Django Reinhardt

Jean “Django” Reinhardt was born in a Romani caravan in Belgium in 1910 and grew up in the encampments around Paris, a banjo-guitar prodigy playing musette waltzes in dance halls by his early teens. In 1928 a fire in his caravan left his fretting hand mutilated — the third and fourth fingers fused and half-useless. Doctors said he would not play again; he rebuilt his entire technique around two fingers and made the limitation sound like a style (Dregni 2004).

Hearing Armstrong and Ellington on records in the early thirties set the course. With violinist Stéphane Grappelli he formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France (1934) — the first great jazz group with no American members and no horns — and recorded the sides (“Minor Swing,” “Djangology,” “Nuages”) that founded gypsy jazz. He survived the Nazi occupation in Paris — perilously, as a Rom whose people were being exterminated — toured America with Ellington in 1946, absorbed bebop late, and died of a stroke at forty-three (Dregni 2004).

In this site’s web Django is the first proof that the American tree could seed others: a musician from an unmapped tradition heard swing and made something neither American nor imitation — a pattern bossa nova would repeat across another ocean.