Don’t Miss This Masterclass With Grammy-Winning Guitarist Stephane Wrembel

If your New Year's Eve wish list for this year includes finally learning to play the guitar, you can now pick up a few new tricks from a master guitarist.

Grammy Award-winning musician Stephane Wrembel will host a workshop from 2 to 4 p.m. on Jan. 18 at Zounds Sounds B-Side. He’ll be accepting donations for Way Into Music, a local nonprofit that provides music education and instruments for those who can’t afford it.

The French guitarist has been cranking out high-quality tunes since 2002 after graduating summa cum laude from Berklee College of Music. He has played everywhere from New York’s Carnegie Hall to The Lyon Opera House in France. In 2013, Wrembel’s “Bistro Fada” from Midnight in Paris earned him a Grammy when the Woody Allen film was awarded Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media.

From beginners to six-string-savants, everyone can pick up a thing or two from Wrembel. He’s taught music for over two decades following the technique of Django Reinhardt, a legendary guitarist/composer who was forced to adapt the way he played after being injured in a horrible accident.

In 1928, 18-year-old Reinhardt and his wife were caught in a fire in the caravan they were living in. They both survived, but Reinhardt’s left hand was badly burned and lost most of its mobility. With only two fully functional fingers, Reinhardt developed a completely new style of playing to accommodate the limitations of his left hand. It imbued his music with a unique feel and phrasing that stood out among his contemporaries.

“His technique is awesome,” Jerry Garcia told Frets magazine in 1985. When he was 4, the Grateful Dead guitarist had most of his right hand’s middle finger chopped off by his brother in a wood-splitting accident. He cited Reinhardt as a source of inspiration for his success despite his injury.

“Even today, nobody has really come to the state that he was playing at," Garcia said. "As good as players are, they haven't gotten to where he is. There's a lot of guys that play fast and a lot of guys that play clean, and the guitar has come a long way as far as speed and clarity go, but nobody plays with the whole fullness of expression that Django has. I mean, the combination of incredible speed — all the speed you could possibly want — but also the thing of every note having a specific personality. You don't hear it. I really haven't heard it anywhere but with Django.”

A year after Wrembel graduated from Berklee, he launched the Django a Gogo Music Festival and Guitar Camp, a week-long event that celebrates the life and music of Reinhardt. World-class musicians travel to Wrembel’s hometown of Maplewood, New Jersey, every year to perform and give masterclasses on the Sinti guitar style that Reinhardt developed and now Wrembel specializes in.

There are a few chances to catch the Gypsy Jazz guru live with his trio while he’s still in town. After the workshop, Wrembel is booking it to the Scat Jazz Club in Fort Worth before heading down to the Parker Jazz Club in Austin on Jan. 19.

If anyone walks away feeling like a changed musician and needs more time to learn from Wrembel, he offers private lessons online in English and French. He’s also posted a Django Style and Gypsy Jazz play-along series on YouTube with 215 different songs to jam to, each with a corresponding chord sheet.

More information can be found at stephanewrembel.com.