Gypsy Swingin’ with the Milwaukee Hot Club

Milwaukee Hot Club (from left): Guy Fiorentini, Tom Sobel, Clay Schaub and Scott Hlavenka. The quartet will bring their high-energy mix of swing, bossa and gypsy jazz to Door County Brewing Co. on Saturday night. Photo by Hannah Toldt Photography.

The walls of Door County Brewing Co. will reverberate with the lively sound of swinging 1930s jazz, bossa and Gypsy samba rhythms May 27 when Gypsy jazz quartet Milwaukee Hot Club makes its way to the stage.

The Milwaukee Hot Club pays tribute to the man largely credited as Europe’s first and most significant jazz player: Belgian-born jazz guitarist, and free-spirited Gypsy, Django Reinhardt. Reinhardt, who in the 1930s established the swinging musical style that is Gypsy jazz, is the composer behind a number of jazz standards, from the bouncy, French-inspired “Minor Swing” (first recorded by his band, The Quintet of the Hot Club of France, in 1937) to the sauntering “Nuages.”

“He was a stunning virtuoso and prolific,” Milwaukee Hot Club frontman Guy Fiorentini said. “He wrote a lot, despite being illiterate. Not just musically illiterate but illiterate. He composed a lot of music and the Gypsies of Western Europe, particularly France, have kept this music alive for a long time and in the last 15 years through YouTube, it’s really kind of exploded because people go online and see these little kids playing ridiculously fast, dazzling music.

“Where this music comes from, people sit around and a lot of these people don’t send their kids to school,” he added. “They spend a lot of time and they sit around and play guitar all day. If you can play guitar for five, six hours a day, you’re going to be pretty good by the time you’re 12 or 13 years old.”

Though a lifelong musician, it wasn’t until 2000 that Fiorentini was introduced to the genre during a brief stint playing with Harmonious Wail, one of Wisconsin’s first Gypsy jazz bands. Over the course of the next decade, the genre percolated within him as he retrained his brain on guitar techniques.

“As a guitar player, most of us kind of have to unlearn the way we’ve been playing,” Fiorentini said. “Most of us come to it from playing electric guitar and to get the tone and the right sound it’s another technique. The power and sound of the music, it takes a long time to learn to play that, that’s one thing that I’ve learned…part of it is just learning the repertoire and that’s a huge commitment of time, to learn how to play it. It’s serious music.”

Since 2010, he has played Gypsy guitar alongside Scott Hlavenka, bassist Clay Schaub and saxophonist/clarinetist Tom Sobel in the Milwaukee Hot Club, performing a repertoire of largely instrumental pieces at cafes, bars and festivals around Milwaukee. In the process, they have gained a steady following of dedicated listeners drawn to the spirited listening of this easy swing of strings.

“The music is not cerebral,” he said. “It hits you at a more emotional level and therefore I think it has a very wide popularity even just from people that maybe don’t consider themselves jazz lovers. It’s not brainiac music.”

Milwaukee Hot Club performs at 7pm on Saturday, May 27 at Door County Brewing Co., 2434 County F in Baileys Harbor. For more on the band, visit milwaukeehotclub.com.