Then along come some critics to tell us how the fallen women symbolize our desperate and corrupted society, or something else profound.
BUT THIS NEW DJANGO, he sings a song light as a feather that floats on a breeze as cool as death. I mean, you just feel the danger, the sense that while something as serious as a heart attack is about to happen, just around the corner, this tan beauty with the pearls is the thing you will still be seeing in your dreams, twenty- two years from now, when you almost succumb to amoebic dysentery in a gray motel room in Maracaibo.
Back in my salad days, at the University, I went to see a performance of the Living Theater. All the thirty-something longhairs re-enacting sun worship rituals on a huge stage in a concert hall, and then they tore off all their clothing and migrated out into the crowd and physically allured and grabbed and sweet-talked and god-knows-what-all beleaguered the audience members to stand, walk, zombify themselves, just get their asses up and move onto the stage where slowly several hundred people coalesced and stripped themselves barenaked and milled about in a crowd both hot from embarrassment and cold from lack of clothing for a half an hour of NO RULES, and that was that, and now I find out that this Djangoman’s dad was there, HE WAS ONE OF THEM, that weird international corrupting influence that actually played jazz piano and brought something really new into the world (and probably every day, will again).
Oh God, let me CLIMB ON THAT ROLLERCOASTER!!!
Jabez L. Van Cleef is a writer and musician who lives in Madison, NJ, USA.
Music composed, produced, performed*, written and arranged by DN.
*Guitar on "Two Giant Players" and "The Promise Of Forever": Bård Helgerud.
"The Promise Of Forever" radio edit - mastering by Øystein Sevåg.
All rights reserved.
DN.
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