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Is This Henri Salvador?
Teddy Dupont
Deity
This is a frequently seen photo but is the man in the middle Henri Salvador?
A picture from about the same time for comparison:-
A picture from about the same time for comparison:-
Comments
No it is not Henri Salvador
Silvio Siobud also played clarinet with Matelo Ferret quintet in 1943
Matelo's solo here is ... astonishing
And here is La Cigale... quite different. On Teddy's photo there is the exact name of the place indicated "Chez BRA..."
Here there are no trees and no place for them. La Cigale still exists today. In the 70's Al Lirvat that belonged to the same orchestra was still playing trombone every night there.
maybe a better resolution photo should help us
Something I always felt is that in the past, people had a better sense of melody, more musical. No doubt from the exposure of all the great music from those eras, however, run-of-the-mill musicians like Matelo & co. lacked the technical proficiency that is much more common today (as an example the beginning of Swing 42 is totally off a whole beat!), although there is often less melody in what musicians play these days. Guitarists with very good technique but only playing the Minor Blues/Pentatonic scale is a good example. They might be fast and very accurate and on-tempo, but that doesn't give them flexibility in their rhythm, melodic tapestery or overall musicality like the masters. Django of course had all this as he was very gifted. Musicians like Slash from KISS only appeal to younger audiences because they're too young to have ever heard anything decent in mainstream media. Or they're just not musical enough and have no deeper understanding and appreciation.
Those who are older, or those who ignore the mainstream and expose themselves to Django and other masters will ultimately become better musicians, but they might never reach a mainstream audience because of how things are in the world and in life. A big shame.
It's fascinating how music is evolving. In just one or two hundred years our civilizations have changed so much that it might not even be accurate to say that we exist in the same civilization that existed a hundred or two hundred years ago. That we've strayed away from it too much. Music included. The only thing that's really left are the traditions, some of them originating in civilizations long gone...
Another interesting thing I've been thinking about is that the right hemisphere of our brains might be the "key" and the left hemisphere the "lock". The left half tells us what we can do and what we can't, musical patterns and scales and laws and limits. While the right is completely free and doesn't know where it's really going. A child banging the keys of a piano must be using its right half to play and the left to just make sure he hits the keys and not the body of the piano. As he learns to play, the left half learns what keys sound "good" and which don't, scales and laws, and all that freedom is squeezed into a box which the child, now a little older, will pull the music out of. What doesn't exist in that box is uncharted territory. Stage fright is the fear of not being able to reach into the box, and doing something "out of the box" so to speak, and thus interpret it as doing something "wrong". When people improvise they often improvise scales. But the scale only exists in the left half, it's not entierly free. But why should it be? When you improvise you bring both the right and the left together. The left being what keeps the music to the ground so it doesn't just drift away into nothingness. If you ignore it, it's just mindlessly banging on the keys again with the right half, and again the only purpose the left half has then is making sure you hit the keys and not your head.
Now I don't know anything about brains so don't quote me. :P
The information about it being Le Cigale comes from Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, the German soldier standing next to Django who owned the photo. I have never been able to find a good quality copy of this picture to be sure exactly what the signs say. In another copy I have, it looks more like "CHEZ DRA....." It is of course quite possible that Schulz-Koehn had incorrectly remembered where the photo was taken.
I must confess that Matelo's solo on "Swing 42" doesn't work for me. :shock:
youtube.com/user/TheTeddyDupont
The Ray Ventura band arriving in Buenos Aires on 12th July, 1942. So, amongst others, there is Louis Vola and ......
youtube.com/user/TheTeddyDupont
But Matelot Ferret a "run-of-the-mill musician"? That's nuts. None of the Ferrets played like Django, of course not. Hard as it might seem to believe nowadays, I don't think any of the guitarists in '30s and 40s Paris wanted to play like Django. They had the good sense to recognize that no one could play like Django, so they found their own way.
Technical proficiency is only part of what makes a great musician. There are scores of guitarists who can play with incredible precision and speed - but I would much rather listen to Matelot Ferret, a very poetic, lyrical and imaginative musician.
And Slash did not play with Kiss, he was with Guns and Roses - as if that was of any importance...