Django Reinhardt
With two sound fingers in place of the two that fire had frozen stiff, he forged the first voice of European jazz.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Companions ⏳🌊
- ColleagueStéphane Grappelli
They met in Paris in the early 1930s and together led the Quintette du Hot Club de France.
- FamilyJoseph Reinhardt
His younger brother and lifelong rhythm guitarist, sharing the stage and the studio with him.
- PatronCharles Delaunay
A critic and producer, he was the patron who arranged the early recordings and contracts.
- FamilyNaguine (Sophie Ziegler)
His second wife, with whom he made a new home during the war; together they had a son, Babik.
- InfluenceLouis Armstrong
Hearing his records was what led him to devote himself to jazz.
- ColleagueDuke Ellington
Invited him to join his orchestra for a 1946 American tour.
I. The wandering child of Liberchies · 1910–1928 (age 0–18)
(Belgium) In January 1910, he was born inside the caravan of a wandering Gypsy (Manouche) family in Liberchies, a village near Charleroi in the Walloon region of Belgium. The son of his father, Jean-Baptiste Reinhardt, and his mother, Laurence, he grew up in a family that drifted back and forth across the French–Belgian border, earning a living by basket weaving and open-air performance. (Paris) He spent his childhood in a Gypsy encampment at Porte de Choisy on the outskirts of Paris. Never formally schooled, he remained unable to read or write all his life and, it is said, learned to sign his name only with difficulty. Instead, at the encampment he took up the banjo-guitar and the violin and taught himself, mimicking the adults' playing by watching over their shoulders. (Talent) From the age of twelve or thirteen he earned money playing banjo-guitar in the cafés and musette dance halls of Paris. His accompaniment to the accordion dance tunes peculiar to France quickly made a name for him even among players his own age, and by his mid-teens he was already being called the prodigy of the Parisian Gypsy music scene. (Marriage) In 1928 he married Bella, a woman from the same Gypsy community, according to custom. The couple had a son, Lousson. By then he was already earning good money, but he spent just as freely; his colleagues recalled a man who loved billiards and fishing and lived each day on impulse.
II. Reborn from the fire · 1928–1934 (age 18–24)
(Fire) In November 1928, in their caravan parked on the outskirts of Paris, he knocked over a candle; the flame caught the celluloid Bella used to make artificial flowers, and in an instant the whole caravan was engulfed. He escaped by wrapping himself in a blanket, but suffered severe burns over his entire body, especially to his left hand and his legs. (Rebuilding) The doctors urged amputation of his right leg, but he refused and learned to walk again on crutches. The tendons of his left fourth·fifth fingers contracted, and those fingers never straightened again. During eighteen months of convalescence, clinging to a guitar his brother Joseph had bought him, he devised a technique entirely his own: the two ruined fingers rested lightly on the strings only for chords, while the melody was fingered with the index and middle fingers alone. (Armstrong) During his recovery, it is said, he wept on hearing a Louis Armstrong record that someone put on for him. In the free improvisation of that trumpeter, already covered in this series, he glimpsed a world beyond the musette, and he later recalled that from then on he resolved to devote himself to jazz. (Grappelli) In the early 1930s, at a jazz club in Paris, he crossed paths with the violinist Stéphane Grappelli. The two eyed each other's playing sidelong, then tried improvising together, and in that moment, Grappelli later said in an interview, each recognized the sound the other had been searching for.
III. The Hot Club de France · 1934–1939 (age 24–29)
(Formation) In 1934, Grappelli, he, his brother Joseph Reinhardt, Roger Chaput (both on rhythm guitar), and the bassist Louis Vola came together to form the Quintette du Hot Club de France. A lineup with no drums and no piano — only violin, three guitars and bass — was radical in the jazz world of the day. (Delaunay) Charles Delaunay, a young French jazz critic and founder of the Hot Club de France, appointed himself their patron and arranged their recordings. Beginning with "Dinah" in 1934, their records became known not only in Paris but to jazz fans in London and America, and they are counted as the first proof that European jazz could speak in a voice of its own. (Full gallop) "Minor Swing," recorded in 1937, was his own composition: over a simple minor chord progression, the rapid tremolos and octave leaps he drew out with two fingers captured at once the passion of Gypsy music and the swing of jazz. The piece went on to become the standard of the Gypsy jazz genre itself. (Daily life) Fame brought money, but he spent it as recklessly as ever. Countless stories survive of him vanishing mid-performance to play billiards or failing to turn up for appointments, to the despair of his managers. He could not read his contracts and signed his name clumsily, Delaunay later recalled, and so he was often shortchanged when the earnings were divided.
The first official recording of the Quintette du Hot Club de France, it came about when a chance backstage jam reached Delaunay's ears.
- In the opening, Grappelli's violin sets the melody gently swaying, as if singing (swinging phrasing).
- Django's solo briefly quotes the original melody, then scatters into ever faster notes, reaching a climax in a bright, ringing tone.
- With no drums, two guitars split the rhythm between them, an accompaniment that creates a distinctive drive.
- A 32-bar AABA standard, laid out simply in a head–solo–head structure.
- Famous is the moment when a tremolo played with his two-finger technique spreads out, resonating above the harmony.
An original co-written by him and Grappelli, it became an essential practice piece for countless Gypsy jazz players.
- A minor chord progression repeats from start to finish, evoking melancholy and tension at once.
- Django's solo opens with thick tremolos in the low register and races up into fast scales in the high register.
- Two rhythm guitars drag slightly on the back of the beat, creating a strong swing feel (la pompe).
- Grappelli's violin solo trades short phrases with Django, repeating·varying them as if in conversation.
IV. Nuages under the Occupation · 1939–1944 (age 29–34)
(Outbreak) When World War II broke out in 1939 during a tour of Britain, Grappelli chose to stay in London, while he hurried back to Paris. Their partnership was effectively over, and he carried on playing in new combinations, with his brother Joseph, the clarinetist Hubert Rostaing and others. (Persecution) In occupied France, Gypsies, along with Jews, were targets of systematic persecution. Several of his relatives, it is said, were taken to camps and lost their lives. His standing as a famous musician, and the personal protection of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, a Luftwaffe officer and jazz lover, spared him from arrest, but he had to live in fear of being taken away at any moment. (Escape) In 1943 he tried to flee to Switzerland but was stopped at the border and returned to Paris. Around this time he started a new family with Naguine (born Sophie Ziegler), and the couple had a son, Babik. He and Bella had long since drifted apart. (Nuages) Composed amid this unease, "Nuages" ("Clouds") became the most widely loved song in occupied Paris. Opening with a slow, plaintive melody and unfolding as if light were gradually breaking through, the piece, it is said, was tacitly understood among the French at the time as a song of consolation and hope.
Composed amid the unease of occupied Paris, it was tacitly taken by the French as a song of consolation.
- Striking is the melodic arc that begins at a slow tempo and moves gradually from a dark minor into a bright major.
- Rather than dazzling technique, the melody is sung out, each note drawn long.
- There is an exchange in which the woodwinds lead the melody and Django takes it up and varies it.
- The restrained emotion held within a simple 32-bar form is said to have moved audiences of the time deeply.
Written during the years he started a new family in wartime, it puts the longing of the melody itself ahead of flashy improvisation.
- Over a slow, ballad-like tempo, he plays as if singing, laying on a heavy vibrato.
- The melody rises and falls across an octave, tracing a line that seems to voice longing.
- The rhythm section touches only the barest harmonies, supporting the melody so that it stands out.
- True to a piece written in wartime, it puts the feeling of the melody itself ahead of improvisation.
V. America, and the tour with Ellington · 1945–1946 (age 35–36)
(Liberation) After the war ended, he reunited with Grappelli in London in early 1946 and briefly played alongside him again, but this time it was the American stage that called. In 1946, Duke Ellington, already covered in this series, invited him on an American tour with his orchestra. (Dissonance) On arriving in America he expected to be treated as a star, but in practice he was often introduced as just one act among the orchestra's many, and things were frequently out of step: he turned up late to rehearsals and had to scramble for an instrument on the spot. On some nights, instead of the acoustic guitar he had played all his life, he had to take up on the fly the electric guitar he encountered in America. (The gap) The tour, which included a Carnegie Hall concert, ended amid a split between critical praise and the frustration of the people running it. With the language barrier, his inability to read, and his unfamiliarity with American touring practice all piling up, the collaboration with Ellington's band is said to have borne less fruit than hoped. (Homecoming) Returning to France after a few months, he had been deeply struck by the bebop he heard in America. Fast, angular phrases began to seep into his playing, leading to a late style different in grain from the swing idiom of his earlier quintet years.
VI. Final years in Samois-sur-Seine · 1947–1953 (age 37–43)
(Settling down) After returning from America, he settled in Samois-sur-Seine, at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris. Living with Naguine and his son Babik, he spent more and more days fishing and painting. Around this time, it is said, he taught himself oil painting and took it up as a pastime. (Electric guitar) In place of the acoustic quintet sound, he tried a new lineup that added electric guitar and drums, grafting bebop's harmony and rhythm onto his Gypsy swing idiom. Critics were divided, but the recordings of this period show that he never settled into a single style. (The stage) He kept performing, though not as often as before. His temperament, mercurial since youth, was unchanged; fellow musicians recalled that he would sometimes go fishing on the day of a concert and show up late. Even so, his name still ranked at the very top of European jazz. (Death) On May 16, 1953, walking home from Fontainebleau-Avon station, he collapsed in front of his house in Samois-sur-Seine and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was forty-three. It is said that, although the symptoms came on suddenly, help was slow to arrive, and his death was felt as an abrupt loss to French jazz.
A reunion recording with Grappelli made in Rome, Italy, it reveals a mature rapport quite unlike that of the old quintet days.
- His rapport with Grappelli, reunited after a long absence, comes through in an interplay grown easier and more assured.
- Chromatic passing tones borrowed from bebop creep into the solos, revealing an idiom unlike that of earlier years.
- The unison ending, with the two trading the same phrase to close, is striking.
- The spontaneous air of a local session rather than a studio date makes the whole feel loose yet lively.
A late piece recorded on electric guitar, it captures the new jazz-club scene of postwar Paris.
- The clear, cutting tone of the electric guitar gives a texture distinctly different from the earlier acoustic years.
- Over a fast tempo, angular bebop-style phrases mingle with the tremolo characteristic of Gypsy swing.
- With drums joining in, the rhythm section drives with a far firmer, more modern momentum than the old quintet.
- A lively head-solo-head structure that evokes the atmosphere of the basement jazz clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris.
Lesser-known stories
The name 'Django' was not his real name but a nickname meaning 'I awake' in Romani. The official name on his birth certificate was Jean Reinhardt, yet all his life he introduced himself as Django. Biographers see in this the double identity of Gypsies at the time, when the names on French government papers and the names used within the Manouche community existed separately. It is well known that he never learned to read or write, but less known are the efforts he made to hide it. He imitated a signature on contracts as though drawing a picture, and even after composing a piece, transcribing it into notation always fell to a colleague or producer. Later researchers confirmed that many of his copyright registration documents were in fact filled out by Delaunay or fellow musicians. Records show that in the last years of the Occupation he conceived a Mass for the Romani people (often called the “Django Mass”). This plan to attempt religious music on a scale wholly different from his popular swing tunes was never completed and survives only in sketches; long overshadowed by his popular image, it was brought back to light only through the archival research of later musicologists. In his last years he taught himself oil painting as a pastime, and his love of billiards was so famous among his colleagues that, the story goes, he had a billiard table of his own installed in his dressing room. Though these hobbies have no direct connection to music, they are often cited as a clue to a temperament that blended the ease and the competitive drive heard in his improvisation.
Glossary 📚🔎
Swing
(In jazz) Swing refers to the bouncy rhythmic feel that comes from not splitting the beat exactly in half, but playing the first part long and the second short, as if pushing and pulling. It is like walking in step with a friend when one of you lands each step just a little late: the slight mismatch, never quite lining up, is exactly what lifts the spirits. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, a swing is the playground seat, and in golf it is the motion of swinging the club.
Improvisation
(In jazz) Creating a new melody on the spot, without a prewritten score, within a set chord progression or the framework of a tune. It is like chatting with friends and trading whatever comes to mind, without a script prepared in advance.
Bebop
(Word sense) The name bebop is said to come from 'bebop,' the onomatopoeia for humming two quick notes. (In jazz) A fast, complex jazz style that emerged in America in the 1940s, prizing elaborate harmony and rapid improvisation over simple dance rhythms. It is easy to grasp if you think of the difference between dancing freely without set choreography and a dance in which you must follow fixed steps.
Tremolo
(Word sense) Tremolo means 'trembling' in Italian. (In jazz) A technique of repeating the same note or chord very rapidly to produce a quivering sound. The effect is like switching a flashlight off and on very fast, so that the flickering light seems continuous.
La pompe
(Word sense) French for 'pumping,' named for the way the rhythm guitar strikes chords at a steady pulse, as if working a pump. (In jazz) An accompaniment style in Gypsy jazz in which the rhythm guitar crisply strikes chords on every beat to create strong drive even without drums. Just as it is hard to keep the rhythm when jumping rope without the steady slap of the rope on the ground, this accompaniment serves as the heartbeat of the whole tune.
AABA form
(In jazz) A popular song structure that divides a tune into four eight-bar sections: the same melody (A) is played twice, a different melody (B, often called the bridge) is inserted, and then the opening melody (A) returns. It resembles the structure of a pop song with a chorus and a contrasting verse.