Stephane Wrembel | TJF
($35-$45 tickets | 6:30pm & 8:30pm shows) Tucson Jazz Festival presents Stephane Wrembel and his band!
**STEPHANE WREMBEL**
Stephane Wrembel is quite simply one of the finest guitar players in the world. The breadth and range of his playing and compositions are unmatched. This prolific musician, composer, educator, and musical director has released a steady stream of music since 2002 truly making his mark as one of the most original guitar voices in contemporary music.
His live performance is unparallel. He has headlined Jazz at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Town Hall in NYC and The Lyon Opera House in France. He has toured and/or shared stages with master violinist Mark O’Connor, Sam Bush, Stochelo Rosenberg, Esperanza Spalding, and Al Di Meola. He has dazzled audiences at Montreal Jazz Festival, Rochester International Jazz Festival, Django Reinhardt Festival in France, Ellnora Guitar Festival, Caramoor Jazz Festival and many others. He has toured Canada, France, Israel, UK, India and Nigeria.
Born in Paris and raised in Fontainebleau, the home of Impressionism and Django Reinhardt, Wrembel first studied classical piano, beginning at the age of four. But in his mid-teens, he discovered that he had an affinity for guitar. As a big fan of Pink Floyd, he “spent hours learning David Gilmour’s style,” he said. “So I had a classical background, a passion for rock music, and then I found out about Django. I fell in love with the very strong impressionist feel in his music.”
Reinhardt, long regarded as one of the most influential musicians and composers of all time, was a Sinti (a Roma group from Western Europe). Wrembel immersed himself in Sinti culture, spending “six, seven years going to the camps. I started learning the atmosphere of what it really means to play Sinti-style guitar. I learned from the masters such as Angelo Debarre and Serge Krief. That’s how you learn this music because it is specific to a culture. Music is not only the notes. Without the culture, something is missing.”