CANCELED: Stephane Wrembel
Cafe Coda 1224 Williamson St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703
Casey Ryan Vock
Stephane Wrembel and guitar.
Stephane Wrembel
press release: Award-winning guitarist STEPHANE WREMBEL and his band will perform at Cafe Coda, 1224 Williamson St, Madison, WI, 53703, on Thursday, April 2, at 8:00 p.m. This event is open to patrons 18 and older. Tickets are $20.00 ($15.00 for students with I.D.). For more information call 608-630-9089 or visit cafecoda.club.
Wrembel’s band includes long-time collaborators Thor Jensen (guitar), Ari Folman- Cohen (bass) and Nick Anderson (drums).
Stephane Wrembel is considered one of the preeminent master guitarists in the world specialized in the Django Reinhardt style. The Aquarian Weekly said, "Stephane Wrembel just might be the greatest acoustic guitarist alive."
Born in Paris and raised in Fontainebleau, the home of Impressionism and Django Reinhardt, Wrembel began playing guitar in his mid-teens. A Pink Floyd fan, he “spent hours learning David Gilmour’s style,” he said. “So I had a classical background in piano, a passion for rock music, and then I found out about Django. I fell in love with the very strong impressionist feel in his music.” Wrembel’s breakthrough came with his original composition “Bistro Fada,” a Django-influenced swinging waltz that was the theme song for Woody Allen’s 2011 Oscar®-winning film, “Midnight In Paris.” Since then, Wrembel has released five discs dedicated to Reinhardt (The Django Experiment Vol. I-IV and Live at Rochester) and recently produced the debut CD by Simba Baumgartner, Django’s great-grandson. His Django A Gogo festival, launched in 2004, has become one of the world’s most important and influential events, which includes an intensive music camp, celebrating and expanding Reinhardt’s music.
In October of 2019, Wrembel released Django L’Impressionniste putting the spotlight on 17 little-known solo pieces Reinhardt recorded between 1937 and 1950. Wrembel is the first and only interpreter who has performed all of these solo pieces and collected them in one definitive masterwork. It is available digitally and on double-vinyl with liner notes by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke.
The Django Experiment V was released on Wrembel's own Water Is Life Records on January 23, 2020, the 110th anniversary of the birth of Reinhardt. As with the previous “experiments,” The Django Experiment V was recorded with Wrembel and his world-class band performing live, with no headphones or tracking, in a setting conducive to improvisation with each musician pushing their own boundaries to evoke new interpretations of Reinhardt’s music as well as songs by other composers. In addition to Jensen, Cohen-Folman and Anderson, Wrembel was joined in the studio by special guests Nick Driscoll (saxophone, clarinet) and Daisy Castro (violin).
Wrembel feels this is his strongest “experiment” thus far. He comments, “First of all, it comes after the release of Django l’impressionniste that I recorded after months of memorization and practice. Then, besides the usual crew I invited Daisy Castro, one of the greatest violinists of our time, who is specialized in all improvised music, to join in on this incredible journey. The album starts with the Impressionist touch…Django’s ‘Improvisation #1’ and ‘Nympheas’…and travels through the sounds of a more classic Django swing vibe to end up in an invocation of New York City’s voodoo spirit with the apocalyptic version of Ellington’s ‘Caravan.’ For me, these experiments are a never-ending journey.”
has several more recordings planned for 2020. In the meantime, he and his band will continue to tour behind the release of The Django Experiment V as he prepares for Django A Gogo 2020, which will be held May 5-9 in Maplewood, N.J. and New York City.