Honolulu Museum of Art presents Gypsy Jazz Carnival

Guitarist John Jorgenson will headline two concerts at the Gypsy Jazz Carnival. --Courtesy photo

Jazz musician Sonny Silva likes to re-create an atmosphere for the gypsy jazz stylings of his Hot Club of Hulaville, whether it’s Hawaii in 1949 or Paris during the Gershwin years.

This weekend he’s bringing a carnival climate to the Honolulu Museum of Art for three concerts. If you plan to attend Saturday’s festivities, you’d better watch out.

“The carnival will have crepes and wine, that stuff, but we’ll also have palm readers, numerologists, magicians, pickpockets, con artists, whatever we can do to make it authentic for you,” he said, laughing about the last two performers on the list.

“We have a real sideshow guy. (That would be Professor Pandemonium. — Ed.) … I don’t know what he actually does. (He lies on a bed of nails, pounds nails up his nose, things like that. — Ed.)

It will all be in the service of gypsy jazz, the swinging yet melancholic style associated with the great guitarist Django Reinhardt and his Quintet of the Hot Club of France.

Silva’s Hot Club of Hulaville will headline one concert. Guitarist John Jorgenson headlines two more.

JORGENSON is a multitalented musician who toured with Elton John for six years and plays clarinet and piano. His talent at gypsy jazz is so respected that he was asked to portray Reinhardt in a movie, “Head in the Clouds.”

He fell in love with gypsy jazz when he first heard it in 1979, he said, and has been “chasing it ever since then.”

“It was always sort of my ‘hobby’ music,” he said, “But then with the Internet and people having the ability to connect, they realized they liked this kind of music and started having festivals and concerts.”

In fact, there are now jazz clubs throughout the world devoted to Reinhardt, who died in 1953 at age 43 and had his heyday in the 1930s and 1940s.

Silva said many fans slavishly adhere to Reinhardt’s complicated technique, which he developed after an accident left two fingers partially paralyzed. (Asked whether he uses it, Silva said, “Hell, no! I’d hurt myself!”)

Jorgenson, however, often plays using that technique, and said it’s more than flashy fingerwork.

“That’s one of the things that gave (Reinhardt) his distinctive sound,” he said. “Because he had just two digits on his fretting hand, he had to climb around the fretboard a lot more. … Thus, you’re getting a lot more color out of the instrument.”

Jorgenson is performing with his own quintet for the concerts, featuring musicians accomplished in gypsy jazz. The Hot Club of Hulaville will perform its own brand of Hawaiian-inspired gypsy jazz — maybe call it Gywaiian. Lap steel guitarist Greg Sardinha and pianist Aaron Aranita are joining Silva, bassist Miles Jackson and violinist Duane Padilla for the concerts, and the band is bringing back its original vocalist, Willow Chang Alleon.

“We are going to try to get a bit more Hawaiian, a bit more hula in Hulaville, if you will,” Silva said.

–Steven Mark / smark@staradvertiser.com