Django Reinhardt
Summary
- I remember the day i first heard of Django Reinhardt. We were in Jo'burg and went out to dinner with Lebo and Soso and ? and there was a band playing guitar. I had just started learning guitar but danged if I couldn't recognise a single chord. So I went up to them afterward and complimented their playing and they told me the story of Django Reinhardt.
- Django was born in 1910 in a Romani caravan. He barely went to school and couldnt read period, let alone read music. But Romani culture was full of music. He learned to play violin, but at 12 he was given a banjo-guitar which loved.
Details
- He was good at improvising and creating new tunes from existing music.
- When he was 18, his caravan exploded in fire and he was badly burned. His pinkie and ring finger would be useless. But he simply relearned and figured out new chord positions that he could play with his remaining fingers
- He invented a new style of music called dancehall jazz
- He influenced musicians such as Prince and Jimi Hendrix
- He composed a symphony by playing the notes on his guitar that each instrument should play as another musician transcribed it
References
- Range - Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - David Epstein
- Watch him play here
- Watch a tribute band in his style on npr here at the Django Reinhardt festival
Quotes
Highlight: Perhaps the greatest improv master of all could not read, period—words or music. Django Reinhardt was born in Belgium in 1910, in a Romani caravan. His early childhood talents were chicken stealing and trout tickling—feeling along a riverbank for fish and rubbing their bellies until they relaxed and could be tossed ashore. Django grew up outside Paris in an area called la Zone, where the city’s cesspool cleaners unloaded waste each night. His mother, Négros, was too busy supporting the family making bracelets out of spent artillery shell casings she gathered from a World War I battlefield to lord over anyone’s music practice. Django went to school if he felt like it, but he mostly didn’t. He crashed movie theaters and shot billiards, and was surrounded by music. Wherever Romani gathered, there were banjos, harps, pianos, and especially violins.
The violin’s portability made it the classic Romani instrument, and Django started there, but he didn’t love it. He learned in the call-and-response style. An adult would play a section of music and he would try to copy it. When he was twelve, an acquaintance gave him a hybrid banjo-guitar. He had found his thing, and became obsessed. He experimented with different objects as picks when his fingers needed a break: spoons, sewing thimbles, coins, a piece of whalebone. He teamed up with a banjo-playing hunchback named Lagardère, and they wandered the Paris streets, busking and improvising duets.
In his mid teens, Django was at a restaurant in Paris where the city’s accordionists had gathered. He and his banjo-guitar were asked to the stage to play for the other musicians. Django launched into a polka that was known as a skill-proving piece for accordionists because it was so hard to play. When he finished the traditional form, rather than stopping he careened into a series of lightning improvisations, bending and twisting the song into creations none of the veteran musicians had ever heard. Django was playing “with a drawn knife,” as the lingo went. He was looking for a fight by warping a sacred dancehall tune, but he was so original that he got away with it. His creativity was unbound. “I wonder if, in his younger days,” one of his music partners said, “he even knew that printed music existed.” Django would soon need all the versatility he had learned.
He was eighteen when a candle in his wagon ignited a batch of celluloid flowers that his wife, Bella, had fashioned for a funeral. The wagon exploded into an inferno. Django was burned over half his body and ended up bedridden for a year and a half. For the rest of his life the pinkie and ring finger of his left hand, his fret hand, were dangling flesh, useless on the strings. Django was used to improvising. Like Pelegrina of the figlie del coro when she lost her teeth, he pivoted. He taught himself how to play chords with a thumb and two fingers. His left hand had to sprint up and down the neck of his guitar, the index and middle finger flitting waterbug-like over the strings. He reemerged with a new way of handling the instrument, and his
Highlight: With a French violinist, Django fused dancehall musette with jazz and invented a new form of improvisational music that defied easy characterization, so it was just called “Gypsy jazz.” Some of his spontaneous compositions became “standards,” pieces that enter the canon from which other musicians improvise. He revolutionized the now-familiar virtuosic guitar solo that pervaded the next generation’s music, from Jimi Hendrix, who kept an album of Django’s recordings and named one of his groups Band of Gypsys, to Prince (self-taught, played more than a half-dozen different genres of instruments on his debut album). Long before Hendrix melted “The Star-Spangled Banner” into his own wondrous creation, Django did it with the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”
Even though he never learned to read music (or words—a fellow musician had to teach him to sign his autograph for fans), Django composed a symphony, playing on his guitar what he wanted each instrument in the ensemble to do while another musician struggled to transcribe it.