The French Connection
From the left: Ben Powell, Gary Burton, and Julian Lage
When I was two years old, I began taking violin lessons with my mother, who taught the Suzuki Method. Also a musician, my father plays cello for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Needless to say, music has been a part of my everyday life for as long as I can remember.
A turning point came in my middle-school years when I first heard the late, great French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli. I was smitten by jazz, but particularly by Grappelli’s charm. His effortless, swinging style ignited something within me. He played with such resonance, and his distinctive tone quality instantly captivated me. How could someone—who was essentially making up the music—play with such authority as though the piece were written? That was my classical mind speaking, and this was jazz. Maybe I could find a way to combine the two?
In my early years, I developed proper classical technique and played lots of solo violin repertoire. Given my aural training in the Suzuki Method, I experimented with jazz ideas on my violin. Essentially, I was combining Suzuki’s mother-tongue method with the tradition of learning jazz by ear. I spent hours wearing headphones playing along with Grappelli’s CDs and, later, jamming to recordings by Duke, Miles, Louis, Thelonious, and other jazz icons. It became like an addiction—often indulged in after an hour or two of playing Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The sensation of swinging and letting my ears respond to these influences felt so liberating.
During my high-school years, I got the opportunity to play in a master class with trumpeter Randy Brecker at the Cheltenham International Jazz Festival. Midway through high school, I was chosen to join the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (NYO). Keith Lockhart, the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, was NYO’s guest conductor when I was a principal player during my second year with the orchestra. Over the course of rehearsing and performing together, Maestro Lockhart and I became well acquainted. He quickly discovered my love for jazz and improvisation, and he told me that he frequently drove past Berklee en route to Boston’s Symphony Hall. This was the first I’d heard of the college. After our final concert together, Lockhart kindly offered to hand-carry a letter and CD of my music to Berklee for me. He dropped it off to Matt Glaser, who was then the chair of the String Department. Things moved quickly and within a year, I had enrolled at the college.
Boston provided an incredible environment in which to learn. At the beginning of my second semester, I joined the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, led by conductor Benjamin Zander. This allowed me to continue to perform with a great classical orchestra while focusing on my jazz studies at Berklee. For a time, Monday afternoons and evenings involved playing in Joe Lovano’s performance ensembles at Berklee and then hurriedly jetting off to New England Conservatory or Harvard University for three hours of orchestral rehearsals with the philharmonic.
Paris Is Burning
After graduating from Berklee in the summer of 2009, I moved to Paris for a few months—something I’d always wanted to do. For a jazz violinist, Paris is burning (so to speak). It’s long been the mecca for jazz violin. French players such as Jean Luc-Ponty, Didier Lockwood, and Grappelli have been dominant in the heritage of jazz violin. During the 1930s, the city spawned the gypsy jazz movement, popularized by Django Reinhardt and Grappelli and their group the Hot Club of France. During my sojourn in Paris, I found just what I was looking for in playing nightly at wine cellars, bars, cafés, and restaurants. I took part in a multitude of acoustic jams and concerts playing alongside amazing self-taught Gypsy jazz guitarists, violinists, bassists, accordionists, and more. The whole experience was a breath of fresh air for me.
While in Paris, I visited the apartment where Grappelli lived. It’s still in his family, and I was fortunate to be invited to stop by on more than one occasion. There, I looked through his music collection, photos, letters, and the many artifacts and memorabilia collected from his world tours. His first violin is there too. The experience made me more determined than ever to pay tribute to the great violinist on my next CD. In a dream scenario, I enlisted the talents of vibraphonist Gary Burton and guitarist Julian Lage for the tribute on my latest disc, New Street.
Here’s the back story. I had met guitarist Julian Lage while we were both Berklee students, and he introduced me to Burton. For years, I’d enjoyed the 1969 Atlantic Records release Paris Encounter that featured Grappelli and Burton together. I summoned up the courage to discuss my ideas for a Grappelli tribute with Burton. That’s when he told me that decades ago he received a package in the mail from Grappelli containing a tune he’d written titled simply “Gary.” For years, the faded lead sheet hung on the wall of Burton’s Berklee office. After some sleuthing, I found the sole recording of Grappelli playing “Gary” with his quartet in Europe. But Gary had never played it. My recording seemed to be the right forum for Burton to premiere his namesake tune. The session was sentimental for Burton and a great honor for me.
Lage, Burton, and I recorded two additional tracks: “La Chanson des Rues” (“The Song of the Streets”) and “Piccadilly Stomp.” “La Chanson” is a beautiful French melody that Grappelli performed throughout his career, and “Piccadilly Stomp” is an upbeat swing tune Grappelli wrote during his first visit to London before World War II. One popular recording of the tune features Grappelli playing it with pianist George Shearing’s quartet. Burton worked for many years as a member of Shearing’s band, so this music threads a number of elements together. Grappelli was very fond of England—my native land—and lived in the English countryside throughout World War II. Shearing frequently visited him there.
On New Street, the unusual combination of vibes, guitar, and violin accentuated that personal touch I was looking for in the tribute and provided a nice contrast to the tracks with my quartet (bass, drums, piano and violin) heard on the rest of the record. The acoustic trio’s instrumentation creates an intimate timbre, and allows each of us to really blend our musical voices. Later it occurred to me that Burton’s and Lage’s musical interactions started about the time I was playing along with Grappelli’s CDs. The session closed the circle a bit, giving me another connection to the music of Grappelli.
As Grappelli put it, “Improvisation, it is a mystery,” a mystery that fuels a wonderful journey of creative discovery. When I reflect on my journey to date, I find that I still reference the classical violin repertoire that is the wellspring for my sound and expression. My album New Street is my celebration of the voice and spirit of the violin as I hear it in jazz—a further exploration of the legacy that Stéphane Grappelli left to us.
Ben Powell is a jazz violinist living in Boston. His latest CD New Street was released in May. Visit www.ben-powell.com.