(Gypsy) Jimmy Rosenberg Feat. Bireli Lagrene & Angelo Debarre - The Alternative One And Only Album - 2013, MP3, 320 kbps

#777A NEW album featuring Jimmy Rosenberg, Bireli Lagrene and Angelo Debarre now - nearly a decade after Jimmy withdrew from public life? Well Yes and No. The unlikely story about this bonus album is as follows.
More than one historic guitar session took place in those Parisian recording studios in 1997. Immediately after the Django festival at Samois, the Hot Club de Norvège, Babik Reinhardt, Romane, and John Jorgenson recorded the HOT SHOTS album in the Studio Bastille, and our special guest was the talk of the town; the 17 year old Dutch guitar virtuoso Jimmy Rosenberg.
By that time Jimmy had already been a part of the rapidly growing international gypsy jazz scene for five years. He had played everywhere, and with everybody, and was rocketing with mile high expectations towards the new millennium. Many regarded Jimmy as the greatest new guitar talent after Django himself. The HOT SHOTS album was released early in the autumn, and received a warm welcome worldwide. Just a few months later it was time to produce the first solo album from this prodigious debutant Jimmy Rosenberg.
This time we met in the Sysmo Studio, at Butte Montmartre, not far from Porte de Clignancourt and its famous flea market. I was still in awe from my previous recording session in the same studio nine years earlier, with Chet Baker and Philip Catherine. The poetry and melancholy was still in the walls, and the Sysmo session actually became Chet Baker’s very last studio album.
Jimmy, on the other hand, was a young and rising star – or perhaps more like Icarus? Rising on beautiful foolish arms, as Joni Mitchell so beautifully described him, headlong towards the sun? In any case, in order to give Jimmy a profound musical challenge in the studio I invited two other extraordinary guitar players: Angelo Debarre and Bireli Lagrene. We had all met briefly at the Django Festival in Oslo four years earlier. Now they were the three new masters of contemporary jazz manouche, a diabolic constellation, a Trinity even, but also reputedly bohemians.
The new recording session went surprisingly easily, in fact it was over in only two days, and the ONE AND ONLY album was released soon after. The CD was filled to the brim with hardcore guitar improvisations, a pyrotechnical masterpiece expected to become the first in a long string of pearls in the years to come. But faith and fate would have it differently.
The success we had with the HOT SHOTS and the ONE AND ONLY albums opened up many new doors, and shortly after Jimmy Rosenberg found himself in the middle of a group of international artist managers, record producers, directors, promo babes, brokers, dealers, family, fortune hunters and 'advisors' who all wanted a piece of the cake. It started out as the American dream, but soon it turned into a rock’n’roll nightmare, better described elsewhere.
Today, more than 15 years later, everything is changed. It is already nearly a decade since Jimmy Rosenberg imploded and ended the first turbulent chapter of his career. While we continue to keep our fingers crossed for a miracle and a future comeback for Jimmy, the nine Hot Club Records releases he participated on during our twelve years on the road together are dear souvenirs and colorful snapshots from a time filled with laughter and joy, before the dark clouds took over.
Consequently I have dug down into the archives, and gone through those old and rapidly deteriorating multi track reels from the 90s, and after musicological-archeological excavations among magnetic tapes with dropouts, and/or in formats no longer in use, I have found and remixed no less than 12 previously unpublished takes from the ONE AND ONLY sessions – an entire ALTERNATIVE album! Plus one outtake (All Of Me) that was not included in the original album, but was added to the SWINGING WITH JIMMY album. So – yes! – this is an actual new album featuring these three astonishing jazz manouche guitar players in their heyday:
The amazing versions of Blue Bossa and All Of Me were never included in the ONE AND ONLY album due to the time limit in the CD format. In all the ALTERNATIVE album consists of no less than eight magical sublime first takes: Groovin’ High, Donna Lee, Embraceable You, Coquette, September Song, It Don’t Mean A Thing, Wasso’s Waltz and Blue Bossa – the remaining five are the second takes! This means that the ALTERNATIVE album is a unique documentation of the sweet first meetings, and a glimpse into the act of creation itself.
Now it is my humble hope that the ALTERNATIVE album, despite its lack of physical format, will find an audience in the new generation of online music lovers, and that Django’s music will continue to inspire and evolve.
February 2013,
Jon Larsen