Matelo Ferret was a French guitarist and composer of the manouche tradition, born on December 1, 1918 in Le Petit-Quevilly, beside Rouen, into a Romani family. He was the youngest of three guitar-playing brothers, with Baro and Sarane Ferret, and his nickname "Matelo" means sailor. Records credit him under many spellings, among them Matelot, Matlo, Jean Ferret, Pierre Ferret and, from the 1960s, Matelo Ferré, the form his sons later adopted for themselves. He passed away in Paris on January 24, 1989, at the age of 70.

As a child he played banjo at dances. In Paris he was hired by the accordionist Émile Vacher and then by Guérino's musette orchestra La Boîte à Matelots, and he soon turned to the guitar. The three brothers had come to the capital from Rouen and met Django Reinhardt in 1931, and Reinhardt's circle played often in the Russian cabarets of Paris, notably the Casanova and the Shéhérazade. While Reinhardt moved toward jazz, Matelo spent much of his time in those cabarets and built a personal guitar style that mixed Russian and Romanian Romani music, musette waltzes and swing. Between 1938 and 1943 he appeared on a run of Paris sessions: with the accordionist Gus Viseur in September and October 1938 and again in 1940, on guitar behind Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli in the Quintette du Hot Club de France's "Younger Generation" (June 30, 1939), in Le Trio Ferret with Baro and their cousin Challain Ferret on March 2, 1939, in Sarane Ferret's Swing Quintette de Paris in 1941 and 1942, and with the saxophonist André Ekyan on July 22, 1942. French Wikipedia adds that he joined the violinist Michel Warlop's string septet in 1941 and that American jazz musicians, Benny Carter among them, sought him out.

His own first sessions were cut in Paris on December 15, 1943, as Jean Ferret et son Sixtette, a sextet of clarinet, vibraphone, guitars, bass and percussion. After the war he became a leading name in swing musette, the style of Gus Viseur and Tony Murena, and he revived the gypsy waltz, which purist jazz fans had turned away from. He recorded only sporadically under his own name. The EP Musique pour deux no. 14 came out in 1955 under the billing Matelo Ferret et son Quartette, and a Vogue EP of 1960 was titled as a collection of unpublished pieces by Django Reinhardt. Marta (1965), billed to Matelo Ferré, put him with the vibraphonist Michel Terrioux, the guitarist Laro Sollero, the bassist Michel Gaudry and the drummer Andy Arpino. Much of his working life went into accompaniment: the accordionist Jo Privat's Manouche Partie, recorded in 1960 with Babik Reinhardt as second guitarist and described by French Wikipedia as the high point of his career, the singers Robert Ripa, Jean Ferrat and Antoine Ciosi, and the concert album La Nuit des Gitans à l'Olympia de Paris (1970).

He lived long enough to see gypsy jazz return to favor and was counted among the great surviving players of the style. In the late 1970s he recorded the double LP Tziganskaia for Charles Delaunay, issued by Vogue, with his son Boulou on guitar, Michel Villas on cimbalom and Ernest Pseffer on double bass. In 1988 the Norwegian label Hot Club Records reissued it on CD as Tziganskaia and Other Rare Recordings, adding four waltzes by Reinhardt that Matelo had recorded in 1960. Tribute to Django (Esoldun, 1989), billed to Sarane and Matelo Ferret, gathers radio recordings made in Paris on April 16, 1967 and a performance at Samois on May 27, 1973. Two of his sons, Boulou and Elios Ferré, became well-known guitarists and record as the duo Boulou & Elios Ferré; a third son, Michel Ferré, known as Sarane after his uncle, also played and recorded with his father. In 2009 Frémeaux issued the three-CD set Les Frères Ferret: Les Gitans de Paris 1938-1956, which gathers the recordings of Matelo, Baro and Sarane from the years of the Paris cabarets and swing records.

Ferret's playing grew out of two Paris worlds that overlapped, the Russian cabarets and the musette dance halls, and he took from both. His guitar mixed Russian and Hungarian-flavored Romani song with the swing waltz and four-beat swing, with bold rhythmic figures that French Wikipedia says required considerable technique. The Tziganskaia programme shows the range: the Russian folk tune "Tziganskaia", the Hungarian "Sombre Dimanche", a Franz Lehar melody, Reinhardt's "Gagoug" and his own "Melle de Bucarest" and "Pouro Rom". French Wikipedia reports that around 1942 he called his swinging waltz style "valses-bebop", and the repertoire on Tribute to Django sets Reinhardt tunes beside Oscar Pettiford's "Blues in the Closet" and the standards "Out of Nowhere" and "The Man I Love". Much of his career was spent in the musette and cabaret world, so his output sits at the meeting point of manouche jazz and dance-hall music rather than in a purely jazz setting; the Gypsy Jazz and Swing tags reflect the jazz side of that work. English Wikipedia singles out the Russian and Hungarian influences in his style, and he is remembered above all as an interpreter of the gypsy waltz.