Faux Frenchmen

Detail: The Faux Frenchmen are acoustic guitarists Brian Lovely and George Cunningham, Don Aren on double bass, and violinist Paul Patterson. We’ve been playing 1930’s Hot Club-inspired string band jazz, also called “gypsy jazz,” in and around Cincinnati since September 2002 Guitarist Django Reinhardt and violin virtuoso Stephane Grappelli lead the Hot Club of France from 1934 to 1939. They blended traditional gypsy and European popular music with the sounds of American artists, like Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, to comprise the first and most influential generation of European jazz musicians.Rather than being a Hot Club “tribute” band, we Faux Frenchmen attempt to take the Hot Club’s instrumentation and approach and adapt it to our own subversive musical ends. That means we try to take this unique, special thing that happened in the thirties in Europe, study and understand it to the greatest extent possible, adapt it to our musicianship and our musicianship to it, and then utilize or ignore all this knowledge as our whims dictate.