MUSIC

 The Genius of Django

with 2 fingers   By Sammy Waters

Music by Joe Deninzon and Stratospheerius

January 24th, 1910 at Liberchies Belgium, Django Reinhardt was born into the impoverished life of a gypsy on a camp near the outskirts of Paris.   When he was eight, his mother's tribe settled near the old Parisian Choisy gate.    He grew up in the Monouches world of contradictions with one shoe in the modern city of Paris and the other in the traditional life of the nomadic gypsy.   The French Gypsies (Manouches) were steeped in their own peculiar traditions, medieval beliefs and distrustful of the modern world.

He  first started playing the violin and eventually moved on to a banjo-guitar that had been given to him by his neighbor  after noticing the young boy's interest in music.  Django quickly learned to play after mimicking the fingerings of musicians he observed and played guitar with.  He was soon astonishing the adults around the camp with his ability to play the guitar and before he was thirteen, he began his musical career playing with popular accordionist Guerino at a dance hall on the Rue Monge.   He played alongside other musicians and bands and made his first musical recordings with Jean Vaisade.   Since he could not read or write, his name appears on these records as Jiango Renard. 

 

On November 2nd, 1928 a tragic event occurred that would forever change his life.  Django was just 18 and returned back to his caravan home of himself and his new wife from a night of playing at a new club "La Java".  His wife had filled the caravan with celluloid flowers she had made to sell at the market on the following day.  In the middle of the night he awoke after hearing what he thought was a mouse and bent down holding a candle to look among the flowers when the wick from the candle fell into the flowers.   The highly inflammable flowers caught on fire and within seconds the caravan turned into a flaming inferno.   He grabbed a nearby blanket and wrapped it around himself to protect himself from the flames.  He then took hold of his wife and ran through the fire and outside to find that his fingers on his left hand and his right side from knee to waist were severely burned.

 

The damage to his leg was so severe that initially doctors wanted to amputate it but Django refused.  He spent time in a hospital nursing home where his leg was fortunately saved by the care of the doctors and nurses who took pity on him knowing that he was a musician and probably thought that he would never play again.  He remained bedridden for the next 18th months and during this time he created a whole new fingering system of playing the guitar with the two fingers on his left hand.  Due to the tendons shrinking from the heat of the fire, his fourth and fifth digits of the left hand were permanently curled towards the palm. He could use his curled and badly deformed digits on the first two strings of the guitar for chords and octaves but complete extension of these twisted fingers was impossible. 

All of his his solos were outstandingly played with grace and precision with only his index and middle fingers which seems to almost defy belief for any other guitar player.

Django was very much influenced by American jazz players like Duke Ellington,  Eddie Young, Joe Venuti and Louis Armstrong.  This type of jazz music was the perfect vehicle for his improvisational and composing skills and his sophisticated and subtle harmonic structures and beautiful melodies.  His creative genius was not only that of the master guitar player and improviser, but also that of the composer,  even though he could not read a word of or write musical notation.  He had to rely on other members of the band to take down his ideas on paper.
 

 

"Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn't have" Django Reinhardt

1934 he founded The Quintet of the hot club of Paris after a serendipitous meeting with Stéphane Grappelli.   They formed a band of fourteen musicians including Roger Chaput, Louis Vola and others who then seriously began touring throughout England when the the second World War broke out.

He then decided to return to Paris while Stéphane remained in England and  miraculously escaped the unfortunate fate of many of his gypsy kinfolk who went to their early deaths in the gas chambers of German Nazi concentration camps.

 

Django and Stéphane quickly reunited after the war and they began playing and recording again. He also toured briefly with Duke Ellington in the US and returned to Paris where he continued his career until 1951 when he retired to the small village of Samois sur Seine. 

On May 16th 1953 he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died leaving behind his wife Sophie and son Babik.

 Though born a nomadic gypsy and into a life of poverty,  he had the soul and nature of a nobleman and a natural elegance and ability to express himself through his unparalleled guitar playing and ever lasting music.

 

www.joedeninzon.com