THE GYPSY IN HIS SOUL

As he wraps the 20th installment of his celebrated Django A GoGo Festival, Stephane Wrembel reflects on the guitarist whose musical essence inspires his own.

- MARTIN MCQUADE

A POTENT ALCHEMY IS at play in the artistry of Parisian guitar wizard Stephane Wrembel. Juxtaposed ingredients including classical, flamenco, jazz, swing, bebop, blues and rock - combine in the mixture. However, the coalescing element is a facet of northern Gypsy culture, a sensuous music that has throbbed through his veins and cascaded through his strings for more than 30 years namely, the Sinti guitar style, with its unique tone, vibrato and melodic improvisation. In the process, Wrembel's cluster of sounds acquires a dreamlike, even mesmerizing quality, echoing the aura of a surrealist mosaic, akin to the films of his favorite director, Luis Buñuel.

The exemplar of this tradition is Belgium-born Sinti Jean "Django" Reinhardt, the jazz icon who imbued the style with a sweep-picking intensity. Wrembel found his muse In Reinhardt's red-hot repertoire and devoted himself to the propagation of his legacy. In 2003, he created the Django A GoGo Festival, which this year culminated in conjunction with the May release of Wrembel's new album, Django New Orleans. It's a merger of Reinhardt's string-driven jazz with the Big Easy tradition of wind instrumentation.

Wrembel started studying classical piano at the age of four in the Parisian commune of Fontainebleau, which he describes as "the home of the French Kings and birthplace of Impressionism." It is also the wellspring where Reinhardt spent his final years. Although Wrembel showed great promise, there was a rival. "I never had a natural feeling for the piano," he explains, "while with the guitar I had a fusion.