Santa to meet Django on Arden stage

Shake up your Christmas traditions with the Hot Club of San Francisco’s Cool Yule, a swinging gypsy jazz sleigh ride to the North Pole.

Borrowing from the style of the famed gypsy jazz interpreter Django Reinhardt, Hot Club makes its first appearance at the Arden Theatre on Saturday, Dec. 17 with a spirited nostalgic mix of holiday gems and fierce originals.

Cool Yule is no ordinary concert. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer shakes out as an erotic tango in Don Rodolfo. Composer Vince Guaraldi’s famed Skating from A Charlie Brown Christmas is resuscitated with a fresh spin as Carol of the Bells, and The Nutcracker flips into red-hot heat as Sugar Rum Cherry.

“We scramble them up good,” laughs Hot Club founder Paul ‘Pazzo’ Mehling. As the first to introduce the North American continent with the swinging genre, he has been crowned the Godfather of American Gypsy Jazz.

Raised in Santa Cruz, the young Mehling grew up surrounded by music that ranged from Louis Armstrong to the Beatles to Reinhardt. It was a given he’d play lead guitar in various area jazz bands.

But in 1981 he went biking across Europe with his girlfriend and saw a live performance by Waso, a gypsy jazz band from Belgium. Galvanized by their improvisations, he made a promise to return and learn the Reinhardt technique and import it to the United States.

Django Reinhardt was the first hugely influential jazz musician from Europe. A key figure in the pre-bop era, the free-spirited gypsy came up with a unique style that propelled the humble acoustic guitar into the frontlines of jazz combos.

Reinhardt’s own band, Quintette du Hot Club de France, developed a reputation for joyous, arcing guitar solos and thrumming basses elegantly balanced with an emotive violin.

Ensnared by the magic, Mehlin packed a guitar and violin and flew to Paris. By day he played in the Metro for change. By night he trolled Paris searching for gypsy followers of the great Reinhart.

“But they were difficult to find. They didn’t show up when you wanted, where you wanted.”

After several months of searching for Reinhardt acolytes, he finally bumped into Serge Krief, a Django style guitarist and spent the next six months observing his technique.

Mehling returned to the States and in 1985 got a job as lead guitarist for The Acoustic Warriors. But he was restless and in 1990 made a huge musical leap. Mehling moved to the cosmopolitan San Francisco and started the Hot Club.

For months he auditioned musicians. But no one knew how to play gypsy jazz. Finally, he decided to train his own musicians.

“It was a bit risky, but I felt I had the whole field to myself. Little by little a whole movement of young guys began to nip and tuck at my heels, and I had to put my ear to the ground and dig deeper.”

By 2003, the 50th anniversary of Reinhart’s death, there was a huge resurgence of interest.

“He was such a huge hero. He proved that gypsies were not dogs. Django was 100 per cent gypsy. It was so ironical that he had to prove himself in France, a country where Black Americans were going to escape racism.”

Also part of the Hot Club is Clint Baker (bass), Isabelle Fontaine (guitar), Evan Price (violin) and Jeff Magidson (guitar).

For more info visit www.hcsf.com.