Django Reinardht
Jazz in Paris

Django Reinhardt was born in 1910 in Liberchies (Belgium) and died young in 1953 in Samois Sur Seine (France).

He was born into a family of "sinti" ethnicity, today vulgarly called gypsies. According to some sources, this ethnicity is called Manouches or Manus in France.

At only 18 years of age, he suffered a serious accident following a fire that destroyed his trailer (his home) and was severely injured on his left hand and a leg so much that, to avoid gangrene, amputation was advisable, but Django refused, and this refusal, along with the refusal to consult a doctor in the future, to get visited and treated, would be the cause of his premature death.

However, Django perhaps had good reasons to refuse since he became, in the following years, one of the most extraordinary guitarists of all time. Deliberately, I don't write jazz-guitarists because I find it limiting. He could have played anything, any genre, ON any genre, embellishing over it (improvisation on any piece would be another of his peculiarities, his version of "Brasil" a piece that almost makes you nauseous for how many times we've heard it, done by him becomes a masterpiece).

It was precisely because of the accident that he started playing the guitar despite having a disabled left hand, but precisely because of this, he developed a very particular technique, a touch, a way of playing that will be taught, that will have many admirers, a technique that will be imitated or only partly picked up by many great guitarists in the future but no one will ever equal him.

Django was a genius, an exceptional talent, I think that men like this, in any field and around the world, are born once every X years also because one must consider that Django not only hadn't studied music to the point of one day asking what a musical scale was, considering his fellow musicians were discussing musical scales, but he was also completely illiterate, he barely learned to write his name to sign autographs.

Jazz in Paris is a collection. It contains some of his famous tracks, I bought it many years ago, it's the only record I have of him, but I still listen to it occasionally.

The musical pieces in this collection have something magical about them, I can't find a specific adjective (already "magical" seems rhetorical but that's it) ... clean ... perfect (worse than magical, what is perfection?) but yes, in short, they are exquisite, sober, elegant, refined, simple melodies (and believe me - today rhetoric presses me - it's not easy to be simple). Music in nonchalance, in sur-place, played with eyes closed without scores, a team of formidable musicians but then he arrives, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground. Him and his guitar, him and his "scales", but Django's were not musical, they were stairways to heaven. In a heartbeat, you realize he's already played a dozen notes and you don't know where they come from, they start spin back, they circle around you, they tickle you, or they explode like fireworks that you don't know where to look, where to listen.

The genius and his urgency to play.

Thanks, Django.