The Lost Fingers

Tango to Django

Young gypsy-jazz bands a hot ticket

We know there are more JazzFest gigs this week than you can shake a sax at, but we thought we’d shed some light on a style that many seem to be shakin’ their booties to these days: Django-Reinhardt inspired gypsy jazz. Not one, but two young, up-and-coming Canadian groups who perform this style will be touching down this week in Victoria; the Lost Fingers, whose debut album, Lost in the 80s, has sold over 100,000 copies in Quebec alone, and Gypsophilia, a Halifax-based group of musicians who are hitting virtually every Jazzfest in Canada.

“There’s a pretty wild first 10 days of the tour where we’re flying and playing every day,” says Gypsophilia guitarist Ross Burns. “It’s like a wacky dream come true.”

Speaking of jazz festivals, the Lost Fingers’ Byron Mikaloff says it was last year’s Festival International de Jazz de Montréal that really got the buzz going for them. They had a nightly gig in a tent that held about 100 people—which the organizers had to expand to hold 750.

“We had 800-900 people waiting outside for 10 nights in a row and people were lining up at like two in the afternoon,” he says. “We had to close the festival as well with Mory Kanté in front of 60,000 people.”

There’s something about the Lost Fingers’ gypsy-jazz takes on classic ’80s tunes like “Touch Me” and “Pump Up the Jam” that has really got people excited. “You listen to it and you get a chuckle,” says Mikaloff. “You listen to it again and you think, ‘These guys can actually play guitar and sing,’ Then once you see it live, that’s usually where we get people.”

The Lost Fingers have just released a French album called Rendezvous Rose and are still debating on the content for their next English record (“We’ve talked about ’90s dance, which would be totally cool. Haddaway, Snap, ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ and all that kind of stuff,” says Mikaloff) and Gypsophilia just put out their latest, Sa-ba-da-OW!, in mid-June. The album was recorded over a three-day stint after their first serious bout of touring.

“It’s music composed by six of the different members of the band, so it comes from a diverse set of composers and sounds pretty wide-ranging,” says Burns. “It felt like a bit of a tour in itself, just traveling from song to song trying to figure out what we were going to do and how we were going to treat each tune and watching it evolve.”

Both groups are definitely on the up-and-up, a testament to both the bands’ skill and the infectiousness of gypsy jazz.

“The 1930s is not a time any of us have direct experience with, so in that way, we’re musical voyeurs, looking back through recordings and getting excited about the sounds that have trickled down,” says Burns. “I think it speaks to the power, to the verve of the original music, that there could be echos this far into the future.” M

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The Lost Fingers
9:30pm Saturday, June 27
Event Centre, 1415 Broad
Tickets $22 • jazzvictoria.ca

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Gypsophilia
4:45pm Sunday, June 28
Centennial Square
FREE • jazzvictoria.ca