J is for Jazz 002: DJANGO REINHARDT

Django Reinhardt Vol 2 
Dial EP, c 1943

 

 

But when it came to describing for them who had never heard it the poignant fleeting exquisitely delicate melody of that guitar, memory always faltered.  There was no way to describe them that.  You had to hear that, the steady, swinging, never wavering beat with the two-or-three-chord haunting minor riffs at the ends of phrases, each containing the whole feel and pattern of the joyously unhappy tragedy of this earth (and of that other earth).  And always over it all the one picked single string of the melody following infallibly the beat, weaving in and out around it with the hard-driven swiftly-run arpeggios, always moving, never hesitating, never getting lost and having to pause to get back on, shifting suddenly from the set light-accent of the melancholy jazz beat to the sharp erratic-explosive gypsy rhythm that cried over life while laughing at it, too fast for the ear to follow, too original for the mind to anticipate, too intricate for the memory to remember.  Andy was not a jazzman, but Andy knew guitars.  The American Eddy Lang was good, but Django the Frenchman was untouchable, like God.

 

JAMES JONES
 

From Here To Eternity  

(1951)

 

 

The music of Django Reinhardt has been called 'impossible to describe,' but James Jones did a very good job, I've always thought, of defining what makes it so bewitchingly unique.  No one has ever played the guitar in quite the way that Django played the guitar.  Like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan and only a handful of other jazz musicians who came before and after him, Django's style was immediately identifiable and exclusively his own.  Even people who claim to hate jazz will smile and begin to tap their foot if you play them a track by the Quintette du Hot Club de France, the all-acoustic string band he co-founded with violinist Stéphane Grappelli in 1934. 

 

NAGASAKI (1936)

LE QUINTETTE DU HOT CLUB DE FRANCE

DJANGO REINHARDT [guitar solos]  

STÉPHANE GRAPPELLI [violin]

JOSEPH REINHARDT, PIERRE FERRET [guitars]  

LOUIS VOLA [bass]

FREDDIE TAYLOR [vocal]

    

 

Although he spent most of his life in France, Jean Baptiste 'Django' Reinhardt was actually born in Belgium, near a small village called Liberchies in the caravan belonging to his unmarried Manouche (or Romany) mother.  He grew up in this caravan, travelling the roads of France (and briefly of Italy and Algeria during World War One) with the woman that everyone called 'Négros' and his younger brother Joseph (who would one day join him as second guitarist in the Quintette du Hot Club de France).  Although he learned to play the banjo, the guitar and the violin at an early age, he never attended school and did not learn to read and write until he reached adulthood.  By the age of thirteen he was such a proficient musician that he was able to support himself by playing the banjo, accompanying the 'gypsy accordionist' Guérino every night in a club on the Rue Monge in Paris, where his extended Manouche family had now decided to park its caravans more or less permanently.  His technique dazzled everyone who heard him and he was soon being asked to accompany other Manouche musicians in various Parisian nightclubs and cabarets, his mother dutifully coming to collect him and his pay after each performance to ensure he didn't gamble it away.  It was with one of these same Manouche musicians –– a cabaret singer named Chabel –– that he allegedly made his debut recording some time in 1924.  He was then fourteen years old.

 

 

 

 

DJANGO REINHARDT 
(name misspelled), 1930s

 

 

Four years later he appeared on another record by accordionist Jean Vaissade, playing banjo again with his name misspelled as 'Jiango Renard.'  (The name Django supposedly means 'I awake' in the Romany dialect his family spoke.)  A few months after this, in November 1928, he was seriously injured in a fire that started in his caravan when a burning candle came into contact with some celluloid flowers.  His pregnant wife, who was with him at the time, managed to escape the ensuing blaze with minor injuries, but Django sustained terrible burns to his right leg as well as to the third and fourth fingers of his left hand.  He spent eighteen months in a nursing home recovering from his injuries and re-teaching himself to play the guitar, developing an entirely new style of fingering that would still allow him to play lightning-fast arpeggios on the instrument using only his first and second fingers.  Amazingly, he was able to return to the recording studio in 1931, this time as a member of Louis Vola's orchestra. 

  

In 1932 (or perhaps a little earlier, no one can seem to agree on the precise date) he met classically-trained violinist Stéphane Grappelli, a consummate professional who was, emotionally and professionally, his polar opposite.  But they shared a love for the new North American music called jazz and jammed together many times at a new Paris club called 'Le Hot Club de France.'  When the manager of the club wanted to put an all-French band together to perform regularly at the venue, the first musicians he thought of hiring were Reinhardt and his elegant friend Grappelli.  The Quintette's first recordings –– test pressings that were never officially released –– were rejected by their would-be record label Odéon because they were deemed to be too modern.  Jazz was still considered to be a cacophonous foreign noise in France at this time and they struggled to find another record company willing to offer them a contract.  Finally they found the tiny Ultraphone label and recorded their debut single –– a version of the 1920s standard Dinah backed by George and Ira Gershwin's Lady Be Good –– for it in December 1933.  The record was an instant success, even earning rave reviews from critics who had previously expressed nothing but contempt for this 'noisy' new music.

 

 

NUAGES (1937)     
LE QUINTETTE DU HOT CLUB DE FRANCE 

DJANGO REINHARDT [guitar solos]  

STÉPHANE GRAPPELLI [violin]

JOSEPH REINHARDT, PIERRE FERRET [guitars]  

LOUIS VOLA [bass] 

 

 

The success of the Quintette –– more recordings, shows in England and in most of the major cities of western Europe –– never really changed Django, who would often forget or simply not bother to turn up for concerts if he was busy fishing, playing cards or involved in a particularly gripping game of billiards.  This behaviour angered concert promoters and frustrated Grappelli, who tried his best to work around it for the music's sake but often found himself at odds with his friend due his wandering ways and sometimes costly lack of professionalism.  The Quintette nevertheless continued to record and tour and was appearing in England when World War Two broke out in September 1939.  Django's decision to return to France was a courageous one, given that Hitler's 'Final Solution' included the extermination of the entire Romany race along with Jews, homosexuals and anyone else it deemed to be of 'impure blood.'   Grappelli did not return to France with the rest of the band, meaning that the two friends did not play together again until 1946.  Django continued to perform and record throughout the war as frequently as possible, adding the clarinet of Hubert Rostaing to his band to replace Grappelli's missing violin.  In 1943, three years into the Occupation of France, Django was arrested as a suspected spy while attempting to cross the border into Switzerland.  He was only saved from being sent to the gas chamber by a sympathetic German officer who luckily happened to be a jazz fan and would not hear of anyone as talented as he was being sent to die in Auschwitz.

 

 
          

  IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD (1937)    
LE QUINTETTE DU HOT CLUB DE FRANCE         
DJANGO REINHARDT [guitar solos]  

STÉPHANE GRAPPELLI [violin]      
JOSEPH REINHARDT, MARCEL BIANCHI [guitars]  

LOUIS VOLA [bass]
  

 

 

 

 

DJANGO REINHARDT and DUKE ELLINGTON (behind)

 

 

The post-war years saw Django visit North America for the first time, playing electric guitar with the Duke Ellington Orchestra in what some critics believed was an attempt to modernize his sound.  The Ellington experiment failed –– although he was thrilled to be playing with such a legendary artist, he only got to perform at the end of the maestro's concerts, accompanied only by him on piano and never by his complete orchestra –– and when the offers he kept expecting to receive to play in California were not forthcoming, he gladly returned to France, where he was reunited with Grappelli and began sporadically performing and recording again as a member of their re-formed Quintette.  He also took up painting, telling people that he preferred creating pictures to playing music, and bought his first house, built on waste ground in one of the outlying suburbs of Paris, that his Manouche relatives quickly moved into and reduced to rubble virtually overnight.

 

 
     

HONEYSUCKLE ROSE (1946)  
DJANGO REINHARDT [electric guitar)  
accompanied by DUKE ELLINGTON & HIS ORCHESTRA  

 
 

 

By 1950 his career seemed to be in decline.  Regular bookings became harder to find as what was seen as the 'quaint' jazz of the 1930s was pushed aside in favour of the new harder-edged be-bop sound pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (musicians he admired and unfortunately failed to meet while visiting New York).  Django went into semi-retirement, spending his time painting and fishing while he and his wife lived quietly in their old caravan near the town of Samois-sur-Seine.  During a tour of Switzerland in 1953, he began to complain of headaches, not realizing they were the early warning signs of the stroke that would prematurely end his life on 16 May 1953.  The jazz world was devastated, unable to believe it had lost its first authentic European-born genius at the age of forty-three.  He was survived by his sons Lousson and Babik, talented guitarists in their own right who shared his gift for composing original music that seamlessly blended elements of the classical, jazz and Romany styles.  His two grandsons also became guitarists, continuing what has obviously become a proud family tradition.   Stéphane Grappelli continued to play well into his eighties (he lived until 1997) and always insisted that an empty chair be placed on stage each night wherever he performed.  When asked why he insisted on this, he would always reply 'For Django.'    

 

   

 

Use the link below to visit the UK website The Django Reinhardt Swing Page which features links to various performers, festivals, and workshops all around the world:

 

 

 

 

http://www.hotclub.co.uk/   

 

 

 

The standard (if dated) biography is Django Reinhardt by his friend and former business associate CHARLES DELAUNAY.  It was last reprinted by the DaCapo Press in 1993 and remains widely available.  A new biography by MICHAEL DREGNI titled Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend was published by the Oxford University Press in 2004 and is now considered to be the definitive biography.

 

The WOODY ALLEN film Sweet and Lowdown, starring SEAN PENN as an eccentric 1930s jazz guitarist named 'Emmet Ray' who is obsessed with Django, was released in 1999. 

 

       

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.    

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:  

 

 
J is for Jazz 001: LESTER YOUNG

 

     
J is for Jazz 004: JACK TEAGARDEN

 

     
J is for Jazz 005: SARAH VAUGHAN

 

 

 

Last updated 1 October 2021 §  

  

Betty (1961) by GEORGES SIMENON

Le Livre de Poche France, 2008

 

Elle regarda Laure dan les yeux, méchamment, acheva d'une voix dure:

 

– Toute ma vie, j'ai couru après ma blessure.

 

Elle s'était juré de ne pas pleurer. Ce n'était plus possible.  Les larmes jaillissaient, épaisses, de ses paupières chaudes, coulaient le long de son nez, mettaient un goût salé dans sa bouche.  En même temps, elle riait.

 

 

She looked Laure in the eyes, spitefully, finished in a hard voice:

 

'All my life, I've chased after my wound.'

 

She didn't blame herself for not crying.  It was no longer possible.  The tears gushed out, thickly, from her hot eyelids, ran along her nose, put a dirty taste in her mouth.  At the same time, she laughed.

 

 

Excerpts translated by  

BR

 

 

 

The Novel:  An attractive young woman, drunk and disoriented and in desperate need of a bath, turns up one night in a seedy Paris bar called Le Trou [The Hole].  She has no idea how she came to be there, only that she is no longer welcome in the plush apartment on the Rue de Ponthieu she formerly shared with her husband and their two young daughters.  

 

The bar owner, Mario, takes pity on her and asks if she would like something to eat.  No, she tells him, nothing.  But she would like another drink if she could have one.  She must keep drinking to block out the memories –– of all the men she's had sex with that day, of the one who brought her to this decidedly sleazy bar, of signing the paper which granted full custody of her children to her husband and his family –– or she may go mad. 

 

But what would it matter if she did lose her mind?   Who would really care if she woke up in a hospital or the gutter the next day or, better yet, never woke up at all?  She's a drunk and a whore.  The paper she signed with her own name –– 'Elisabeth Etamble, née Fayet' –– and had witnessed by her husband and mother-in-law freely admitted as much.

 

So begins one of Simenon's most chilling novels, a disturbing yet psychologically riveting examination of the ideas that damnation holds a certain appeal in the minds of certain people and that no good deed, however noble it may be in intention, ever goes unpunished.

 

Betty, as Elisabeth now calls herself, is eventually taken home and cared for by Mario's girlfriend, a generous and motherly middle-aged widow named Laure.  Laure allows Betty to stay with her in her hotel room and, as she and the equally concerned Mario slowly nurse her back to health, they gradually begin to piece together the tragic details of her story.  Trapped in a loveless bourgeois marriage to Guy, a man who neither needed nor ever truly understood her, Betty sought refuge in the arms of a lover, becoming more and more reckless as time went on until, one night, she was caught making love to him on the floor of their apartment by Guy and his mother.

 

Disgusted and mortified at being cuckolded like this in front of his mother, Guy threw Betty out, later making her sign a paper admitting her guilt and giving him custody of their daughters in exchange for a specific sum of money.  This, Betty tells Laure, was the crowning achievement of a life devoted to wickedness, of an existence spent digging into the 'wound' that has simultaneously defined and blighted it.  She always suspected that she would turn out to be a whore, she says, after voyeuristically observing her uncle having sex with his own parlor maid when she was fifteen.  Signing the paper that deprived her of her children and being thrown out by her husband had been nothing more than the next logical step on her inevitable, self-guided road to hell.

 

 

Hamish Hamilton UK, 1975

 

 

But Guy proves to be more forgiving than she suspected, offering her a chance to return home and continue their loveless marriage as long as she agrees to act as though nothing has happened.  Betty considers accepting his proposal but ultimately rejects it, realizing that she cannot deny her true nature now that she has finally found the courage to admit the full truth of who and what she is to herself.  She stays with Laure and Mario, continuing to eavesdrop on them making love and talking about her, cunningly plotting her next move while she does so.  She begins flirting with Mario whenever Laure's back is turned, making plans to run off with him even though a doctor has warned her that she needs rest and care in a quiet, stable environment.  But Betty seeks neither rest nor stability.  She is une femme maudite [a damned woman] and must continue to pursue her own destruction and the destruction of everything 'respectable' even if the act of doing so robs Laure, her friend and benefactor, of the one thing that gives her own life as a wealthy but lonely widow its only sense of happiness and purpose.

 

 

GEORGES SIMENON, 1963

 

 

 

The Writer:  Georges Simenon was born in the Belgian city of Liège on 13 February 1903 and died eighty-six years later in the Swiss city of Lausanne, having published close to two hundred novels, over a hundred and fifty novellas and scores of short stories, articles and humorous pieces in the meantime.  

 

For most of his career he was the world's bestselling author, thanks largely to the series of successful romans policiers [crime novels] he published between 1931 and 1972 which featured his most famous creation, Commissaire Maigret (known as Inspector Maigret in most English translations of his work).  While the Maigret novels made Simenon wealthy and famous –– the character is to the francophone world what Sherlock Holmes is to the anglophone world and has been the subject of dozens of film, television and radio adaptations –– his most insightful and arguably best work is found in his romans durs ['hard' or 'tough' novels], beginning in 1931 with Le Relais d'Alsace and including such later masterpieces as Le Coup de lune [Tropic Moon], Lettre à mon juge [Letter to My Judge], La Veuve Couderc [The Widow] and La neige était sale [Dirty Snow].  These novels are gripping character studies of people living on the fringes of society –– drunks, outcasts, failures as well as the just plain foolish and persistently unlucky –– and drew strongly on his years as a newspaper reporter, raconteur and habituée of Paris nightclubs for their plots and background detail.  They are less about crime than about what motivates crime and the havoc it wreaks on the lives of hapless, self-deceiving human beings.  As Simenon himself wrote to fellow novelist André Gide in 1939:  'Ne pas pouvoir voir un homme sans se mettre à sa place, souffir pour lui…l'idéal serait de pouvoir dire tous les hommes, d'avoir vécu toutes leurs vies.  Même en petit, souffert toutes leurs souffrances.  J'en suis loin!  Avec le temps, je me rapprocherai cet idéal.' ['I can't see a man without putting myself in his place, suffering for him…the ideal would be to have the power to speak for everybody, to live everybody's lives.  Even in a small way, to suffer everything they suffer.  I'm far from doing that!  In time, I will come closer to reaching this ideal.'] 

 

 

Film Poster, 1992

 

 

Simenon was married twice and had children with each of his two wives.  He also had many affairs, which complicated his life but also furnished him with much of the raw material he needed for his work.  In 1978 his daughter Marie-Jo, his second child by his second wife Denyse, committed suicide –– a tragedy which saw him retreat from the spotlight to a certain extent, even though he continued to publish novels and went on to dictate and publish several volumes of memoirs prior to his own death on 4 September 1989.  An inveterate traveler throughout his life, Simenon visited Africa, the Middle East and the USSR and also spent ten years living in the United States –– a stay which inspired much of his finest work –– before he returned to live permanently in Europe in 1955.  An amazingly prolific author, he frequently managed to churn out between 60 and 80 pages of publishable prose a day –– a feat any writer would envy and a gift that was no doubt the source of his incredible artistic as well as financial success.  He was, as André Gide rightly called him, a 'phenomenon' who also happened to be one of the most psychologically astute novelists of the twentieth century.

 

 

 

Many novels by GEORGES SIMENON have been translated into English, including most of the Maigret series and several of his finest romans durs.  (An English translation of Betty was published by the London firm of Hamish Hamilton in 1975 but has never been reprinted to my knowledge.) 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read an excerpt of an interview (in English) with GEORGES SIMENON which originally appeared in the Summer 1955 issue of The Paris Review:

 

 

 

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5020/the-art-of-fiction-no-9-georges-simenon

 

 

 

 

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David Golder (1929) by IRÉNE NÉMIROVSKY

 

 

 

Mildred Pierce (1941) by JAMES M CAIN

 

 

 

Nightmare Alley (1946) by WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM

 

 

 

Last updated 23 May 2022

 

Une vie intense REMEMBERING JACQUES BREL

JACQUES BREL 
Performing live at l'Olympia, 1964

 

 

Ce qui compte dans une vie, c'est l'intensité d'une vie, ce n'est pas la durée d'une vie.

  

[What counts in a life is the intensity of that life, not how long a life endures.]

 

Stirring, theatrical, passionate, ironic, funny, lyrical, tragic, sentimental –– these are just a few of the words that can be used to describe the music of Jacques Brel, the great Belgian chansonnier [singer-songwriter] who was born on this day in 1929.

 

LE PLAT PAYS

JACQUES BREL   
See below for BR translation

 

Brel's career must rate as one of the most unlikely in the history of show business.  His father was the director of a company which manufactured cardboard boxes and it was partly to escape being roped into this uninspiring profession that he began performing with his local church group as a boy, first as an actor in self-created plays and then as a vocalist, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar.  In 1950 he married Thérèse Michielsen, his childhood sweetheart, and within two years was appearing regularly in the music halls and cabarets of his native Brussels.   

 

In 1953, after being invited to perform on Belgian radio, Brel signed to Philips Records, releasing his first single La Foire [The Fair] in March of that year.  Soon afterwards he moved to Paris, where the intensity of his live performances soon earned him the affection and respect of audiences and his fellow chansonniers alike.  His big break came when Juliette Greco, then one of France's most popular singers, recorded a version of his song Ça Va (also known as Le Diable, or 'The Devil' in English).  In 1954, Philips released his debut LP Jacques Brel et ses chansons and in July he made the first of what would be many triumphant appearances at L'Olympia, the most famous music-hall in Paris and the future scene of some his most electrifying, emotion charged performances.

  

AMSTERDAMJACQUES BREL  Live in concert, 1966 

 

As popular as Brel's records were, it was on the concert stage that he truly shone as a performer, using his large expressive body to act out the stories his poetic and very dramatic chansons told in a way that borrowed as much from the work of comedians like Chaplin and Jacques Tati as it did from the chansonnier tradition pioneered by artists like Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trénet.  Unlike Chevalier and his friend (and contemporary) Charles Aznavour, Brel refused to record in English, stating that his music had come from a European tradition and had to be performed in its original European style or risk being deprived of its meaning.  His refusal to perform in English didn't prevent him from selling out Carnegie Hall in New York City when he appeared there in 1965 or keep Rod McKuen from translating his song Ne me quitte pas [Don't Leave Me] into the enormously successful hit If You Go Away –– a song that would go on to be recorded literally dozens of times by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Russian rock group Mumiy Troll.  Another song translated by McKuen, Le Moribond [The Dying Man], became a worldwide hit for Canadian singer Terry Jacks in 1974 under the cheerier title Seasons in the Sun.   

 

In 1966 Brel announced his intention to retire from the concert stage –– an announcement greeted with horror by his fans and viewed as something of a minor tragedy in France and many other parts of Europe.  But he was adamant, insisting that he'd achieved all he could achieve as a cabaret performer and needed to pursue new challenges.  In 1967 he appeared in André Cayatte's film Les risques du métier [The Risks of the Profession], playing the role of a teacher unjustly accused of raping one of his female students.  He would go on to appear in eight more films, two of which, including his final film Le Far West, he also wrote, directed, and took the leading role in. 1968 saw him surprise his fans again by translating and starring as Don Quixote in the French version of the successful Broadway musical Man of La Mancha.  Doing this was a very risky move in pre-Les Misérables France.  As he said in 1973: 'C'est dangereux la comédie musicale, surtout en France, c'est trés dangereux.' ['It's dangerous to do musical comedies, especially in France, it's very dangerous.']  It was the danger that drew him to the project, just as it did to learning to fly his own plane and sail his beloved yacht, the Askoy II, through the South Pacific with only his mistress for company.   

 

Brel was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, which an exploratory operation soon revealed to be in its terminal stages.  He spent his final years flying, sailing and living on the Askoy II and, when this became too much for him to manage, in a rented house on the island of Oa Hiva.  He returned to Paris in 1977 to record what would be his final album Les Marquises [The Marquesas], named for the beautiful group of islands he now called home.  The album was released on 17 November of that same year and became an instant gold record despite his request that no publicity campaign be undertaken to promote it.  He did not return to France again until shortly before his death on 9 October 1978.  His body was later returned to Oa Hiva, where it was buried not far from the grave of the artist Paul Gauguin.

 

 

  

MADELEINE

JACQUES BREL
    French TV performance, c 1964

The song is about a man waiting for a girl who promises 

to show up for a date with him each week but never does

 

 

 

Use the links below to visit the website (translation is available) of Belgian singer-songwriter and actor JACQUES BREL and hear DAVID BOWIE and SCOTT WALKER perform two of his songs in English.

 

 

https://fondationbrel.be/

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uPZIG5BHD4

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyl8Om0yV2c

 

  

 

LE PLAT PAYS* 

[The Flat Country] 

 

 

With the North Sea for a dumping ground    
And only waves of sand dunes to stop the waves    
And the rocks that grow sick of the waves that pass them  
 

And which never stop passing in the heart 
With always more shadows to come  
With the wind from the east, hear it clutching on to    
The flat country that is mine    

 

With cathedrals the only mountains    
Their black steeples like greasy poles    
Where stone devils tear down the clouds  
With the passing of days your only journey    
And roads in the rain your only goodnight    
With the wind from the west, hear it wanting    
The flat country that is mine    

 

With a sky so low that a canal loses itself    
With a sky so low that it humbles itself   
With a sky so grey that a canal hangs itself  
With a sky so grey that it has to forgive itself    
With the north wind that comes to tear itself apart  
With the wind from the north, listen to it crack apart    
The flat country that is mine    

 

With Italy that flows down through the river Escaut  
With blonde Frida when she becomes Margot    
When the sons of November return to us in May    
When the plains are steaming and trembling in July    
When the wind laughs, when the wind's in the wheat    
When the wind's in the south, listen to it singing to    
The flat country that is mine  

 

 

Translated by 

BR  

 

 

*This is one of many fine songs that Brel 

wrote and sang about his native Belgium.    

  
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.  

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

  

 
La Chanson est la vie 001: CLAUDE NOUGARO

 

 
La Chanson est la vie 002: JACQUES DUTRONC  

 

 
La Chanson est la vie 003: BARBARA

 

     

                                                                              

Last updated 18 October 2021   §