In recent years, there’s been a significant and welcome upsurge of interest in the music of the legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt. The architect of gypsy jazz and leader of the seminal quintet the Hot Club of France is being discovered and embraced by a new, young wave of acoustic music lovers. This phenomenon has not been lost on the programmers of the Catskill Jazz Factory series, which on February 11 will present Alphonso Horne and Candice Hoyes in “French Connection: Django Reinhardt and the French Salon,” an evening at Bard College that will see “the rhythms of early jazz and the musical influences of French Impressionism collide.”
The appropriately named Horne is a youthful master of the trumpet who’s performed with Wynton Marsalis, Jane Monheit, Wes Anderson, and others and just last week took part in a talent-heavy Django Reinhardt event in New York. Singer Hoyes, who, like Horne, hails from New York and has as well worked with Marsalis, glides easily between jazz and opera and has been featured on NPR.
Here, the pair perform French Impressionist composer Francis Poulenc’s “Fleurs”:
“French Connection: Django Reinhardt and the French Salon” will take place at Bard College’s Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on February 11 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $25. For more information, call (845) 758-7900 or visit http://fishercenter.bard.edu/.
This article appears in January 2017.
