Play the Violin as Stephane Grappelli

The footage of Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt playing in the 1930s is a very rare piece of video indeed, one of the few Hot Club De France movie recordings (Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli’s original swing jazz band) . The song is J’Attendrai (I Will Wait), a popular tune of the day and is played in the ‘Hot’ Jazz style. This is the only example where the audio and video match, so what you’re seeing is what they’re actually playing.

So what do I love about this clip?

Stephane’s performance is confident, rich, sweet, and a bit cheeky! Even when you’re sitting on a bed smoking, you can play with amazing intonation and tone. The interesting thing is to see how his technique has developed over the years, if you see later images of his performance, he seems more relaxed with a loose, almost ‘folkie’ feel. In this clip, recorded sometime in the 1930s, you can see that he is still employing a more “classical” or at least a little more traditional technique (probably from a few years earlier when he was learning to play the violin).

So what makes Grappelli and this clip so great?

His intonation (tuning) is impressive, I don’t think he has heard everyone who heard him play out of tune (no seriously, he’s that good), he has developed the most amazing ear for intonation, all down to his musical development (which we will get to later). Observe your left hand closely, your elbow is under the violin, the wrist and right hand are stretched out with your right hand slightly bent forward and the fingers of the right hand on the finger board going down over the strings at the tips of the fingers. The right hand and thumb are relaxed at all times. Without this, it is nothing.

The bow arm is equally impressive, at 3.17 you can see the elbow and left hand and the level of the wrist, particularly when going to bow healing. Like your left wrist, your right is loose and flexible. Notice how he also uses the entire bow (later he often stays in the top third place), putting the bow on the string before pulling a note. Not to mention the free syncopated swing feel it has, but that’s another lesson!

Another feature of the Grappelli playing that I love is the sweet vibrato it gets, particularly on the high notes, you can see that it comes from the hand and the arm and is short and fast, just eliciting the sweetness of the instrument.

The lick he brings out at 2.07, right at the end of the lead tune is fantastic, I’ve been trying to play this in my own Hot Club band for years! It’s a combination of syncopation, slides, starts, flair, and incredible Jazz intuition that has me stumped.

How did it turn into this?

The formula for becoming this good should come as no surprise, it takes an astonishing amount of practice and effort! However, I think in short it boils down to these 5 Simple Factors Anyone Can Do –

1) Practice, practice, and more practice: Grappelli started playing the streets of Paris, playing the streets for money and then when he was old enough, he moved on to jazz bands, film bands, jazz clubs and campfires with Django, sometimes touching all of them. evening. They say you need to practice for 10,000 hours before you become a genius on an instrument, I think you must have easily accomplished that in your youth.

2) Listen / look and copy: in his biography he mentions many times that he saw, received advice / lessons and listened to many other musicians, not only from jazz, but also from classical musicians, and copied what he saw.

3) Have some lessons, really obvious, but it helps! I think he studied at the Paris Conservatoire for a while.

4) Learn some piano – this would definitely help you with your intonation and understanding of chords / keys with your Jazz improvisation.

5) Listening to music: He would have been surrounded by Jazz music and classical music at the time, this meant that he knew the music he was playing before trying to play it himself. This is crucial to develop intonation and also to focus on the 20% that need improvement (80/20 principle) when practicing anything.

So hopefully this gives you a little taste of Grappelli, I’ll write a bit more about him on my website as he’s a huge inspiration. Remember to download some fun violin sheet music with mp3 backing tracks here: http://www.funkyviolins.com/violin-sheet-music/

Mate