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| 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.
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)
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| 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.
LE QUINTETTE DU HOT CLUB DE FRANCE
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.
LE QUINTETTE DU HOT CLUB DE FRANCE
DJANGO REINHARDT [guitar solos]
JOSEPH REINHARDT, MARCEL BIANCHI [guitars]
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| 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.
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.'
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 §
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