So-called ‘inimitable’ jazz musicians usually turn out to be nothing of the sort, because scores of enthralled admirers line up to play like them.
The adjective better indicates how many of these co-religionists attempt imitation and how few succeed.
All-round guitarist John Etheridge’s efforts to reproduce the sounds of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France flatter the memory of its leaders Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli with sincere hero-worship.
In the quartet Sweet Chorus, he takes the Django role and violinist Christian Garrick Grappelli’s. The band, which has been going for 12 years, celebrates Etheridge’s one-time partnership with Grappelli and, this year, the centenary of Django’s birth.
Suffice to say that Garrick is harder-edged than the super-suave Grappelli, while Etheridge brings to Django’s acoustic style more of the finger-flying dexterity and chordal digression learnt elsewhere.
These qualities intensified, though sometimes over-larded, Quintet charts such as Nuages, Swing 39 and After You’ve Gone and brought a nostalgic balm to I’ll Be Seeing You and Lennon-McCartney’s Here, There and Everywhere.
Racing tempos on Tiger Rag and After You’ve Gone illustrated a band having fun without the abrasion between violin and guitar sometimes associated with their forebears. In any case, the engine-room of rhythm guitarist Dave Kelbie and bassist Andy Crowdy obviated the need for Etheridge to boost it when Garrick was soloing.
It was not all Quintet-like music when Etheridge briefly went electric (as Django did) to prove that imitation can be liberating as well as limiting.
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