Portrait Of Stephane Grappelli, A - Stephane Grappelli

Advantages: Great Trad Jazz
Disadvantages: None

...Jean Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt was one of the first important jazz musicians to be born in Europe. He spent most of his youth in the gypsy encampments close to Paris, France, playing banjo, guitar and violin. At an early age he started playing professionally at dance halls in Paris. When he was 18, he was injured in a fire in his caravan loosing the use of his 3rd and 4th fingers on his left hand. After this he focused on the guitar and developed an original style of playing that emphasized his undamaged fingers. The man is nothing short of the original guitar god influencing everyone from the Beatles, Tony Immoni, B. B. King, Willie Nelson, and myself. I lost the use of my left forefinger due to an accident. I decided that if Django could do it with 2 fingers then I could do it with 3 fingers!!!!!! Stéphane Grappelli is quite... Read review

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Advantages: Some of the best Jazz violin playing ever heard
Disadvantages: Very few

...Stephane Grappelli does jazz like no other. Although he started off as a pianist, studying at the Paris conservatoire, Grappelli soon became one of the pioneers of jazz violin, indeed violin improvisation. Crazy rhythm is a compilation of some of Grappelli's most well known versions of jazz classics, recorded in the early 70s. What shocked me on the first listen is the real character he gets out of the violin, from youthful exhuberance in tracks like Crazy Rhythm and Sweet Georgia Brown to more conversational, lyrical tones in Ain't Misbehaving. Grappellis bow and strings certainly convey more emotion than many of the world's better singers. Crazy Rhythm really shows off Grappelli's technical expertise, which is not lacking in the slightest. This is aided by the fact he is unconstrained by a score, as all classical musicians are... Read review

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Advantages: Strong storyline, unusual setting.
Disadvantages: none.

...and feel something of the wonder I felt myself, "the Last Girl" is one such book. This is the author's first book funded by a grant from the East Midlands Arts Council to a man from a working class background who failed to gain an education from his comprehensive school. After a series of dead-end jobs Stephan Collishaw eventually went to Goldsmith's college in 1989 where his love of reading paid dividends. Still, he was a wanderer in search of something he couldn't even understand at that point in time. Born and bred in Nottingham his travels finally took him to Vilnius the capitol of Lithuania in 1995 where he spend a year often snowed in and learnt to live like a native of the country. Here he met his wife and from his experiences in the troubled streets of the capitol he eventually wrote "The Last Girl" released in 2003 to critical... Read review

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