Wasso Ferret

stubla

God! this reminds me why i fell in love with this music in the first place(and not a George Benson lick in sight).Absolutely sublime playing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeJ0LcXWto0

Its amazing to realise there are still hidden figures in this music such as Wasso with SO many musical tales to tell.

Stu

nicksansone

So wonderful, thanks for finding this one!

thickpick

Any idea what the setting is for this video? Where are they? Is it a circus? I'm curious. And I love in the midst of it there's a girl wearing a "High School Musical" t-shirt. Seeing that while hearing Wasso's playing is quite a juxtaposition.

stoche

Hi,

This isn't a circus. It's a religious meeting from "Vie et Lumière" ("Life and Light"), one of the most important evangelical actual trend in gipsy world. They use to gather several times per year inside these huge congregations where people pray, sing and... play good guitar! The song played in this video is actually a cantique from Gagar Hoffman, a very famous gipsy preacher. By the way, there are still religious tensions between catholics and pentecostal prostestants inside the gipsy world.
I guess that unlike the americans, french people are not really used with pentecostalism...

Best swing,
stoche

thickpick

Thank you for that information, Stoche. That's really fascinating. I appreciate it.

michaeldregni

This snippet of video is from a stunning new documentary created by Pascal Signolet and Michel Lefort for French TV, entitled "Sur les pas de Django: Au coeur d'un heritage." There's a lengthy interview with Wasso Ferret discussing the lineage of Django's influence on Gypsy religious music via Piton Reinhardt and violinist Pierre "Gager" Hoffmann---including rare vintage photos of both and footage of Piton playing! Another Gypsy pasteur, Chou Chou Landauer, also plays un cantique that's a beautiful mix of Gypsy jazz and Bossa Dorado into a hymn. The visit to the Vie et Lumiere gathering is the most interesting part of the whole film, in my humble opinion, but there's much more. There's the usual visit to Samois-sur-Seine with interviews with David Reinhardt, Levi Adel-Reinhardt, and Noe Reinhardt as well as a trip to Liberchies. An amazing new document!

HotTinRoof

Inspiring playing right there. Love the emotion of his hands - not to mention the plastic covered couch.

Ando

Wonderful stuff. Thanks for posting this!

Mitch

Thanks for the info Stoche and Michael

I love this video, just pure emotion...

The film is really beautiful, if you have a chance of seeing it with a few skills in french, don't miss it!