Django Reinhardt

Jean Reinhardt was born on January 23, 1910, in a Romani encampment at Liberchies, a village in the commune of Pont-à-Celles in French-speaking Belgium. His family belonged to the Manouche, the Romani people of France and the Low Countries, and they lived a travelling life, moving between Belgium, France, and North Africa during his childhood. The nickname Django, by which the world would know him, came from his own community; among the Manouche it is commonly understood to mean "I awake" ^[1].

His mother, Laurence Reinhardt, known as Négros, raised Django and his younger brother Joseph largely on her own, and by the end of the First World War the family had settled in the encampments on the edge of Paris, near the Porte de Choisy. Formal schooling barely touched him. He never learned to read or write fluently, and throughout his life he signed documents with difficulty. Music filled the gap. The caravans around him were full of players, and the boy absorbed banjo, violin, and guitar by watching and imitating ^[2].

By the age of twelve or thirteen he was performing in the bals-musette, the accordion-led dance halls of working-class Paris, accompanying accordionists on a banjo-guitar. He made his first recordings in 1928 as a sideman to accordionist Jean Vaissade, still a teenager and already known in the musette world as an unusually quick and inventive accompanist ^[1].

On the night of October 26, 1928, a candle ignited a bundle of celluloid flowers inside the caravan Django shared with his first wife, Florine "Bella" Mayer. The fire spread fast. He survived, but his right leg and left hand were badly burned, and the ring finger and little finger of that hand, the hand he used on the fretboard, were left permanently contracted ^[2]. Doctors proposed amputating the leg. He refused, and after roughly eighteen months of convalescence he walked again with the aid of a cane and then without one.

The damage to his fretting hand would have ended most guitar careers. Reinhardt instead worked out a new technique during his recovery, building his solo lines mainly with the index and middle fingers and using the two injured fingers only for certain chord shapes on the upper strings ^[3]. The result was not a workaround so much as a new vocabulary: fast chromatic runs, sweeping arpeggios, and octave passages that suited two strong fingers better than four average ones.

During the same period his musical horizons changed. Accounts from his circle describe him hearing American jazz records around 1930, including recordings by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and recognizing in them the improvised, ornamented approach he already practiced by instinct ^[1]. From that point the musette repertoire receded and jazz became his subject.

Anyone asking who was Django Reinhardt usually arrives first at the group he co-led. In 1934, under the sponsorship of the Hot Club de France, a Parisian society of jazz enthusiasts led by Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay, Reinhardt and the violinist Stéphane Grappelli formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France. The lineup was unheard of in jazz: violin, three guitars, and double bass, with no drums, piano, or horns ^[4]. Django's brother Joseph and, at various times, Roger Chaput and Pierre "Baro" Ferret supplied the pumping rhythm-guitar accompaniment known as la pompe, while the bass anchored the swing.

The group recorded prolifically for Ultraphone, Decca, and other labels from late 1934 onward, and its sides travelled well beyond France. Titles such as Minor Swing (1937), Djangology, Belleville, and Swing 42, many of them Reinhardt compositions or co-compositions with Grappelli, showed that jazz of the first rank could be made by Europeans on European terms ^[4]. American musicians passing through Paris, including Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter, recorded with him, treating him as a peer rather than a curiosity ^[5].

The partnership with Grappelli was close but combustible. Grappelli was punctual, urbane, and professional; Reinhardt was famously casual about schedules, capable of missing a well-paid engagement because he had gone fishing or found a card game. Yet on record their dialogue, the violin gliding over the guitar's driving chords and answering its solos, defined the group's sound and much of European jazz identity in the 1930s ^[1].

The Quintette was performing in London when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939. Grappelli chose to remain in England for the duration; Reinhardt returned to Paris, and the two would not play together again until after the liberation ^[2]. Back in occupied France, Reinhardt reorganized the Quintette with clarinetist Hubert Rostaing in place of the violin, a change that pushed the music toward a smoother, more modern sound.

His position under the occupation was precarious. The Nazi regime murdered hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti across Europe in the genocide the Romani people call the Porajmos, and jazz itself was officially disparaged as degenerate. Reinhardt nevertheless remained one of the most visible entertainers in Paris, protected in part by his fame and by German officers who privately admired his music ^[5]. He twice attempted to escape to Switzerland and was turned back both times.

Out of these years came the piece most often named among Django Reinhardt achievements: Nuages, recorded in 1940. Its wistful, floating melody was embraced by French audiences as an unofficial anthem of quiet endurance, and it became his best-known composition ^[4]. He also grew more ambitious as a writer, working on a Mass for the Romani people and a symphonic piece, dictating the music to collaborators since he did not write notation.

After the war Reinhardt received the invitation he had long wanted: a tour of the United States as a featured guest with the Duke Ellington orchestra in the autumn of 1946, including two concerts at Carnegie Hall ^[5]. The visit disappointed both sides. Reinhardt arrived without a guitar, expecting instruments and perhaps Hollywood offers to materialize; he played an unfamiliar amplified instrument, and reviews were mixed. He returned to France early in 1947.

The American trip still changed his playing. He adopted the electric guitar and engaged seriously with bebop, the harmonically dense modern jazz of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. His late recordings, particularly the 1953 sessions for Norman Granz that produced tracks like Nuits de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, show him fluent in the new language while remaining unmistakably himself ^[3]. Critics who once framed him as a folk phenomenon had to reckon with a musician who kept evolving until the end.

He also reunited intermittently with Grappelli after 1946, recording sessions in London and Rome that revisited the old repertoire with a postwar polish. But the prewar Quintette format now belonged to history, and Reinhardt increasingly preferred small electric groups ^[1].

Reinhardt's first marriage, to Florine Mayer, produced a son, Henri "Lousson" Reinhardt, born in 1929, who himself became a guitarist. The marriage did not survive the aftermath of the caravan fire. He later married Sophie "Naguine" Ziegler, a cousin, and their son Babik Reinhardt, born in 1944, grew into a respected jazz guitarist in his own right ^[2].

Away from the bandstand Django lived much as he always had. He loved fishing, billiards, and gambling, spent money as fast as it arrived, and painted with some seriousness in his later years. He never fully left the travelling culture he was born into, even after buying property, and friends described a man who could be childlike, proud, generous, and completely indifferent to bourgeois obligation in the same afternoon ^[1].

In 1951 he settled in Samois-sur-Seine, a village on the Seine near Fontainebleau, where he fished, painted, and played selectively. On May 16, 1953, after returning from playing in a Paris club, he collapsed at Avon railway station near his home and died of a brain hemorrhage. He was forty three ^[2]. He was buried in Samois, and the village has since hosted an annual festival in his name.

Reinhardt's influence runs in two broad channels. The first is Gypsy jazz, or jazz manouche, the string-band style he invented with the Quintette, kept alive first within Manouche and Sinti communities by players such as the Ferret brothers and later carried worldwide by guitarists including Biréli Lagrène and Stochelo Rosenberg. The annual Festival Django Reinhardt, founded at Samois-sur-Seine in 1968 and now held nearby at Fontainebleau, draws players of the style from across the world ^[6].

The second channel is his effect on guitarists far outside the idiom. B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Jeff Beck, and Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, who lost fingertips in an industrial accident and took direct encouragement from Reinhardt's example, have all named him as an influence, and jazz players from Wes Montgomery to contemporary soloists absorbed his phrasing ^[3]. Down Beat readers had voted him among the world's leading guitarists as early as the 1930s, and he remains the standard case cited whenever anyone claims that jazz could only be created by Americans.

Basic Django Reinhardt facts have also entered wider culture: the Belgian caravan birth, the two-fingered technique, the untaught genius who never read music or, for most of his life, words. Woody Allen built the 1999 film Sweet and Lowdown around a fictional guitarist obsessed with him, and his recordings, more than eight hundred sides, remain continuously in print ^[5]. Any serious Django Reinhardt biography ends where his admirers begin: with the records, which still sound like no one else.