As I write this, I’m lying in bed with a banging headache, running a temperature. Listening to this album through headphones made the headache worse—no reflection of the music whatsoever (well, perhaps a little—more on that later), merely of the pathetic and overly sensitive state I find myself in. So I dragged myself from my sick bed and fetched my Bluetooth speaker, which packs a small but respectable bass cone into its little rubberized frame. This I perched on my chest as I lay, cursing the world—and soon I began to feel substantially better.
It’s no substitute for piping a record right into your eardrums, but as the little unit pulsed rhythmically in time with the bass, I imagined myself twirling around a dancefloor before a live band—and all was right with the world. Swing Manouche is the newest release by Gramophone Stomp, a young outfit from Montpellier in France. Manouche is what the French call the Roma people, of whom Django Reinhardt was one—you can probably guess where this is going.
This seven-piece swing combo is suitably string-heavy, with up to three guitars and an upright bass appearing on most tracks. Said tracks are mostly a combination of toe-tapping floor fillers and gently picked jazz ballads made famous by Jean “Django” Reinhardt (Django meaning “I wake up”—the more you know…). But they also feature tunes more commonly associated wit
