Django Reinhardt – Le Jazz Hot

Django was a roaming gypsy. I am something of a gypsy myself. I work rotating 12-hour shifts. I sleep at odd hours, and am often up most of the night when I am not working. My body clock is somewhat broken. As an escape from my shift work, I occassionally slip out (like a gypsy) for a 30-minute break to rummage with other vagabonds and kindred spirits at the local thrift shop. Along with the usual racks of clothes, housewares, and ratty old furniture, this store also carries an assortment of CD’s and LP’s arranged in no particular order. You have to get dirty to come out with something worthwhile, but if you are patient, sometimes you get very lucky. A recent visit was just one of those occassions. I found an original 10-inch LP of Django Reinhardt from 1954:

Le Jazz Hot par Django Reinhardt et Q.H.C.F
Angel Records, ANG 60003
Produced by John S. Wilson

Personnel:

Django Reinhardt – guitar
Stephane Grappelli – violin
Quintet of the Hot Club of France

Track Listing:

1) Festival
2) Nuages
3) Oiseaux des Iles
4) Ol’ Man River
5) Dinette
6) My Serenade
7) Diminushing
8) Rythme Futur

Liner notes by John S. Wilson:

The influence of Django Reinhardt on the course of jazz can be quickly gauged by considering the vast number of jazz guitarists who can now be heard busily plucking out lengthy solos on their instruments. It was Reinhardt who first gave the guitar a solid position as a front line jazz instrument. Eddie Lang, who preceded him, had raised the guitar from its purely supporting role but, as fine a jazz performer as Lang was, he lacked Reinhardt’s creative range, his fantastic technique and the tremendously urgent swinging sense that always characterized Reinhardt’s playing, whether in a delicate bit of tracery or a vigorous, biting chordal assault.

Reinhardt’s position in the world of jazz is unique for he was the first European musician who could be spoken of on equal terms with the great American figures of jazz – with Louis Armstrong, with Jelly Roll Morton, with Johnny Dodds or with Jack Teagarden.

Reinhardt was a gypsy, born in a gypsy camp in Belgium in 1910, who grew up playing conventional gypsy music on both violin and guitar. When he was 18 and 19 two events occurred which led him away from the routine life of a gypsy musician.

His left hand was so badly burned when an overturned kerosene lamp set his trailer on fire (he was 18) that the fourth an fifth fingers of the hand became practically useless. No longer able to finger his violin, he abandoned it and patiently set about devising a method of reaching the frets on his guitar with his remaining fingers.

A year later, burrowing through the junk heaps of the Orlean flea market, he found a Louis Armstrong recording of “Dallas Blues”. This led him into jazz and he was soon sitting in with various jazz musicians around Paris who were as much amazed by his mastery of the essence of hot jazz as they were by his dexterity despite his injured fingers. He played most of his single-note work using the first and second fingers of his left hand. For chords he was able to use his two paralyzed fingers to a limited extent on the first two strings. Some of his fingering verged on the unbelieveable – in one cross-fingering position the second finger of his left hand crossed over the first to play a note behind and on a string lower than the note being fingered by the first finger.

Reinhardt’s playing came into international focus when the Quintette of the Hot Club of France was created in 1934 by Pierre Nourry. Nourry, head of the Hot Club, needed a new group of musicians to replace Freddy Johnson’s departing Harlemites. He proposed the idea of an all-string jazz group to Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, a pianist and violinist who had formed a close relationship with Reinhardt. They were delighted with the thought and the Quintette – three guitars, a violin and string bass – made its first public appearance in November, 1934. Within a matter of weeks, this thoroughly unorthodox jazz group had made its first records and for the next five years it poured out recordings and made several tours of Europe.

As he moved from gypsy caravans into the international jazz scene, Reinhardt never completely shed his gypsy heritage. Although he never learned to read music, he could play involved technical classical pieces flawlessly from memory. He was a man of sudden and divergent changes of mood, as is evident in his music. Describing Reinhardt’s life in Paris, Roger Kay has reported that “he had a small apartment but a lot of the time he’d sleep out on park benches or just roam around all night with his guitar. Most of the time he was broke although he did make some money on record dates and irregular jobs. He . . . was so irresponsible . . . He might be working in an orchestra, suddenly decide that he wanted to be some place and just get down from the stand and walk out and probably wouldn’t be seen again for two or three weeks.”

After the original Quintette broken up in 1939, Reinhardt formed a new group in which clarinetist Hubert Rostaing replaced Grappelli and his violin. It is this group, with drummer Pierre Fouad as an added element to the all-string sound, which plays Dinette and Rhythme Futur. Dinette is a charming example of Reinhardt’s melodic grace as a compose. The dramatic feeling that invests much of his emotionalism is underscored in the striking entrance he makes after some deceptively languid vamping.

Basically the same group, with the addition of the popular French band leader, Alix Combelle, on clarinet and tenor saxophone to make the Quintette a Sextette, recorded Nuages and Oiseaux des Iles. Both of these selections are notable for the slightly different harmonic effects made possible by the addition of Combelle. There is some particularly effective three-part harmony on Nuages which also has a relatively rare passage in which Reinhardt works out his ideas high up on the scale on strings tightened almost to immovability.

After the war, Grappelli once more recorded with Reinhardt and the instrumentation of the original Quintette was resumed on Festival 48, Ol’ Man River and Diminushing. By this time both Reinhardt and Grappelli had become interested in the new approach to jazz being taken by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the other innovators of the mid-Forties. There are distinct reflections of bop in Grappelli’s opening solo in Festival 48 while Diminushing reveals the Quintette searching out harmonic and rhythmic ideas that are quite different from their work in the Thirties. The only number in this collection which dates back to those years and which is played by the original Quintette is My Serenade, which offers a stunning display of the lyric beauty in Reinhardt’s playing and a delightful demonstration of Grappelli’s indebtedness to the great American violinist, Eddie South.

When he died in 1953, Reinhardt was still reaching out for new ways of expressing the exciting music which always pulsed through his fingers. Never a follower but always an experimenter, he was intrigued by the new directions being taken by jazz and was absorbing them into his own musical personality. What he might have evolved makes for fascinating if bootless conjecture but of one thing we may be certain: It would have been, as Reinhardt’s music always had been, uniquely and inimitably Reinhardt.