Django Reinhardt - Music on Google Play Django Reinhardt About the artist Jean "Django" Reinhardt was a Belgian-born French jazz guitarist and composer of Romani ethnicity regarded as one of the greatest guitar players of all time, having written nearly 100 songs. He was the first and most significant jazz talent to emerge from Europe. Despite having two of his fingers disabled from a fire, he overcame the handicap and went on to forge an entirely new style of jazz guitar technique, which has since become a living musical tradition within French Gypsy culture. Benny Goodman asked him to travel with his band, which he never did, but he did tour the U.S. with Duke Ellington's band in 1946. He died suddenly of a stroke at age 43. With violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Reinhardt formed the Paris-based Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934, today considered one of the most original bands in the history of recorded jazz. Reinhardt's most popular compositions have become jazz standards, including "Minor Swing", "Daphne", "Belleville", "Djangology", "Swing '42", and "Nuages".

According to jazz guitarist Frank Vignola, nearly every major guitarist in the world has been influenced by Django, including Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and Les Paul. Django Reinhardt - [53 Songs] [ 25 Albums ] Jean "Django" Reinhardt ( 23 January 1910 - 16 May 1953) was a Belgium-born French guitarist and composer of Romani ethnicity.< ... More Jean "Django" Reinhardt ( 23 January 1910 - 16 May 1953) was a Belgium-born French guitarist and composer of Romani ethnicity. Reinhardt is regarded as one of the greatest guitar players of all time; he was the first important European jazz musician who made major contributions to the development of the guitar genre. After his fourth and fifth fingers were paralyzed when he suffered burns in a fire, Reinhardt used only the index and middle finger of his left hand on his solos. He created an entirely new style of jazz guitar technique (sometimes called 'hot' jazz guitar), which has since become a living musical tradition within French Gypsy culture.

With violinist StÃ©phane Grappelli, Reinhardt co-founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France, described by critic Thom Jurek as "one of the most original bands in the history of recorded jazz". Reinhardt's most popular compositions have become jazz standards, including "Minor Swing", "Daphne", "Belleville", "Djangology", "Swing '42", and "Nuages". Hide Django Reinhardt | Vintage Guitar® magazine Vintage Guitar® magazine Tweet on Twitter A favorite photograph of Django Reinhardt pictures him standing alongside Stéphane Grappelli, the duo looking suave and sophisticated in white tuxedos. The photograph is steeped in the aura of 1930s Paris (the home of Quintette du Hot Club de France): charming, cool, classy. Grappelli – Django’s musical partner, foil, rival and co-composer – holds his magic violin under his arm. Django leans casually on his famous Selmer guitar, his left hand carefully placed in his suit pocket, hiding the disfigured hand that he not only learned to play in spite of, but which shaped his style.

But it’s the look on Django’s face that always makes you examine this picture closely. It’s a look that comes through in many photographs of the gypsy guitarist: his dark eyes seem to twinkle, his pencil-thin mustache seems slightly devilish. And his smile – happy-go-lucky, mysterious, and omniscient. Above all, Django’s smile seems to hold the key to his music. The Music Counts vary, but from 1928 to 1953, Django recorded some 750 to 1,000 sides. Much of his music is readily available today on numerous compact disc reissues and complete chronological sets. Add to this the alternate takes, unissued sides, radio broadcasts, and live recordings recently issued, and you soon realize that Django was the definition of prolific. Ironically, many people’s first impressions of Django’s music are often negative, due to the medium. Most people first hear him via his recordings on 78-rpm discs – or LP or CD collections made from the 78s instead of the master recordings (which are 45 to 60 years old).

Listening to the QHCF for the first time, the first sound one hears is hiss and static as the recording begins. Then, the full band erupts into the first chorus with three acoustic guitars, Grappelli’s violin soaring above, and string bass below, the band’s sound often pushing the sonic limits of the era’s single-mic mono recording technology. The sound is akin to the cacophony of the modern civilization of the 1930s: the new sound of automobile traffic, machines, airplanes, street noises, a growing population. Then Django’s guitar cuts through, and the music blossoms. He takes the lead as the rhythm guitars fall back into the famous boom-chick, boom-chick of la pompe – the jazz manouche rhythm. Django’s guitar is sublime and pure, unhurried in its cascades of elegant diminished arpeggios. It’s the sound of one man’s genius breaking through the chaos of the modern world. When Django begins to play, the listener is hooked. The Legend The story of Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt has all the makings of legend.

He was born in a gypsy caravan on January 23, 1910, near the Belgian town of Liverchies. His unmarried mother, known to audiences as “La Belle Laurence,” was a dancer and acrobat working with a wandering troupe of Gypsy comedians and musicians. Many have since referred to Django as a Belgian gypsy, due to his place of birth, or a French gypsy, as he lived most of his life in France. But the nationality was never important; his cultural background as a gypsy was. Some 2,000 years ago, the gypsy tribe known as the Sinti are believed to have migrated from the banks of the Sinti River, in India (from which they derived their name), to the Persian court, where they found work as musicians. From Persia, the gypsies traveled what is known as the Romany trail, leading through the Middle East into North Africa and Europe. Europeans, believing these wandering people to come from Egypt, corrupted their name into “gypsy.” Often chased away from “civilization,” the gypsies have become nomadic of necessity more than desire.

Forced to live a transitory life, they managed to survive on their skills as musicians, entertainers, metalsmiths, and traders. They have become a people of the diaspora, without a homeland and without a promised land. But through the centuries, their love for song has endured. Django grew up a wanderer. Living in a caravan – “la verdine,” in the language of the Rom � Django’s mother led him and his younger brother, Joseph (known affectionately as “Nin-Nin,”) through France, south to Nice, across to Italy, Corsica, Algeria, and then back to Paris. The family occasionally spent time in caravans on the nether zones at the edge of Paris by one of the old city gates. Django learned to play banjo – the prime rhythm instrument before the ascendance of the guitar – because the banjo’s unamplified resonator blessed it with volume and the cutting, trebly tone gave it the power to accompany an accordion.

In his teens, Django played banjo and guitar with Vetese Guérino, the popular gypsy accordionist, and others, in the cafes, dance halls, night clubs, and at the bals des Auvergnats (named for the people of the French province of Auvergne who migrated to the city), bringing the folk music that became a source of musette. Django had a rare talent as a musician, an ability respected and admired among gypsies. As Charles Delaunay, Django’s French friend and manager, wrote in his colorful biography of the guitarist; “As water is a fish’s element and the air a bird’s, music was Django’s.” The Tragedy Then tragedy struck. At 1:00 a.m. on November 2, 1928, Django returned from a club to his caravan. He lit a candle to provide some light, and the flame ignited a bouquet of flowers his wife, Sophie “Naguine” Ziegler, had fashioned from celluloid, a highly flammable plastic. In minutes, the caravan was aflame. Django and Naguine escaped, but Django suffered horrible burns over half his body.

His left hand was disfigured from the burns: his two smallest fingers were twisted and thus limited in use; his ring and index fingers still functioned. His family thought he would never play guitar again, and as Delaunay writes, the men of the caravan wept. But while bedridden and recovering, Django taught himself, slowly and surely, to play again. Grappelli explained the process best in a 1954 interview with the British music magazine Melody Maker, which appeared after Django’s death. “He acquired amazing dexterity with those first two fingers,” Grappelli said. “But that didn’t mean he never employed the others. He learned to grip the guitar with his little finger on the E string and the next finger on the B. That accounts for some of those chord progressions which Django was probably the first to perform on the guitar.” The Jazz A new epoch in European jazz dawned when Django met Stéphane Grappelli, and the two began jamming on American swing tunes. In late 1934, they formed the Hot Club quintet, naming it after the Hot Club of France, a Paris meeting place for jazz musicians and fans.

They were an inspired pair, similar to the American guitar/violin duo of Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti. Django’s playing with the QHCF in its glory years (1937 to 1939) was a modern amalgam of French folk music, accordion-lead musette, traditional gypsy music, and even the Argentine tango that was all the rage in 1920s Paris. Added into this strange brew was the wild, free, exciting sound of American jazz that transformed the old into the new. Swing supercharged the music, and the sound of the QHCF came to define an era. It’s important to note that Django was not a solitary gypsy guitar genius, but part of a style. Gypsy guitarist/composer Gusti Malha was the patriarch of gypsy guitarists at the time when Django first starting playing in the bals-musette and jazz hot clubs of Paris. Malha played with gypsy accordionist Guerino, and others, composing and recording early musette classics such as “La Valse des Niglos,” or “The Waltz of the Hedgehogs,” named for a favored delicacy of gypsy cuisine.

Malha’s style set the tone of the times and caught Django’s ear. Django, however, was an audacious pioneer, infusing musette with jazz. Initially, musette and swing were two camps of musical styles that did not want to mix, as the great accordionist, Jo Privat, recalled. “There were ‘No Swing Dancing’ signs in musette ballrooms,” he said. “Swing could provoke brawls. Guys who like to hold their girls tight didn’t like that.” But to Django, swing made it mean something. As Delaunay quotes Django himself: “Jazz attracted me, because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.” Django wasn’t the only young gypsy guitarist following in Malha’s footsteps. Lulu Galopin, and later Paul “Tchan Tchou” Vidal, of Alsace, Patotte Bousquet, of Marseilles, Didi Duprat, Francis-Alfred Moerman, and others were all drawn to musette. But it is the brothers Baro, Sarane, and Matelo Ferret who remain the most famous of the other gypsy guitarists.

The Ferrets also were self-taught on banjo, then guitar, and played in and recorded with Parisian musette bands, offering daring and inventive solos, and blending bebop with waltzes to create a unique style. Django’s career was intermixed with the Ferret brothers’. At times, Matelo played rhythm in the QHCF, but it was Baro who recorded numerous sides and played with the quintet, on and off, for many years. The Man Stories about Django are many. As a reviewer of the Hot Club’s concert premiere in 1934 in Jazz Tango magazine hinted. “It might be said that he was the revelation of the concert. He is a curious musician, with a style like no one else’s…Moreover, Reinhardt is a charming fellow who seems to offer in his mode of existence the same whimsical imagination that illumines his solos….” And there are stories that illuminate Django, the man. He apparently was terrified of ghosts. He could not stop himself from gambling. He adored movies, particularly American gangster films, and from them developed a fondness for wide-brimmed hats that he liked to perch askew on his head and tuck over one eye.

He was amazingly adept at games, from pinball to pool. He had a pet monkey. And then there was the time he met Andrés Segovia. He played a short jazz crepuscule on his Selmer guitar for the Spanish classical maestro. Segovia was dazzled by the piece and asked for a transcription. Django laughed and shrugged, saying that it was merely an improvisation. And there was Django’s pride, illustrated by the story of how the Hot Club quartet became a quintet. “I could see something was worrying Django,” Grappelli said. “And when I asked him what the trouble was one day, he replied, ‘It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s just that when you’re playing, Stéphane, you’ve got both [QHCF guitarist Roger] Chaput and me backing you, but when I’m soloing I’ve only got one guitar behind me!'” With that, Django’s brother, Joseph, was hired as a second rhythm guitarist. Grappelli also talked about Django’s sense of style. “I shall never forget the first day Django put on evening dress – with bright red socks.

It took some time to explain, without injuring his feelings, that red socks were not the right thing. Django insisted that he liked it that way, because red looked so well with black.” And finally there was his innocence – a gypsy out of step with the modern world. Again, Grappelli told the story of how the Hot Club, while touring Belgium, was invited to dine with the King. Django, not knowing better, ate his lettuce with his fingers – but, as Grappelli remembered, he somehow did it with great style and class so it seemed alright. The New Beginning World War II split the cornerstones of the Hot Club. Django stayed in France, while Grappelli was in England. Freed from the confines of the Hot Club, Django could explore other venues and band arrangements, setting the stage for a second era of Django’s music, as he broadened his stylistic vocabulary. Django replaced Grappelli and his violin with the clarinet of Hubert Rostaing, creating a band sound no doubt influenced by recordings of Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian. Django also played with Fud Candrix’s big band.

In 1946, Django regrouped with Grappelli for a short time before setting sail to tour the U.S. with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. In the ’40s, Django experimented with electric instruments. Devoted to his acoustic Selmer, but having trouble cutting through the sound of the larger bands, he affixed a magnetic pickup to the petit bouche soundhole. The sound created a new style, heard on his later recordings, which are infused with the bebop he heard in America. The Coda At the dawn of the 1950s, Django moved his family from Paris to the town of Samois-sur-Seine, just south of the capital. “I think he ended up living in Samois because it was a retreat for him where he could relax and rethink his music,” his second son, Babik, recalled. “He was very inspired at the time and listened to everything from Beethoven to bebop…especially bebop.” Django was in semi-retirement, playing now and then, but spending more time fishing. On May 15, 1953, he suffered a fatal stroke. He was 43 years old.

Django Reinhardt lived a long life in his 43 years. Today, it’s impossible to sum up his influence on jazz because it continues. Matelo Ferret’s sons, Boulou and Elios Ferré, still carry Django’s torch to the extremes of musical creativity, and jazz manouche is currently in a renaissance with bands such as Latcho Drom, of France, the Rosenberg Trio, of the Netherlands, and Hot Club bands in Japan, Norway, San Francisco, and almost anywhere else jazz is heard. Perhaps it’s best for Django’s old cohort, Stéphane Grappelli, to have the final word. Now 89, Grappelli is still going strong at this writing. He summed up Django’s playing in the 1954 Melody Maker interview. “He did more for the guitar than any other man in jazz. His way of playing was unlike anyone else’s, and jazz is different because of him. There can be many other fine guitarists, but never can there be another Reinhardt. I am sure of that.” Django Reinhardt with his fabled Selmer. Photo courtesy of Frank Driggs collection. This article originally appeared in VG‘s Dec. ’97 issue.

All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited. Related by Joseph Dinkins Django Reinhardt has astounded and thrilled numerous generations of guitar players and jazz lovers with his amazing command of the guitar. January 24th, 1910 at Liberchies Belgium, Django was born into the open air, rambling lifestyle of his gypsy parents. At the age of eight, his mother's tribe settled near the belt of fortifications that surrounded the old Paris, near the Choisy gate. He never wore a suit or lived in a real house until he was twenty years old. These French Gypsies or Manouches were a world unto themselves, medieval in their beliefs, and distrustful of modern science. Django grew up in this world of contradictions, one foot in the bustling big city of Paris and the other in the age-old life of the nomadic gypsy. Though born into poverty Django had the soul of a nobleman and this natural elegance of bearing and attitude expressed itself in his music. It was at an early age Django became attracted to music.

When twelve years old he received his first instrument, a banjo/guitar that was given to him by a neighbor who had noticed his keen interest in music. He quickly learned to play, mimicking the fingerings of musicians he watched. He was soon astounding adults with his ability on the guitar, and before he was thirteen he began his musical career playing with popular accordionist Guerino at a dance hall on the Rue Monge. He went on to play with numerous other bands and musicians and made his first recordings with accordionist Jean Vaissade for the Ideal Company. Since Django could not read or write at the time "Jiango Renard" was how his name appeared on these records. On November 2nd, 1928 an event took place that would forever change Django's life. At one o'clock in the morning the 18 year old Django returned from a night of playing music at a new club "La Java" to the caravan that was now the home of himself and his new wife. The caravan was filled with celluloid flowers his wife had made to sell at the market on the following day. Django upon hearing what he thought was a mouse among the flowers bent down with a candle to look.

The wick from the candle fell into the highly flammable celluloid flowers and the caravan was almost instantly transformed into a raging inferno. Django wrapped himself in a blanket to shield him from the flames. Somehow he and his wife made it across the blazing room to safety outside, but his left hand, and his right side from knee to waist were badly burned. Initially doctors wanted to amputate his leg but Django refused. He was moved to a nursing home where the care was so good his leg was saved. Django was bedridden for eighteen months. During this time he was given a guitar, and with great determination Django created a whole new fingering system built around the two fingers on his left hand that had full mobility. His fourth and fifth digits of the left hand were permanently curled towards the palm due to the tendons shrinking from the heat of the fire. He could use them on the first two strings of the guitar for chords and octaves but complete extension of these fingers was impossible. His soloing was all done with the index and middle fingers! Film clips of Django show his technique to be graceful and precise, almost defying belief.

Django was influenced by jazz recordings of Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti , Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington . This new music found a place deep in Django's heart. It provided the perfect vehicle for his prodigious talent for improvisation. Django rarely if ever played a solo the same way twice. Numerous recordings prove this to be true. His creative genius was not only that of the master improviser, but also that of the composer, and he can be credited with numerous pieces with beautiful melodies and sophisticated, subtle harmonic structures. However, Django could not read or write musical notation and he was at the mercy of others that could to get his ideas down on paper. 1934 proved to be the most important year of his life. The Quintet of the Hot Club of France was born! As the fates would have it, the Quintet was formed by a chance meeting of Django and St�phane Grappelli. A band of fourteen musicians including Django, St�phane, Roger Chaput, and Louis Vola were commissioned to play at the Hotel Cambridge at teatime. During intermission Django would find a corner backstage and play his guitar.

One day St�phane joined in and both were so pleased with the exchange they went on to play together more and more frequently joined by Roger Chaput (guitar), Louis Vola (bass), and eventually Django's brother Joseph (guitar). A small record company Ultraphone recorded their first sides Dinah , Tiger Rag , Oh Lady be Good , and I Saw Stars . These first records caused a sensation! The Quintet went on to record hundreds of sides and had a following on both sides of the ocean. 1939 found the Quintet touring in England when the war broke out. Django returned to Paris while St�phane remained in England. Django played and recorded throughout the war years substituting Hubert Rostaing's clarinet for Stephen's violin. He somehow avoided the fate of many of his kinfolk who went to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps. After the war he was rejoined by St�phane and they again played and recorded. He toured briefly with Duke Ellington in America and returned to Paris where he continued his career until 1951 when he retired to the small village of Samois sur Seine.

On May 16th 1953 Django suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and died, leaving behind his wife Sophie and son Babik. His music remains as vital and exciting today as it was when he lived, a legacy of joy to all future generations that rediscover the genius of the Belgian gypsy Django Reinhardt. Django Django By Michael Dregni A favorite photograph of Django Reinhardt pictures him standing alongside Stéphane Grappelli, the duo looking suave and sophisticated in white tuxedos. The photograph is steeped in the aura of 1930s Paris, where the Quintette du Hot Club de France was formed: charming, cool, classy. Grappelliï¿½Djangoï¿½s musical partner and foil, rival and co-composerï¿½holds his magic violin under his arm. Django leans causally on his famous Selmer guitar, his left hand carefully placed in his suit pocket to hide his disfigurement. This is the hand that he not only learned to play in spite of, but the hand that also shaped his style due to its limitations.

But itï¿½s the look on Djangoï¿½s face that always makes you examine this picture closely. Itï¿½s a look that comes through in many photographs of the Gypsy guitarist: His dark eyes seem to twinkle. His pencil-thin mustache seems slightly devilish. And his smile.... His smile is happy-go-lucky, mysterious, and omniscient at the same time. Above all, Djangoï¿½s smile seems to hold the key to his music. The Music From 1928 to 1953, Django recorded some 750 to 1,000 sidesï¿½counts vary. Much of his music is readily available today on numerous compact disc reissues and complete, chronological sets. Add to this the alternate takes, unissued sides, radio broadcasts, and live recordings recently issued, and you soon realize that Django was the definition of prolific. Ironically, many peopleï¿½s first impressions of Djangoï¿½s music are often negative due to the medium.

Unless you were lucky enough to see him play in person, most people first hear him via his recordings on 78-rpm discsï¿½or LP or CD collections that are often made from the 78s instead of the masters, and even the masters are forty-five to sixty years old. Listening to the QHCF for the first time, the first sound that greets the ears is hiss and static as the recording begins. Then the full band erupts into the first chorus with three acoustic guitars, Grappelliï¿½s violin soaring above, and a string bass below, the bandï¿½s sound often pushing the sonic limits of another eraï¿½s single-mike mono recording technology. The sound is akin to the cacophony of the modern civilization of the 1930s: The then-new sound of automobile traffic, machines, airplanes, street noises, a growing population of people. And then Djangoï¿½s guitar cuts through the band and the music blossoms. He takes the lead as the rhythm guitars fall back into the famous boom-chick, boom-chick of la pompe, the jazz manouche rhythm.

Djangoï¿½s guitar is sublime and pure, unhurried in its cascades of elegant diminished arpeggios. Itï¿½s the sound of one manï¿½s genius breaking through the chaos of the modern world. When Django begins to play, thatï¿½s when the listener is hooked. The Legend The story of Jean Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt has all the makings of legend. He was born in a gypsy caravan during the night of January 23, 1910, near the Belgian town of Liberchies, neighboring Charleroi. His unmarried mother, known to audiences as "La Belle Laurence," was a dancer and acrobat working with a wandering troupe of Gypsy comedians and musicians. Many have since referred to Django as a Belgian Gypsy, due to his place of birth, or a French Gypsy, as he lived most of his life in France. But the nationality was never important; his cultural background as a Gypsy was.

Some 2,000 years ago, the Gypsy tribe known as the Sinti are believed to have migrated from the banks of the Sinti River in India (from which they derived their name) to the Persian court, where they found work as musicians. From Persia, the Gypsies traveled what is known as the Romany trail leading through the Middle East, into North Africa and Europe. Europeans, believing these wandering people to come from Egypt, corrupted their name into "Gypsy." Often chased away from "civilization," the Gypsies have become nomadic of necessity more than desire. Forced to live a transitory life, they managed to survive on their skills as musicians, entertainers, metalsmiths, and traders. They have become a people of the diaspora, without a homeland and without a promised land. Django grew up a wanderer. Living in a caravanï¿½roulotte in French or verdine in the language of the Romï¿½Djangoï¿½s mother led him and his younger brother Joseph, known affectionately as "Nin-Nin," through France, south to Nice, across to Italy, Corsica, Algeria, and then back to Paris.

The family would live on and off over the years in caravans on the nether zones at the edge of Paris by one of the old city gates. Django learned to play first violin, then banjo. The banjo was the prime rhythm instrument before the ascendance of the guitar as the banjoï¿½s unamplified resonator blessed it with volume and the cutting, trebly tone gave it the power to accompany an accordeon. Django, still in his teens, played banjo, then guitar, with the popular Italian Gypsy accordeonist Vetese Guérino and others in the cafés, dancehalls, night clubs, and at the bals des Auvergnats, named for the people of the French province of Auvergne who migrated to the city, bringing the folk music that became a source of musette. Playing his instrument, Django appeared to have a rare talent as a musician, an ability respected and admired among Gypsies.

As Charles Delaunay, Djangoï¿½s French friend and manager, wrote in his colorful biography of the guitarist: "As water is a fishï¿½s element and the air a birdï¿½s, music was Djangoï¿½s." The Tragedy And then tragedy struck. At one oï¿½clock in the morning of November 2, 1928, Django returned from a club to his caravan. His first wife, known to history only as Bella, had fashioned flowers from the highly flammable proto-plastic, celluloid, to sell in the market; a candle Django was holding ignited the celluloid and in minutes the caravan was aflame. Django and his wife escaped, but not before Django suffered horrible burns over half of his body. Djangoï¿½s left hand was disfigured from the burns: His two small fingers were twisted and limited in use; his ring and index fingers still functioned. His family thought he would never play guitar again, and as Delaunay writes, the men of the caravan wept. But while bed-ridden and recovering, Django taught himself, slowly and surely, to play again.

Grappelli himself explained it best in a 1954 interview with the British music magazine Melody Maker after Djangoï¿½s death: "He acquired amazing dexterity with those first two fingers, but that didnï¿½t mean he never employed the others. He learned to grip the guitar with his little finger on the E string and the next finger on the B. That accounts for some of those chord progressions which Django was probably the first to perform on the guitar." The Jazz It was when Django met Stéphane Grappelli and began jamming on American swing tunes that a new epoch in European jazz dawned. The Hot Club quintet formed in late 1934, named for the Hot Club de France, a meeting place for jazz musicians and fans in Paris. Together, Django and Grappelli were an inspired pair, similar to the American guitar-and-violin duo of Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti. Djangoï¿½s playing with the QHCF in its glory years of 1937-1939 was thoroughly modern, infused by the wild, free, exciting sound of American jazz that transformed the old into the new.

Swing supercharged the music, and the sound of the QHCF came to define an era. In hindsight, itï¿½s important to note that Django was not a solitary Gypsy guitar genius, but part of a style. Gitan Gypsies Poulette Castro, Laro Castro, Matteo Garcia, and Gusti Malha were the patriarchs of Gypsy guitarists at the time when Django first starting playing in the bals-musette and jazz hot clubs of Paris. Malha played with Gypsy accordeonist Guerino and others, composing and recording early musette classics such as "La Valse des Niglos," or "The Waltz of the Hedgehogs," named for a favored delicacy of Gypsy cuisine. It was Poulette Castro, Garcia, and Malhaï¿½s style of playing that set the tone of the times and caught Djangoï¿½s ear. Django, however, was an audacious pioneer, infusing musette with jazz.

Initially, musette and swing were two camps of musical styles that did not want to mix: As the great accordeonist Jo Privat recalled, "There were ï¿½No swing dancingï¿½ signs in musette ballrooms. Swing could provoke brawls. Guys who like to hold their girls tight didnï¿½t like that." But to Django, it was the swing that made it mean something. As Delaunay quotes Django himself: "Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesnï¿½t have." Django was not the only young Gypsy guitarist following in the early mastersï¿½ footsteps. The Gitan Gypsy brothers Baro, Sarane, and Matelo Ferretï¿½as well as their cousin, Challain Ferretï¿½remain the most famous of the other Gypsy guitarists. The Ferrets also taught themselves banjo, then guitar, and played in and recorded with Parisian musette bands, often playing daring and inventive solos and blending bebop with waltzes to create a unique style.

Django and the Ferret brothersï¿½ careers were intermixed. Sarane, Matelo, and Challain played rhythm in the QHCF at times, but it was Baro who would record numerous sides and play with the quintet on and off for many years. The Man Stories about Django are many. As a reviewer of the Hot Clubï¿½s concert premiere in 1934 in Jazz Tango magazine hinted: "It might be said that he was the revelation of the concert. He is a curious musician, with a style like no one elseï¿½s... Moreover, Reinhardt is a charming fellow who seems to offer in his mode of existence the same whimsical imagination that illumines his solos...." Listen to these stories that illuminate Django the man: He was terrified of ghosts. He could not stop himself from gambling. He adored movies, particularly American gangster films, and from them developed a fondness for wide-brimmed hats that he liked to perch askew on his head and tuck over one eye. He was amazingly adept at games, from pinball to pool. He had a pet monkey. And then there was the time he met Andrés Segovia.

He played for the Spanish classical maestro a short jazz crepuscule on his Selmer guitar. When Django finished, Segovia was dazzled by the piece and asked for a transcription. Django laughed and shrugged, saying that it was merely an improvisation. And there was Djangoï¿½s pride, illustrated by the story of how the Hot Club quartet became a quintet. Grappelli told the tale: "I could see something was worrying Django. And when I asked him what the trouble was one day, he replied: ï¿½It doesnï¿½t matter all that much. Itï¿½s just that when youï¿½re playing, Stéphane, youï¿½ve got both [QHCF guitarist Roger] Chaput and me backing you, but when Iï¿½m soloing Iï¿½ve only got one guitar behind me!ï¿½" With that, Djangoï¿½s brother Joseph was hired as a second rhythm guitarist. And there was Djangoï¿½s sense of style. Grappelli: "I shall never forget the first day Django put on evening dressï¿½with bright red socks.

It took some time to explain, without injuring his feelings, that red socks were not the right thing. Django insisted that he liked it that way, because red looked so well with black." And finally there was his innocence, a Gypsy out of step with the modern world. Again, Grappelli told the story, telling of how the Hot Club was invited to dine with the king of Belgium during a Belgian tour. Django, not knowing better, ate his lettuce with his fingersï¿½but, as Grappelli remembered, he somehow did it with great style and class so it seemed alright. The New Beginning World War II split the cornerstones of the QHCF: Django stayed in France while Grappelli was in England. Freed from the confines of the QHCF, Django could explore other venues and band arrangements, setting the stage for a second era of Djangoï¿½s music as he broadened his vocabulary of styles. Django replaced Grappelli and his violin with the clarinet of Hubert Rostaing, creating a band sound no doubt influenced by recordings of Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian. Django also played with Fud Candrixï¿½s big band.

After the war in 1946, Django regrouped with Grappelli for a short time before setting sail to tour the United States with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. During the 1940s, Django experimented with going electric. Devoted to his acoustic Selmer guitar but having trouble cutting through the sound of the larger bands he was playing in, he affixed a magnetic French-made Stimer pickup to the petite bouche soundhole. The sound created a new dimension in his playing, which is infused with bebop he heard in America. The Coda At the dawn of the 1950s, Django moved his small familyï¿½including his second wife Sophie "Naguine" Ziegler and their son Babikï¿½from Paris to the town of Samois-sur-Seine, just south of the capital. "I think he ended up living in Samois because it was a retreat for him where he could relax and rethink his music," Babik recalled. "He was very inspired at the time and listened to everything from Beethoven to bebopï¿½especially bebop." Django was in semi-retirement, playing now and then, but spending more time fishing.

On May 15, 1953, he was struck by a fatal stroke. He was but forty-three years old. Django Reinhardt lived a long life in his forty-three years. Itï¿½s impossible to sum up his influence on jazz as that influence continues to this day. Matelo Ferretï¿½s sons Boulou and Elios Ferré still carry Djangoï¿½s torch to the extremes of musical creativity, and Gypsy jazz is currently in a renaissance with Hot Club bands in Japan, Norway, Sardinia, San Francisco, and almost anywhere else that jazz is heard. Perhaps itï¿½s best for Djangoï¿½s old cohort, Stéphane Grappelli, to have the final word. He summed up Djangoï¿½s playing in the 1954 Melody Maker interview: "He did more for the guitar than any other man in jazz. His way of playing was unlike anyone elseï¿½s, and jazz is different because of him. There can be many other fine guitarists, but never can there be another Reinhardt.

I am sure of that." Django Reinhardt Guitar Licks Django Reinhardt Licks Gypsy jazz guitaristDjango Reinhardt was the first famous European jazz musician. Born in Belgium (that's where the .be in comes from) and raised in a gypsy camp near Paris he first learned to play violin, but later switched to banjo-guitar.At the age of 12 Django Reinhardt played good enough to play professionally. In 1928 disaster struck and the 3rd and 4rd fingers of his left hand got mutilated in a caravan fire, but Django developed a new fingering system and by 1930 he was playing again in Paris' cafes. In Montemartre he heard records of American jazz players like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and he absorbed their music. In 1934 he met Stephane Grappelli, a violin player with whom he founded 'Quintette du Hot Club de France' . 'Nuages' and 'Minor Swing' are some famous Django Reinhardt compositions. Django Reinhardt became the icon of gypsy jazz guitar. Learn how to play Gypsy Jazz Guitar Chords Here... V to I Lick This lick is brilliant in it's simplicity.

Sometimes I wonder why I don't come up with licks like these myself all the time. It starts with a chromatic leap to the 9 of E7, followed by an E7 arpeggio. On the Am Django plays a A minor triad with an added 9. This is a nice idea to avoid playing too much 7th arpeggio's in your improvisations. Make your own personal arpeggio's : take a triad and add a 9 or an 11 or leave out the 5th and replace it with a tension. Minor Lick The following tabs are a sample transcription from Django's ' Nuages ' (click and scroll down to listen to a sample mp3). The lick is played in the Hungarian gypsy scale (1 2 b3 #4 5 b6 7). In the second bar Django Reinhardt plays a major 3. Mixing between minor and major thirds is a sound you can hear a lot in oriental styles of music. 0

Question: What nationality was guitarist Django Reinhardt?
Answer: Belgian