Weird technique on swing guitars

wim

What is that trick he plays in the second A section? How the heck do you do that any ideas?
Also the similar sounding technique in the B section.

Al Watsky

Sounds a lot like a picking technique used by tenor banjo players. Eddie Peabody doing his "two banjo" trick for instance. There are clips on the good ol' youtube that are awesome and slightly disturbing. Considering the 10,000 hours it must have taken to develop the chops to do that .
:shock:

Bob Holo

It does sound like banjo technique, doesn't it? I grew up around Trad Jazz, and the banjo players do a lot of sextuplet strumming riffs when they do rhythm solos. It sounds like he's strumming in that banjo-esque fashion while doing some GJ style chord movement. Here's a vid of Neil Levang doing the banjo strumming pattern and you can see a closeup of the hands in a few places. There's a fairly good shot from about 1:10 to 1:30... It looks like it's either a figure-8 shaped wrist whip or the arm is pumping back and forth while the wrist is whipping up & down. I'm not sure how it's done, but I saw thousands of hours of live Trad Jazz as a kid and I remember banjo players doing this exact thing. it's a very distinctive looking strumming pattern. Neil had stellar technique on stringed instruments, so this is likely a good example to check out.

Al Watsky

Neil has his thing together , the Peabody lick adds a tremolo on top of it all.
Pretty devastating .

scot

He's sliding double stops between adjacent pairs of strings very rapidly, while playing a very fast and accurate tremelo - a trademark of Matelot's jazz playing. If you can find the video of the 1986 concert in Clermont Ferrand (Matelot, Francis Moerman and Alain Dubreuil) it has many examples of him doing this very thing. In fact that concert and another one recorded in Nantes earlier on the same tour have Matelot playing many tunes associated with Django but in a totally original manner. There is a truly incredible solo version of "Tea For Two" there... Unfortunately the quality of these documents is very bad but it's what we have.

Lt. Commander Eddie Peabody USNR was one of the most amazing musicians ever. A lot of vaudeville guys like Roy Smeck were "trick" players but not Peabody - he was the real thing. Absolutely perfect technique and an imagination to match. There is an old Vitaphone where he plays "Blue Skies" in the style of different composers on a plectrum banjo - every time I see it I just shake my head. If it had strings he could make it speak.

spatzo

That's what Django called "Matelo's bunch of keys"!

dennis

Those are triplets that start in the third triplet with an upstroke on ghost or open notes followed by double stop on the downbeat and then another dounle stop a half step above

Lango-Django

I love what he does here, and thanks for sharing it, wim, but I've gotta say as a plectrum banjo player that as far as I know the great Matelot is not really borrowing from four string banjo technique, it seems to me that he probably made this wonderful stuff up all by himself,

scot

Matelot reportedly played something in this style for Django and he said it sounded like someone shaking a bunch of keys. Matelot was mortified and went back to playing the single string solo style. That's why you don't hear much of this on the 60s recordings recently discussed here. But by the 80s he was back at it and on all the recordings from the 80s that I have he's playing pretty much in this style. A simpler example is his Dark Eyes solo on Manouche Partie. I'll find some more examples and post them in the next few days.

Jazzaferri

A banjo player I know from bluegrass days does that stuff. It takes time to build the speed like any bravura technique but its simple when broken down and played at slower speeds.

The one that has always flummoxed me is Django on Mystery Pacific. The right hand awesome as it is I get but the left considering his limitations.

When I think about where he would have gone technically with four good fingers.......mind boggles. Musically maybe a bit different expression but genius is genius. One finger or four.

scot

A bluegrass banjo player could not do this technique with fingerpicks and a thumb pick. It's a strumming technique and not easy.

Here are a couple of cuts from a concert in 1986. Matelot was in fine form on this day and he plays chorus after chorus never repeating himself. You can hear the exact same technique on Out of Nowhere (one of Matelot's favorites) at about 1:50. On Some of These Days he really pulls out the stops and uses nearly all of his tricks - double stops, dissonances, rhythmic jumps, chord melody, insane tremelos.

The fidelity here is poor, and Matelot was pretty old and occasionally hits a bad note. Francis was not having a good day here either - believe me, he could play a lot better than this. But Matelot's playing is incredibly inventive, he plays with total command and he's taking the kinds of risks that you rarely hear today. 67 years old and still pushing his own limits all the time! Listen to his tone - that soft tone he gets while he's playing the melodies and slower passages comes from playing away from the bridge at the top of the soundhole where the strings are pretty loose; hard to play fast up there...

Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys this and if you like I can put more of these up.