Live & Local: French Fest Hits Denver
Bastille Day French Fest is in its second year, and the 2025 event is held just before Bastille Day on July 11-13 at Fillmore Plaza in Cherry Creek North. The celebration aims to transform the neighborhood into a bustling French village, offering foods, wine (of course), art, fashion, and an array of musical offerings, including a New Orleans funk band, a rock band coming in from Paris, and the Hot Club of Olde Town, a Django-styled quartet. Guitarist Nicolas Busquet, who is from France, came to Colorado in the 2000s, immersing himself in “the Denver sound.” But he told KUVO’s Morning Set he soon re-discovered his Django roots, and found a completely different way to play the guitar.
Bastille Day French Fest 2025 is produced by the Rocky Mountain French American Chamber of Commerce.
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Transcript
Steve Chavis: Good to have you and good to have you in Denver and making music for French Fest. This is like an old home. Usually you're in Denver, you're like learning country and Western tunes, but now it's back to the old Django ways.
Nicolas Busquet: Right. Yeah, so well, I came to Colorado some- 17 years ago and when I didn't know anything about that music, actually what's called gypsy jazz, and we can talk more about what that term means, but when I came here, I was really into that sort of country music, especially something called the Denver Sound. I don't know if you heard of that. 16 Horsepower and Bands and Slim Cessna's Auto Club, all these bands like this that I was really into. So jazz in general and gypsy jazz in particular were not on my radar at all. And it's only fairly recently, I would say in the last five, six years that I've sort of discovered or rediscovered my roots, if you will, through that.
Abi Clark: Let's talk about the standards. Of course, we just heard a little bit of Django who's one of those- spearheading of the genre. It was something that you've been really immersing yourself in. Talk to me about the genre itself and that history.
Nicolas: So it's a case of a style of music that was really almost invented single-handedly, no pun intended, by Django Reinhardt, who was a Romani musician from the Romani, Romania, Manouche, Sinti people, however you want to call them. And he created this style based on the tradition of his people, which were traveling people. So they needed to make music to make money, so they needed to, there was already in the tradition, a lot of virtuosity, a lot of impressiveness, because you needed to wow the audiences. But he had an accident on his left hand, so he could only use two fingers on his left hand. And so he developed this very specific style, and his heritage and all the songs that he created became the heritage of his own people. So before him they were not playing any of these songs, but he brought in all these songs from the Great American songbook. So, whatever standard you want to think of, All of Me, My Blue Heaven, Sweet Georgia Brown, et cetera. He brought those in, into the tradition of his people, and now the people who are in the Romani community in the Manouche community in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany think of these songs as part of their heritage as well, which I think is a fascinating sort of cultural transfer from the US back to Europe.
Carlos Lando: Actually, I'm always really interested in how certain instruments become such a prominent part of a musical culture. You mentioned the accordion earlier and thinking, well you know, when we think about accordions here in this country, I think about Zydeco, I think about Louisiana and the French influence. So the French were the ones, probably, (who) had a big impact on the accordions. When I think about Mexican music and Tejano music, it's just accordions are a big part.
Nicolas: And it's always a transfer of culture, right? So if you take a term like Musette, which you may have heard, which is this sort of typical waltzy Musette songs from France, this was originally called for a sort of a little bit of a small bagpipe, but then the Italians came into France and, from France and they brought their accordions with them and the accordion became the preferred instrument for that style of music. So even though now Musette is like, when you think Musette, you think accordion, and you think France, it's actually an Italian origin.
Carlos: I see.
Steve: The music goes so much deeper,
