Drom Blanchard

 

Gipsy guitar

France

Originally from the Jura region, Drom started learning the guitar at a very young age thanks to his father who taught him the basics of jazz and gypsy music. Raised in the culture of the travellers, he then developed his playing and his technique in self-taught (repeating on his guitar what he heard on Django Reinhardt's records) but also with his friends on the gypsy camps. And if today his guitar is largely impregnated with Django's music, he also gets out of it a lot of Mediterranean and flamenco harmonies, other blues tendencies, funk... in short, a mixture of influences which allow him today to play this joy and this nostalgia of the journey as we like to hear it.

His musical culture and his influences are very varied: he is inspired by a lot of world music that he mixes with jazz, remains faithful to his contemporary gypsy models that are mainly Stochelo Rosenberg or Dorado Schmitt, but admits being very influenced by flamenco artists (Vicente Amigo, Tomatito) or soul, funk and bop (Paul Jackson Jr, Joe Pass, Georges Benson or Pat Martino).