Pump Up the Jam, or Pompez Le Jam?

As Lily and I rested our feet in our hotels after marching and climbing all over Montréal and Québec City earlier this month, we watched Musimax and MusiquePlus, Canada’s two big French-language music video channels, before we went out for dinner and before bedtime in our quest for good French-Canadian pop music. We were hoping to find videos that would inspire us to buy fresh tunes in Québec that we couldn’t find in the U.S. We saw a lot of American pop videos in English, and, as on MTV in the U.S., there were episodes of Pimp Mon Char (Pimp My Ride) interfering with our hunger for fresh musical fixes. But we did hear some memorable Québecois songs that were definitely worth taking home with us. We bought them on CD up there and they’ve been in heavy rotation at home and in our car ever since.

“Lever L’ancre” (“Raise the anchor”) is the latest album by the duo Alfa Rococo, and it’s full of catchy, melodic tunes sung primarily in minor keys. Paradoxically, their songs have a laid-back and pensive quality while being simultaneously bubbly and charming. They’re quite danceable, yet the voices have a soft quality to them that gives them a slightly moody bounce. As one reviewer put it, “C’est à la fois accessible et terriblement pop, mais sans être trop sucré.” That is, the album is “accessible and terribly ‘pop,’ but without being too sweet.” Exactement. Their biggest video hit is “Je pense à toi” (“I think of you”), but we’re fondest of the songs “Lever L’ancre” and “Horrible gens” (“Horrible people”). The album is available on iTunes.

While flipping channels on our first morning in Montréal, I chanced to hear a trio of young men in trim grey 80’s style suits with hot pink shirts and skinny silver ties being interviewed on a morning talk show. The group, called The Lost Fingers, played to a crowd of 60,000 at the Montreal Jazz Festival a few days before to huge acclaim, and they are now the toast of Québec. Their first album is called “Lost in the 80s” and it’s made up of covers of eighties pop tunes, with a twist: they’re all played in Gypsy jazz style à la guitar god Django Reinhardt. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam” played with jazz manouche élan and gusto by two fantastic guitarists and a talented string bassist and sung in English laced with rough, louche Québecois growls. Their version is SO infectious that after hearing it once I continued to hear it in my head every day the entire week we were in Québec. I was dying to find a store where I could buy a copy, and once I’d snagged it, I caressed it longingly, wishing I had a CD player to play it on.

Once in Québec City, Lily saw them on TV as well, this time singing Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” and then she understood why I was so excited about them. They also do delicious versions of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” even Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up.” (You didn’t think you ever wanted to hear that song again, I know, but you want to hear this version. Straight up.) Their versions are so energetic, skillful, fun and original, the guys make them sound completely new, absolument frais. I find myself smitten by their sound and I want both to share them with everyone I know and to keep them to myself before everybody finds out how much fun they are. Les gars sont incroyable! Sadly, I can’t find an online outlet in the U.S. where you can order a hard copy of their CD right now, but the album and individual songs are available to download from iTunes, among other websites.

So why the name “The Lost Fingers”? It’s an hommage to Django, bien sûr. When Reinhardt, a Belgian Gypsy, was 18, he accidentally set fire to his caravan and burned himself seriously over more than half of his body. As a result of his injuries, he lost the use of his third and fourth left-hand fingers. Already a professional musician by the time of this disaster, he retaught himself to play guitar with only two fingers and his thumb on his left hand, since the burned fingers remained partially paralyzed. By transcending his injury, he created a whole new style of playing that has influenced jazz musicians for the past 80 years.

Django’s style of playing, usually called Gypsy jazz, Gypsy swing or jazz manouche, has had a resurgence in the past decade or so, with string instrument groups like Seattle’s own Pearl Django playing wonderful Django-style covers of swing-era standards as well as their own compositions. Pearl Django is a group well worth hearing live; I saw them once play a concert at the top of the Space Needle. It was a delightful experience hearing joyous music played with enormous technical skill while the top of the Needle rotated. I had 360 degrees’ worth of beautiful views overlooking Seattle and Elliott Bay to watch and excellent live swing music to listen to. That’s living.

Pearl Django’s lineup has evolved over the years and included various guitarists, double bassists, a violinist and occasionally an accordionist. Their crisp, exuberant playing lifts the spirits, is wonderful to sing along with, and is excellent summertime music to dine by. I’m particularly fond of their albums “New Metropolitan Swing” and “Avalon.” Their music is available at stores and via iTunes, and is very much worth a listen.

Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) spent most of his youth in Gypsy encampments near Paris playing violin, guitar and banjo. He was unable to read or write music and almost illiterate when he began playing with the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. However, Django’s friend violinist Stéphane Grappelli, who founded the Hot Club quintet with Django and with whom Django made a number of recordings over the years, taught him to read music and French. During World War II, Django lived in occupied France but escaped being interned in a Nazi labor camp, where many thousands of Gypsies, also known as Roma or Romany people, were imprisoned and killed. Jazz was officially considered a degenerate art form by the Nazi regime in France and Gypsies, like Jews and homosexuals, were considered undesirables not fit to live among Aryans, but Django was apparently extended the protection of a Luftwaffe officer who admired his music.

In Gypsy jazz ensembles there are usually at least two guitarists, one to play the melodies and one to play rhythm guitar using a distinct percussive technique called “la pompe.” La pompe provides a strong, steady rhythm that usually replaces the drums. A string bass often provides the heft that rounds out the sound, as in The Lost Fingers’ lineup, but the bass is often not just “walking” but trotting along quite quickly. As played by The Lost Fingers, there are no idle fingers in Gypsy jazz.

Gypsies nowadays usually prefer to be called Roma. They have long been a primarily nomadic people who were for centuries best known as traveling entertainers and tradesmen. Many cultures have reviled them and accused them of thievery and kidnapping. Stereotypes of Gypsies as thieves who disappeared with money and kidnapped children have been pervasive and long-lived. Folksongs written in English warning children of Gypsies were regularly written and sung as recently as the early twentieth century. Gypsies are popular characters in music and folklore going back for centuries because of what were considered their mysterious and dangerous ways. I remember hearing my aunt play “The Wraggle-Taggle Gypsies” at the piano when I was a child; that song and many variations on it date back to the early eighteenth century. Fear of Gypsies was still pervasive not only in early twentieth century Europe but also in the United States. When my mother was a child in the 1940s, my grandmother told her not to play too far afield, lest she be taken by Gypsies; Grandma was serious, even though they lived in Dearborn, right outside of Detroit.

The great prejudice toward and fear of Gypsies imperiled their lives and culture for centuries. They have spread across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and northwest India over the past millennium picking up musical influences from all the cultures they’ve touched along the way. Their ancestry is traceable back to India before 1000 A.D. Their influence is heard not only in jazz, but in folk-jazz-punk fusion by way of Gogol Bordello, the “Gypsy punk” band headed by Eugene Hütz, the passionate and extravagant Ukranian singer and actor who stole the movie “Everything is Illuminated” and who stars in the new indie film directed by Madonna, “Filth and Wisdom.” (Although Madonna’s direction of the film has been roundly panned, Hutz’s acting and charisma have been praised.)

I’m a great fan of cross-cultural fertilization and education brought about by sharing differing styles of music. In the 1980s British and U.S. musicians like Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon traveled to Africa and listened to African musicians for inspiration. Gabriel recorded and toured with Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour while Simon worked with the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, helping them to achieve much-deserved international acclaim. In the 1990s pop stars like Paul Simon and David Byrne went to South America and began to use their indigenous musicians and instruments in their work. These efforts to bring non-Western musical styles, instrumental techniques and languages into the mainstream were lauded as groundbreaking at the time. Nowadays “world music” is so commonly incorporated into Western pop that it’s become a cliché. Pop and hip-hop culture have spawned so many songs that sample bits of Jamaican reggae, South African township jazz, Afro-Cuban rhythms and other great international sounds that we have now come to expect a marvelous mash-up of styles, languages and colors in our music. International influence has always found its way around the world to color different musical styles, but never as quickly and pervasively as today. We are so lucky.