French guitar virtuoso Stephane Wrembel a vital link between Django Reinhardt, Pink Floyd and Woody Allen

The versatile musician great grew up idolizing rock guitar stars Steve Vai, Frank Zappa and David Gilmour before embracing Reinhardt’s swinging ‘hot jazz’ style

Jan. 14, 2022 6 AM PT

If there is a missing link between Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Woody Allen, Oscar-winning film composer Hans Zimmer and Gypsy jazz guitar pioneer Django Reinhardt, it is undoubtedly French six-string virtuoso Stéphane Wrembel.

“We all create in a different way, but we follow a common thread,” said Wrembel, who performs with his band Tuesday at the all-ages Dizzy’s in Bay Park.

Now a New Jersey resident, Wrembel played a key role in the house band for the 2012 Academy Awards telecast as a member of the all-star band led by Zimmer. One of the pieces they performed that night was “Bistro Fada,” which Wrembel wrote as the Reinhardt-styled theme song for Allen’s Oscar-nominated “Midnight in Paris.”

The French guitarist also contributed music to Allen’s “Vicki Christina Barcelona” and composed all the music for Allen’s 2020 movie, “Rifkin’s Festival.” Their relationship is cordial, but focused on work.

“Woody’s not a gabber, and I’m not a gabber,” Wrembel said. “We say ‘Hello,’ and then he says: ‘OK, here’s what I need for the movie,’ and we look at the movie. It’s very organic.”

Wrembel is a 2002 summa cum laude graduate of Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music. He has released nine albums under his own name and six as the leader of The Django Experiment, whose repertoire mixes original compositions and Reinhardt classics with such gems as Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose.”

Yet, while he grew up in the same Fontainebleau region of France where Reinhardt had lived, Wrembel spent his teens in rock bands. He diligently emulated the playing of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler and former San Diegan Frank Zappa. And he learned to play the finger-numbingly acrobatic music on Joe Satriani’s 1987 album, “Surfing with the Alien,” note for note.

“The sound of Django was all around me when I was growing up, but I never paid attention,” Wrembel recalled.

“But when I graduated from high school and devoted myself to being a guitarist, I knew I had to study jazz. And the only jazz I knew was Django. So I went and learned his music from the Gypsies.”

‘Django manifested guitar’

A Belgian-born Gypsy who was largely based in France, Reinhardt created an enduring legacy for the guitar with his remarkably fluid and impassioned playing. His dazzling musicianship was unimpeded by the fact that — when Reinhardt was 18 — a fire so badly burned the fourth and fifth fingers on his left hand he could never use them to play guitar again.

Together with French violinist Stephane Grappelli and their band, the famed Quintette du Hot Club de France, Reinhardt popularized a style of jazz that could be ferociously hard-swinging one moment and deeply rhapsodic the next. That sound and approach continues to be built on around the world, including by such bands as the San Diego-bred Hot Club of Cowtown.

“Every instrument has a guy who summarized the nature of the music on their instrument. For piano, it’s Bach. For guitarists, it’s Django,” Wrembel said, speaking by phone from his home in Maplewood, N.J.

“Django manifested guitar and how harmony works on it. So the mechanics of it are all Django. You can take David Gilmour, Jimi Hendrix or Pat Metheny, and they all trace back to Django. His right hand technique feels like it comes from the dawn of humanity.

“We can all learn from Django. But we are all different. So what I teach my students is to look within themselves.”

Wrembel’s Tuesday concert is his first here since his 2012 San Diego debut at Dizzy’s, which was then located in Old Town. The concert comes five days before the 114th birthday of Reinhardt, who was 43 when he died in 1953.

Wrembel and his three-man band are set to open their seven-city California tour here in the midst of the again-surging COVID-19 pandemic.

Is he concerned?

“I have zero concerns,” Wrembel replied. “Why not? Because I don’t. That’s not the way I live my life.”