Gypsy Jazz

Gypsy jazz — jazz manouche — is what happened when American swing records reached a Romani guitar prodigy in the caravan camps outside Paris. Django Reinhardt, his fretting hand half-paralyzed in a 1928 caravan fire, rebuilt his technique around two working fingers and, with violinist Stéphane Grappelli, founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934: violin, three guitars and bass — a swing band with no drums, the rhythm guitars’ percussive la pompe doing the work (Dregni 2004).

The style fuses two complete traditions: swing’s repertoire, harmony and phrasing, and the Romani string-band world’s ornamentation, minor-key melodrama and ferocious picking. “Minor Swing” (1937) is its founding document — and the proof, decades before “world music,” that jazz could take root outside America and grow something new rather than a copy.

Within this site’s web, gypsy jazz is the first European node, and a template for the planned expansion: a genre with one parent in the American tree and one in a tradition the site has yet to map. The style never died — it is still played, competitively and reverently, from Samois-sur-Seine festivals to campsite jams across Europe.