Hot Club of San Francisco, the OGs of Gypsy Jazz, Release Their 15th Album, Original Gadjo

 The Hot Club of San Francisco has never shied away from putting their own stamp on the Gypsy jazz sound created by Manouche guitar legend Django Reinhardt and French violin maestro Stephane Grappelli in 1930s Paris. Guitarist Paul “Pazzo” Mehling, a leading force in North America’s Hot Club movement since its inception in the early 1990s, has long made a point of featuring original tunes along with Reinhardt standards and imaginative Djangofied interpretations of songs by the likes of Lennon and McCartney. But the HCSF’s 15th album, Original Gadjo, captures the creative ferment of the whole group, not just its fearless leader. Released in late 2024, it’s a project that finds the venerable combo revivified after a pandemic-induced hiatus, hitting on all creative cylinders. 

“I’ve made two HCSF albums of all originals, but this is the first time we’ve got the whole band contributing tunes,” Mehling says. “From the beginning our mission statement was not to just to preserve this music, but to pursue the intriguing question: What would Django do if he were still alive? And after 35 years of chasing that sound, this album embraces our identities as gadjos, aka outsiders and Americans who were drawn to Django’s sound but were not born to it.”

Virtuosic, playful, and propulsively grooving, the HCSF’s music offers a state-of-the-art take on the Hot Club tradition from an unabashedly San Francisco perspective with “compositions that reflect both our love for Django’s legacy and our embrace of all that makes us American gypsy jazz musicians,” Mehling says. Joining him in the front line since 1998 is violinist Evan “Zeppo” Price, a highly versatile player who earned top honors as a contest fiddler before performing with a hot-fiddle who’s who including Grappelli, Johnny Frigo, and Claude “Fiddler” Williams. He spent 10 years in the creative crucible of the seminal Turtle Island Quartet, earning two Grammy Awards for the albums Four + 4 and A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane, touring internationally and collaborating with jazz luminaries like Cuban clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera, and pianists Dr. Billy Taylor and Kenny Barron. 

The HCSF’s relentlessly propulsive engine, rhythm guitar expert Jordan Samuels joined the band in 2015 and earned acclaim for his potent grasp of le pompe on the group’s 2017 album John, Paul, George & Django. Recent additions to the band include the prodigious rhythm section tandem of guitarist Nelson Hutchison and bassist Dexter Williams. 

When it comes to mood, tempo, and form, Original Gadjo covers a lot of ground (with a hint of self-mockery, as “gadjo” is the Roma word for non-Roma people). The album opens with “Systeme D.” an insinuating, soul-inflected 21st century piece of hard-bop Djangology by Price and Samuels (with Cullen "Cujo” Luper contributing on baritone violin). An increasingly acclaimed composer who has received several prestigious commissions in recent years, Price also contributed the aptly named “Manic Swing,” a breakneck scamper with a tinge of romance, and the dare-devil “Running To You (Blues On The G String),” a Harold Arlen-ish blues. Reimagining the 3rd movement from his “Concerto For Jazz Violin and Orchestra” Price rechristened the piece as “Tune for Toots,” as the HCSF recorded the winsome melody days after the death of the singular harmonica maestro Toos Thielemans.

With “Busy Bone” Dexter Williams created an opportunity for himself to put down the bass and pick up the valve trombone on a singing melody that sounds like it got left off the Hit Parade in 1928. Jordan Samuels’ “Gazing,” is a similarly buoyant piece that feels like a hat tip to the great Fats Waller. His fellow rhythm guitarist, Nelsen Hutchison, travels in a very different, treacherous direction, with “Highway 17,” a dark and serpentine piece that captures some of the anxiety inspired by the infamously twisty route through the Santa Cruz Mountains. Taking the HCSF into intriguing new territory, his piece “I’ll Call You Back” spins an alluring tale via hocket, putting the medieval device into a decidedly contemporary setting. And rhythm guitarist Hunter Matthews, a former member of the HCSF who’s part of the combo’s extended family, joins the fray on his elegant “Para Ti,” a swaying dance number redolent of late-night romance. 

While Mehling shares the spotlight with his bandmates, he’s still the HCSF’s defining compositional voice, with ebullient pieces like “Dainty” and “Praise D. Lloyd,” a churchy piece that will inspire many an “amen!” He strolls with confidence through “Not Too Blue,” a feature for Williams’ rich arco work, and ends the album with “Fairweather Genius,” a brief blast of melancholy. Is he pining for lost youth or a love gone wrong? Whatever the answer, Mehling sets the stage for the HCSF’s next chapter by offering a glimpse at emotional terrain where Hot Club’s rarely venture. Some 35 years into the group’s reign as the nation’s longest-running Hot Club ensemble, the HCSF continues to expand the possibilities of Djangology. 

“We embrace the more contemporary or modern harmonies that are not idiomatic to the 1930s and ‘40s,” Mehling says. “Yet we strive to retain the thing which we believe is one of the greatest charms of gypsy jazz, namely the swing-or-die approach that Grappelli and Reinhardt threw down with those recordings Swing with lyricism - that's us.”

Like so many kids of his generation, Mehling was initially inspired to pick up the guitar by watching the epochal performance by The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in early 1964. “Then I heard Django’s Hot Club of France: three guitars, bass, and violin and they sounded and acted like a rock band,” he recalls. “I saw pictures of them and they looked sharp, sophisticated and mysterious.”

He spent his early years as a professional musician playing traditional New Orleans jazz on banjo and guitar, and didn’t think of trying to master Django’s music until traveling in Europe in the early 1980s and hearing guitarist Fapy Lafertin with the Belgian Gypsy jazz combo WASO. Combined with the inspiration from two visionary Bay Area ensembles known for drawing deeply from the Hot Club sound—Dan Hicks & his Hot Licks and mandolinist David Grisman’s “dawg music” Quintet—he honed his Django repertoire, and ended up landing a gig as lead guitarist with Dan Hicks’ Acoustic Warriors from 1985-1990, a highlight of which was their 1989 appearance on Austin City Limits.

Mehling launched the Hot Club of San Francisco in 1989, spearheading the American Gypsy jazz movement with countless concerts and a series of critically hailed albums, including 1999’s Lady in Red (Clarity) featuring Maria Muldaur, Dan Hicks, and jazz/blues vocal legend Barbara Dane. In 2000, the HCSF became the first American band invited to play the Festival de Jazz Django Reinhardt in Samois-Sur-Seine, ground zero for the ongoing Django revival. Over the years the band has featured a glittering array of talent, including guitarists Adam Levy, Josh Workman, Sam Miltich, fiddlers Jenny Scheinman and Olivier Manchon, and bassists Joe Kyle and Clint Baker. 

The latest HCSF edition is amongst the strongest yet, and Original Gadjo makes it clear that every player has skin in the game. The album not only makes a convincing case that the group retains its vaunted position at the forefront of the Gypsy jazz movement in America. The album makes it clear that one needn’t hail from a Manouche family to contribute to the Hot Club tradition. “I’ve talked to Biréli Lagrène about this, asking ‘How do all you feel about us in America doing this?’ He was very clear. ‘You’re breaking ground for us, teaching audiences about Django.’ That was beyond encouraging.”