APOTENT ALCHEMY IS at play in the artistry of Parisian guitar wizard Stephane Wrembel. Juxtaposed ingredients — including classical, flamenco, jazz, swing, bebop, blues and rock — combine in the mixture. However, the coalescing element is a facet of northern Gypsy culture, a sensuous music that has throbbed through his veins and cascaded through his strings for more than 30 years — namely, the Sinti guitar style, with its unique tone, vibrato and melodic improvisation. In the process, Wrembel’s cluster of sounds acquires a dreamlike, even mesmerizing quality, echoing the aura of a surrealist mosaic, akin to the films of his favorite director, Luis Buñuel.
The exemplar of this tradition is Belgium-born Sinti Jean “Django” Reinhardt, the jazz icon who imbued the style with a sweep-picking intensity. Wrembel found his muse In Reinhardt’s red-hot repertoire and devoted himself to the propagation of his legacy. In 2003, he created the Django A GoGo Festival, which this year culminated in conjunction with the May release of Wrembel’s new album, . It’s a merger of Reinhardt’s string-driven jazz with the Big Easy tradition of wind instrumentation.