Residency Concert with Amoeba Swing
Schedule
Wed Nov 13 2024 at 07:00 pm to 09:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
316 Willow St, Fort Collins, CO, United States, Colorado 80524 | Fort Collins, CO
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Join us every Second Wednesday for live music with our Autumn Resident Musicians, Amoeba Swing. Residency concerts are meant to encourage collaboration, experimentation, and support our local blooming music scene. Music starts at 6pm, suggested donation is $10. Known under a variety of names--including hot club swing, jazz manouche, Parisian swing, among many others--this style of music is one of the most rich and storied genres you'll find, and is mainly associated with virtuoso French-Belgian Romani guitarist Django "Two-Fingered Lightning" Reinhardt, and his iconic 1930s and 40s Parisian supergroup La Quintette du Hot Club de France. Hot club jazz was originally devised as a fusion of the music Django played growing up in a family of working musicians, living among traveler and caravan communities across continental Europe, and the American "hot jazz" sound of legends like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. As a young man in the 1930s, Django first heard these American groups on singles and LPs snuck into France as World War II began to overtake the country, and his mind was utterly blown. He immediately got to work combining this lively swing popular in America at the time, with the traditional chord changes, standards and melodies he knew as a journeyman musician from his itinerant youth. By the early 1940s his quintette--featuring genre-defining French-Italian violin maestro Stéphane Grappelli--had taken the European music scene by storm, and despite being an ethnic Romani (one of many traveler communities targeted by the German fascist regime for extermination) Django survived quite literally due to fame and talent borne of his efforts in forging and popularizing this new style of swing music. He kept pushing boundaries and finding new sounds into the late 40s and early 50s, even touring America with his idol Duke Ellington, before tragically dying of a sudden brain hemorrhage while walking home from a gig in suburban Paris in 1953 at the age of 43.
What a tale! And that's not even the half of it--we didn't even mention how he did this all this just 3 fingers on his left hand after it was burned in a fire; his multiple foiled escape attempts from Vichy France, at night in the snow through the forest; the entire orchestral mass he wrote for the murdered Sinti and Romani of Europe; the completely new style of acoustic guitar he helped invent to express the sound he heard in his head...the list goes on, with vital mention to all those he collaborated with to make his dream a reality.
Our goal in Amoeba Swing is simple: to bring our own take on this iconic style to the dynamic Northern Colorado music scene! We hope you have as much fun listening as we do playing, and we firmly believe that this sound fits in among far more scenes, styles, and showbills than it might seem at first glance.
For modern examples of players we're inspired by, look up Joscho Stephan, Jimmy Rosenberg, Stochelo Rosenberg, Diknu Schneeberger, Angelo Debarre, among many more virtuosos around the world keeping this beloved genre alive. Cheers, thanks for listening, and as always, Django lives!!
Guitar: Jon Lindeman
Guitar: Jeremy Pounds
Upright Bass: Eric Wolheim
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Where is it happening?
316 Willow St, Fort Collins, CO, United States, Colorado 80524Event Location & Nearby Stays:
