Any workshops/festivals coming to New England in 2011?

HotTinRoof

I've heard a DFNE was done in the past. Is this a yearly thing? Is Denis going to be doing a workshop in the area? Anything else?

seeirwin

I believe the big one is Django in June: http://www.djangoinjune.com/

It's June 14th-19th this year. Lots of concerts, instruction, and jamming. It's in Northampton, MA.

HotTinRoof

Excellent link! Thank you. I have a lot of learning to do!

klaatu

Django in June is not to be missed! It is an incredible experience, and a bargain, given what you get for the price. Instruction all day from masters, with groups at various skill levels, jamming all night (literally), food and lodging on a beautiful college campus. Denis is something of a regular, although we don't know who's coming this year just yet..

I'm looking forward to my fourth visit - missed 2008 due to an unavoidable conflict, and I'm still miffed about that.

HotTinRoof

This sounds fabulous. Cannot wait.

Is there a large difference - other than time with the instructors - between the full course and the weekend course? June is most likely deadline crunch time for my work and I'll only be able to attend the weekend, possibly the Friday as well. What did the weekend course(s) consist of last year?

panick

Django in June is surely worth it for the weekend if you can't do the whole week. Below is a review I wrote a few years back for Just Jazz Guitar. It has only improved every year since. - Peter
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In the seven years since the first Django Reinhardt New York Festival, the music we now know as “Gypsy Jazz” has spread from its nurturing grounds in Gypsy caravans and Parisian bistros to Django festivals all over the U.S. – from Seattle and San Francisco to Chicago, Austin and Brooklyn. Many of these, following the lead of the seminal Whidbey Island Djangofest Northwest, include workshops along with the concerts, giving guitarists a rare chance to pick up some of the playing techniques that make this subgenre of jazz so unique. But for the most part, the primary focus of all these festivals is the concerts themselves. The one exception is an event called Django in June which, from its start four years ago, has had the goal of building a community of players, not just listeners. For a few days each year, the picturesque Smith College campus of Northampton, Massachusetts is transformed into a school of hot acoustic jazz, with professors like Robin Nolan, John Jorgenson, and Stephane Wrembel.

Last year, producer Andrew Lawrence decided to try extending the weekend format into a week-long Django “camp”. He put together a staff that included some of the best players/teachers in the genre - Stephane Wrembel, Kruno Spisic, Biel Ballester, Michael Horowitz, Denis Chang and Ted Gottsegen. And not just guitarists. For violinists, there was the Dutch Grappelli expert, Tim Kliphuis; for bass the Wrembel Trio’s nimble Jared Engel; for mandolin, Berklee string wizard John McGann; and for accordion Vladimir Mollov. It was a virtual field of dreams for the Django fan, but one still had to wonder - if he built it, would they come?

I myself was tied up at work most of the week, so I couldn’t join the camp until Friday afternoon. Luckily, Andrew had designed the schedule to allow people to drop in for the weekend. From the moment I set foot in the dorm, I could feel the excitement in the air as folks carrying guitars and violins gathered for a short break on the lawn before heading off to the last classes of the day. Each day’s offerings, I quickly learned, were posted on the wall, divided up by level and instrument. Between the diversity of instructors and three levels of instruction, there seemed to be something for everyone, from the basics of Gypsy style rhythm (an art in itself) to the theory behind Django’s improvisations. Taking a quick tour of the ongoing sessions, I was impressed with both the quality of the teaching and the rapt attention of the students. And it didn’t take long after the classes broke up for campers to assemble into small groups for jam sessions to practice what they had just learned.

That evening, everyone ambled over to a nearby church for a public concert where Stephane Wrembel was teamed up with Biel Ballester, the Barcelona based guitarist who was visiting America for the first time. The two had never performed together before, which made it all the more enjoyable as a true jazz rendez-vous. Biel’s Latin-tinged choruses provided a good contrast with Stephane’s wildly adventurous forays. Then the Wrembel Trio, with bassist Jared Engel and percussionist David Langlois took the stage for a heady interpretation of Django’s music infused with world music and a touch of Hendrix.

After the concert, it was back to the dorm, where a half dozen jam sessions spilled out onto the lawn and kept everyone up (voluntarily) till the wee hours. If the aim of Django in June was to build a community of musicians, it had certainly succeeded. As Andrew observed, “Compared to Samois (the famous French Django Festival), here you walk in the door and you are introduced to people that you would have to spend days trying to track down. There, you’d have to be on the lookout for where the cool jams are happening or where the good players are hanging out. There’s none of that at Django in June. You don’t have to be invited to the right party.” With on-campus lodging and a communal meal plan, pretty much everybody, including the performers, stayed on site 24x7. As a result, attendees and performers got to hang out together for a week, jamming, dining, and making friendships that are likely to last.

All of this fits with Andrew’s educational philosophy: “My personal interest as a teacher is in facilitating community interaction. I’ve gone through several iterations now of a group instruction model and I currently call it ‘community guitar’. When you learn violin, you automatically learn the kinds of things that you would be doing with other people, whether you’re working on string quartet repertoire or learning fiddle music. But when you learn guitar, it is often assumed that you will be playing it by yourself. So many guitar players have really weak skills when it comes down to sitting with other people and playing. I realized some years ago when I got turned on to Gypsy jazz that it’s great community music making, It’s particularly good for multiple guitars. That’s really rare. I don’t know of any other jazz form where it’s perfectly acceptable to have five or six guitarists sitting around doing it. So it totally bypasses the ‘too many guitars’ thing.”

Saturday’s class schedule was literally jam-packed. No one seemed to let the late night festivities interfere with their attentiveness the following morning. The presence of fiddles, mandolins, accordions and basses at the camp made for a richer jamming experience, and one of Andrew’s goals is to encourage even more participation from these instruments. “I would love for the fiddle component to grow. I want Django in June to be the place to get that perspective that it’s hard to get elsewhere. The instructional program was much more organized around levels than it was instruments. We had guitarists working with Tim Kliphuis, for example, and violinists working with Stephane Wrembel. The extended time allowed us to focus on things that we never had time to focus on before.”

After another intense day of classes, everyone looked forward to relaxing at the evening concert featuring instructor Kruno Spisic’s ensemble with accordionist Vladimir Mollov. Their set delivered not only the sizzling runs Kruno is known for (and which he had been teaching all week) but also a powerful rendition of the melancholic Gypsy anthem “Djelem, Djelem”. Wawau Adler and Tim Kliphuis closed the show in the Reinhardt/Grappelli tradition, having worked out many of their arrangements just hours before. This was their first performance together and the musical chemistry was obvious as they traded solos throughout their impromptu set.

Talking with camp attendees Sunday morning, it was apparent that the full week of Gypsy jazz immersion was well worth it. There was ample time to practice what they learned with other campers, get the perspectives of multiple players on multiple instruments, and connect with people on a personal as well as musical level. The weekend-only option also worked out well, allowing locals unable to take the full week off a chance to take in some great concerts and get a piece of the workshop action. Their fresh fingers may have also helped rejuvenate the jam sessions and bring the week to its rousing crescendo - the huge Saturday night jam with Sinti guitarist Wawau Adler, still glowing from his evening performance with Tim Kliphuis, was one of the best I remember at any Django festival.

Attendance at the camp ranged between 70 and 100 people, yielding an average student-teacher ratio of 8 to1. People came from as far as Holland and Israel, from four provinces of Canada, and from Florida to California. “One of the things I was wondering,” Andrew remarked after it was all over, “was - are people going to come to the camp to jam and hang out or are they going to actually attend three classes a day for four days straight? I was interested to see that basically everybody attended all the sessions every day. During the instructional sessions, the halls and lawns were just empty. Everybody was studying. That says something about the quality of what the teachers were offering. It also says something about the people’s desire to learn. They really do want to develop their musicianship. A camp like this which allows people to dig in and also to develop relationships, I think it really could do something for the level of playing in this country.”

Given the success of the inaugural camp experiment, Django in June will return to Northampton this coming June 10-15 with what is shaping up to be another strong staff of performers and teachers. In addition to the well known Robin Nolan Trio, Andrew is bringing over Ensemble Zaiti and Jean-Philippe Watremez from France, and Gonzalo Bergara from Argentina (via Los Angeles). Berklee string department head Matt Glaser will lead the violin sessions, John McGann and Vladimir Mollov return to their mandolin and accordion posts, and Simon Planting will head up the bass clinics. More staff may be added depending on registration. For more information, visit the web site at djangoinjune.com.

HotTinRoof

Thank you for posting this write-up. Well done sir. I look forward to registration opening up. 8)

klaatu

Well said! The one thing I would add is that it has only gotten better each year.

andoatagn

Hi Folks:
I saw this thread and thought, well, I guess it's time to get in touch with folks about Django in June 2011. I'll get out a mailing soon, but meantime I just posted a little info under a separate thread here on the forum. Thanks for the interest (from newcomers) and for all the kind words (from those who've joined us before).

This year looks to have the all the makings of a doozey...I look forward to sharing it with you!
~Andrew

Andrew Lawrence
Django in June
Northampton, MA