Caffè Lena, Saratoga Springs, NY, Dec. 5, 2024
My grasp of French is tenuous, and that puts it generously. I’m good at classic French dishes and ingredients and the titles of Debussy songs, alongside enough tourist-type phrases to get me in trouble should I ever land in downtown Paris. The thing is, though, that I wish more than anything to visit downtown Paris, not to mention other choice areas of France, and to that end I’ve been trying to teach myself the language. I’ve been using print and online resources, which is how it came to pass, a year or so ago, that the moon and the stars and the YouTube algorithms lined up to suggest videos of Tatiana Eva-Marie and the Avalon Jazz Band.
And you know, if you’ve found her too, this becomes an addictive pursuit. Her singing is so endearing, so effortless, that I forget that I don’t know the words. And her musicians are extraordinary. They’re following the tradition of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli and their legacy at the Hot Club of Paris, performing a mixture of gypsy music and swing. She was born in Switzerland to a violinist mother and composer father, and she grew up there and in France before settling—where else?—in Brooklyn.
Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, NY, is presenting a series of events, the Bright Series, aimed at bringing reputable performers to the café who’ve never appeared there before. It turned out to be a wonderful venue for Tatiana Eva-Marie and the Avalon Jazz Band, who presented two sets there on December 5. “Je t’aime,” the opening number, is Reinhardt and Grappelli’s “Swing 39″ with lyrics by Jacques Larue, originally championed by Irène de Trébert and perfectly suited to Eva-Marie’s seductive style.
It also set the musical pattern for the evening, wherein violin and guitar would have solo moments before more ensemble work and a final vocal chorus. She had three players backing her—violinist Gabe Terracciano, guitarist Max O’Rourke, Wallace Stelzer on bass—although “backing” is an unfair term. It was a partnership, the kind of give and take that suggests some manner of telepathy is at work. It looks and sounds like other-wordly magic, but (not to be too much of a spoiler here) it’s really only incredible talent, active listening, and a shared love of jazz traditions.
But there weren’t any copycat clones on stage. Each of the players displayed an individual voice shaped not only by the aforementioned tradition but also what’s come since. When Terracciano launched into a solo, for example, he offered a credible reminder of the Grappelli tradition, but he also visited places of his own, often with some virtuoso bariolage and double-stop passages along the way.
Eva-Marie introduced the band after the opener, also noting that her new album, Djangology, exemplified much of what this evening would be about. Her love for Reinhardt’s music is so profound, she confessed, that “I believe he wrote all his music for me.”
And she has staked a strong ownership claim by writing lyrics to several of his songs. A brief guitar solo led into the next number, “Nuages,” one of Reinhardt’s most-famous and most-recorded, and now, with those new lyrics, available to vocalists as well (provided you can sing in French). That one is on the new album, as is “Je t’aime,” and it’s where you’ll find “Troublant bolero,” where the lyrics are half-Romanian and half-Romani thanks to a collaboration between Tatiana and her mother, a violinist and poet who grew up in Romania and also speaks a Gypsy dialect. And her mother came up with a story for the song, about “a dashing Gypsy girl (who) comes into town and there’s a boy, and she seduces him, and then leaves him hanging. And then he cries for the rest of his life while she laughs, dancing.”
The song began with pizzicato from all three instruments, growing more rhythmic (and violin-bowed) when the refrain kicked in. I know less Romanian than French, but nevertheless felt some sympathy for the poor jilted boy, especially as the singer seemed to be taking particular glee in whatever it was she was singing about him.
Guitarist O’Rourke took an especially nice solo near the finish of “Swing!,” another of Eva-Marie’s lyrics-added Django songs. It’s otherwise an up-tempo number, and Terracciano took some delight in a solo moment where he quietly sang along with himself à la Slam Stewart.
Bassist Stelzer had a featured moment in “Sweet Chorus,” another Django tune, this one gaining English lyrics to tell the story of one of those wee-hours moments when you’re nursing just one more drink while trying to recall lyrics to your favorite Great American Songbook songs—and, indeed, it was laced with such fragments—“let’s face the music and dance,” “we’ll build a stairway to the stars,” and the oddly appropriate joining of “picture me upon your knee / in the wee small hours.”
Eva-Marie also sang some standards from the Great French Songbook: “La vie en rose,” which I enjoy far more in her voice than Piaf’s (which admission probably will get me kicked out of Paris once I do get there), “C’est si bon,” and “Que reste-t-il de nos amours,” a Charles Trenet song known on this side of the Atlantic as “I Wish You Love,” this one offering an exciting violin-guitar dialogue during the instrumental portion and another meditative guitar solo at the end.
Django’s “Vette” gets a country-style treatment in addition to Eva-Marie’s lyrics, allowing Terracciano to channel his inner Bob Wills, while another change of pace was offered with “Joseph! Joseph!,” Sammy Cahn’s reworking of “Yosl Yosl,” a classic Yiddish theater song. After a slow verse, the refrain took off and took us to a blistering guitar solo before it went into a hora that demanded audience handclaps.
And in no time at all, Eva-Marie was thanking the audience and sharing my hope that she’d soon return to this venue. She finished with Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” best-known as an Ellington showpiece but turned into a showpiece of her own as she imbued it with a Gypsy flavor, singing a half-speed refrain over a contrastingly fast bed before we were treated to more amazing solos from violin and guitar. And Tatiana was inspired to sound some Yma Sumac-style vocalise (without the stratospheric high notes, but so what) before bringing it all to a lingering, high-energy finish. They’re doing terrific justice to the Django tradition by not only carrying it forward but also taking it to new places, for which I’m grateful.
