"Django Chanté" - CD Critique - Besprechungen - Reviews - Recensies - Críticas

This new album features more of a good thing

VINTAGE GUITAR, USA

This is a historic album that all Django Reinhardt fans will want to hear. After years of searching and several fortuitous instances of amazing luck, the Dutch band Orkest Polytour tracked down arrangements and lyrics(!) written in the 1940s for five of Django's famous songs. These versions of "Mélodie au Crépuscule," "Nuages," "Swing 42," "Manoir de mes Rêves," and "Tears" had not been previously released, were largely unknown, and believed lost.

As VG noted several years ago in reviewing the band's first CD, "Polytour play olden-times musette, jazz Manouche, and French chansons that take you on a waltz into years past. Led by accordionist Jean-Pierre Guiran and guitarist Jan de Jong, the quartet unreels a lively, joyous sound on their first compact disc. Its the perfect music for an evening beer at a café."

This new album features more of a good thing. Alongside enchanting versions of "Blue Skies," a musette waltz by Joseph Colombo, and a Charles Trenet chanson, are the five newly discovered lyrics to Django's classics as well as previously released arrangements and lyrics for Django's "Douce Ambiance" and "Swing 39."

You can order a copy from Guiran via email (J.P.Guiran@acmel.nl). Michael Dregni, VINTAGE GUITAR, USA May 2000,

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