Django’s timeless swing
Django Reinhardt remains one of Europe’s most celebrated guitarists, but his musical achievement tends to be overshadowed by his legend. We aim to set the gypsy jazzman’s record straight
Jean ‘Django’ Reinhardt was born in a caravan outside the Walloon town of Liberchies on January 23, 1910. He didn’t stay there long. His family soon settled on the outskirts of Paris, and Django would return to Belgium only on occasion. He paid his dues as an accompanist – first on banjo, then guitar – with established Parisian musette and jazz ensembles before forming the Quintette du Hot Club de France with violinist Stéphane Grappelli.
His dexterity had already earned him the esteem of a small but growing community of young French jazz enthusiasts and of pioneering musicians such as Duke Ellington, with whom he would later tour the US. That a 1928 caravan fire had left him with only two serviceable fingers on his chording hand gave his lightning-fast runs an almost superhuman aspect.
As respected as Django was among the initiated, the popular audience had trouble adjusting to the modernity of his gypsy swing. Strange though it seems, it wasn’t until the Occupation that Django was finally recognised as a true phenomenon.
Occupied Paris was styled as the red-light district of the Reich, a zone where normal prohibitions were cautiously relaxed in the name of pragmatic necessity. ‘Jeder einmal nach Paris,’ as Goebbels’ slogan went. ‘Everybody once to Paris.’ Jazz was one of the ‘decadent’ influences exorcised in Berlin but cynically cultivated in Paris. Of course, the Propagandastaffel monitored the temperature to make sure nothing too hot was served up, but nevertheless, it must have been odd to witness German officers fraternising with Romany, Jewish and African-American musicians.
Many of these musicians rightly feared for their lives, despite tacit official protection. They could be denounced and deported as easily as anyone else. In a moment of panic, Django attempted to escape to Switzerland but was turned back at the border.
He need not have feared. His Nuages became the quintessential French war-time tune, and he was permitted to tour Occupied Europe. Django was even invited to play Berlin. He declined, and before the Germans could insist, the Allies arrived to tour the fatherland in his stead. The return of American GIs to Europe presented endless opportunities, and Django’s success continued through the postwar years until his death in 1953.
The depth of Django’s legacy would become evident later, but even during his lifetime he was a proverbial legend. His musical virtuosity was certainly a factor, but so was a certain construction of his biography, advanced by his promoter, Charles Delaunay, and informed by that quality so highly prized in modern art: marginality.The 20th century was smitten with the figure of the outsider and, as a gypsy, Django fit the bill. With the condescending infatuation typical of the era’s fascination for anthropology, oft-told anecdotes evoked the noble savage: Django was a superb musician, yes, but he was childlike and capricious. He was illiterate well into middle age and, although he eventually learned to read and write a rudimentary French, he never learned to decipher sheet music. He scorned living indoors, preferring to sleep with his wife and pet monkey in a caravan or, later, in the backseat of a flashy car purchased at whim and abandoned just as casually. He would skip gigs without notice to engage in other more pleasurable pastimes (sleeping, fishing and café-crawling were particular favourites). He demanded exorbitant fees and squandered them on trifles, sometimes within minutes. He could be found dressed in rags, hitchhiking to the South of France to while away the summer out of doors, or dressed in Hollywood-style finery, holding court in swanky Parisian nightclubs.
This intermingling of the urbane and the untamed is a familiar jazz cliché, central to both the fawning white adulation and parochial white hostility with which the music was received in different quarters. But it furnished a ready-made niche in the public imagination. The gypsy Django of legend was the European counterpart of the archetypal African-American jazz cat.
He was not, of course, Europe’s answer to Louis Armstrong. The gypsy swing which Django pioneered was something truly new under the sun. It borrowed elements from American jazz, French musette and Romany folk tradition but was ultimately none of the above. In fact, his music incensed purists in all three camps.
At its heart was an unlikely instrument, one that would go on – thanks in no small measure to Django’s early sponsorship – to dominate popular music in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1920s, when the horn was king and strings were strictly accompaniment, the prospect of a guitarist leading the band would have been radical if it wasn’t just plumb impossible. Volume was essential in the raucous dancehalls of the modern city and, in the days before electric amplification, the guitar couldn’t compete with the full-bodied wail of the brass section.
Early on, Django played as aggressively as he could to make himself heard. But the world slowly caught up. In their effort to innovate a more robust guitar, the craftsmen at Paris’ Henri Selmer workshop sought the rising star’s counsel and endorsement. Django was pleased with the final product, a powerful model that became his signature arm. He had successfully re-imagined the guitar. Les Paul, an admirer who made the post-war pilgrimage to meet his idol, would later revolutionise it with the addition of electricity.
Django was above all a musician’s musician, and it is his fellow music-makers who most fully appreciate his work. Belgian jazz veteran Toots Thielemans was a young buck when Django’s fame spread through Europe. “Django Reinhardt was one of the giants of the age,” he says. “He was my first hero. I studied music by myself so I learned a lot from listening to records on my phonograph. I played Django’s version of Sweet Georgia Brown over and over again, trying to solve the riddle of his guitar.” The experience prompted Thielemans to pick up the instrument himself and, although known chiefly for his harmonica, he became a fine jazz guitarist.
French fusion violinist Didier Lockwood belongs to a younger generation but asserts that even rock musicians are Django’s children. “I first heard Django Reinhardt when I was a boy,” Lockwood says. “My father listened to the Quintette du Hot Club de France and other manouche musicians.” As a young violinist in the early 1970s, Lockwood brought Django’s gypsy swing sensibilities to a number of jazz and rock groups, including Magma. By the end of the decade he was collaborating with Django’s own former musical partner, Stéphane Grappelli. “I learned a lot more about Django when Grappelli invited me on tour. I was twenty years old and I was finally playing gypsy music.” The style lends itself to fusion across musical and cultural boundaries. According to Lockwood, “Django’s music transcends genre. It’s timeless, like Mozart or Jimi Hendrix.”
American guitarist Carlos Alomar, revered for his work with David Bowie in the late 1970s, also pays homage. “I never did learn how to play like Django Reinhardt,” he concedes. “Maybe those fused fingers gave him his edge. But my highest aspiration is to play just one song like him.”
DJANGOFOLLLIES FESTIVAL
Django’s birthday is celebrated musically around the world. In Brussels, the annual Djangofolllies jazz festival, headquartered in the Riches-Claires Cultural Centre, takes place this year from January 19 to 21.
