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| Django Reinhardt and the Birth of Gypsy Jazz |
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By Michael Dregni |
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This music we call “Gypsy jazz” is not a synthesis of two traditions—Gypsy music and American jazz—as its name may suggest. Instead, it is the legacy of one man, Jean “Django” Reinhardt, a Gypsy who played jazz.
Jean “Matelo” Ferret, a Romany guitarist who accompanied Django in the 1940s, once said this jazz genre should rightfully be called simply “Django’s music” as Django was so instrumental in its formation. Yet in the years following Django’s death in 1953, the music was first christened by guitarist Francis-Alfred Moerman as “jazz tsigane”—French for Gypsy jazz. In later years, it also won the misnomers “jazz manouche” (Django was a Manouche Romany, although many of the other players were Gitan Gypsies) and “jazz gitan” (which, in turn, leaves out its creator).
Whatever the name, this music is the legacy of Django.
Django was born in a caravan at a crossroads in the Belgian countryside on January 23, 1910. Throughout his youth, his family kept on the move, wandering from Paris to the Midi of France and back again to Belgium. Django’s father, Jean-Eugène Weiss, was a basketmaker as well as a musician. He converted the family’s small caravan to have a canvas-covered stage at the rear upon which he and his dancer wife, Laurence “Négros” Reinhardt, could perform for townsfolk.
Throughout his childhood, Django was surrounded by music. His father and mother fashioned a livelihood from music and dancing. At the annual Romany pilgrimmage to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, music went in hand with religious homage, Manouche violinists playing their songs influenced by Eastern European Tzigane traditions while the Spanish Gitans strummed out guitar-fueled flamenco. In the Parisian flea markets, Gypsies offered melodies on violins and banjos in exchange for spare coins. And around the Romany campfires wherever they were lit, music accompanied family events, from baptisms to funerals.
Django’s first instrument was the violin. He likely learned to play from his father or one of his father’s seven brothers, who were all musicians. Among the brothers was Django’s uncle Guiligou, and according to family lore, Django learned much of his musical skills under Guiligou’s tutelage. By the time he was seven, Django was playing violin with his father’s ensemble.
Django also learned to play banjo from his cousin Gabriel as well as Guiligou. And through the years, he learned from other Romany in the flea markets and around the campfires. Poulette Castro played in Paris’s cafés as well as the pit orchestra at the Théâtre du Châtelet, backing opera divas. Auguste “Gusti” Malha was another, a banjo player who accompanied the accordionists in Paris’s bals musette dancehalls with such virtuosity it was as if he had six fingers on each hand.
Django’s own entrée into the bal musettes came one day when he was busking at a café. An Italian Gypsy in the bar listened as Django played Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube,” then introduced himself: His name was Vétese Guérino, and he played accordion in the dancehalls of all Paris. Now, he wanted Django as his accompanist for the princely sum of ten francs a night.
At the same time Django began making a name for himself in 1926 in the bals musette, he was also making a discovery on the other side of Paris. Jazz had come to town in the form of Billy Arnold’s Novelty Jazz Band, direct from the United States. Django soon began emulating Arnold’s music as well as recording of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Joe Venuti, and others he heard over the coming years. Standing at a crossroads between traditional Gypsy music, musette, and jazz, Django was playing the first notes of what would become known as Gypsy jazz.
Then, tragedy struck its chord. Django returned to his caravan outside the Porte de Clignancourt in the early morning hours of October 26, 1928 after playing at the bal La Java. He entered his caravan to find it abloom: his wife, Bella, had made bouquets of celluloid flowers for the burial of a Manouche boy later that day. But as Bella lit a candle, she dropped the stub, which rolled away into a bouquet of celluloid petals. The flowers turned to flames and the caravan became an inferno. Django saved Bella, but almost died in the blaze himself. Taken to a hospital,e the doctors prescribed that due to the burns that covered the left side of his body, Django’d never play again.
During the ensuing eighteen months of convalescence, Django taught his left fingers to fret a guitar anew. His two small fingers were largely paralyzed, the tendons and nerves damaged, the digits near-useless. His index and middle fingers still functioned, however, and limited now in the number of digits he could employ to fret the guitar, he forced himself to rethink his approach to the fretboard. Instead of playing scales and arpeggios horizontally across the fretboard as was the norm, he searched out fingerings that ran vertically up and down the frets as they were easier to play with just two fingers. He created new chord forms that utilized a minimum of notes—often just triads made with his two good fingers on the bass strings. He pushed his two paralyzed fingers to grip the guitar as well, his smallest digit on the high E string, his ring finger on the B, and sometimes barring his index finger to fashion chords of four to five notes. He then slid his hand up and down the fretboard, employing these chord forms to craft a fluent new vocabulary.
By 1934, Django was back playing music at a tea dance for the smart Hôtel Claridge on the avenue de la Champs-Élysées. It was here that Django’s famed Quintette du Hot Club de France was formed one day by the serendipity of a broken string. As one of the bands’ violinists, a dapper Parisian named Stéphane Grappelli, remembered, “One day, just before we were due to go on, a string broke on my violin. I put on a new one, but couldn’t tune my instrument properly because the tango band was still playing and drowned out any other sound. So, I withdrew behind the curtain, where Django and Louis Vola were waiting for our stint. I tuned my violin and at the same time improvised a chorus that just passed through my head. This music seemed to impress Django because he took his guitar and accompanied my improvisation.” Together, they toyed with Stéphane’s melody, trading choruses, improvising over the theme, throwing in licks they had picked up listening to 78s, copping the stylings of their American to transport themselves far from the stilted elegance of the Claridge. Soon, several other bandmates joined—bassist Louis Vola and guitarists Roger Chaput and Django’s brother Joseph—and the foundation of the band was set.
The Quintette du Hot Club de France became famous for its string jazz recordings from 1934 through 1939, covering American standards, the rare Gypsy melody, French chanson, and a growing number of Django’s own compositions.
In 1940, Django launched his Nouveau Quintette du Hot Club de France with the clarinet of Hubert Rostaing, followed by his big band, Django’s Music. He continued to compose jazz melodies but also worked on a symphony, symphonic jazz tunes, and a Mass. In the last years of his life before his death in 1953, he was charged by bebop and the influence of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker as well as the new cool jazz of Miles Davis.
Most jazz musicians found their voice in one genre—Louis Armstrong in his formative “jass,” Benny Goodman in swing, Dizzy and Bird in bebop, Miles Davis in cool jazz. But Django was not held back by just one musical style. He composed, arranged, and recorded songs in each genre, making a statement in four distinct eras of jazz. Few other jazz musicians boasted such success in such varied musical styles.
Django’s greatest musical accompanists, followers, and ultimately, most innovative successors were three Gitan Gypsy brothers named Pierre Joseph “Baro,” Étienne “Sarane,” and Jean “Matelo” Ferret. Django met the frères Ferret while living in a Montmartre hotel during winter 1931. One day, Django’s second wife, Naguine, stepped out of their room to find a diminutive Gypsy waif with his ear to their door. Stammering his apologies, the boy said he had been passing by when he heard the music and stopped to listen. Naguine invited him in and introduced Django, who was laying sprawled out on his bed, smoking a cigarette, and picking his guitar, improvising melodies. The boy introduced himself as Matelo and said that he and his brothers were all guitarists too. Yet after listening to Django’s playing, Matelo solemnly pledged to throw his own guitar away. Instead, Django invited Matelo to retrieve his instrument and the two began playing together, Django teaching the boy the theme “Sugar,” the first jazz melody Matelo learned.
The frères Ferret had ventured that autumn from Rouen to Paris to play their guitars in the capital’s bals and cabarets russe. As musicians and eldest siblings—a position of grave respect among Gypsies—Django and Baro became best friends and also great rivals.
All three brothers—along with their cousing, the honorary fourth brother, René “Challain” Ferret—took turns accompanying Django in his various Quintettes as well as leading their own ensembles. Sarane had his Swing Quintette de Paris modelled after Django’s group; Matelo and Challain played jazz as well as traditional Gypsy music. Baro created his own eccentric signature compositions, a melding of musette waltz and bebop that were labelled valses bebop in an attempt to describe their avant garde form. These were not waltzes to which to waltz. The melody lines led by Baro’s virtuosic guitar playing took surprising turns down dark alleyways and into dangerous backstreets. Odd harmonies followed the theme like an ominous shadow, Baro adding stabbing chordal accents and startling obbligatos behind the accordion. The results were impressionistic songs of a strange, unnerving atmosphere—true jazz jewels, unlike anything else ever recorded anywhere.
Yet ironically, Baro Ferret set aside his guitar during World War II in honor of and frustration over the brilliance of Django’s music. He ran a series of bars, each more shady than the last one, that became hangouts for Gypsy gangsters and headquarters for Baro’s own illicit underworld activities. Out of jail for a spell in 1966, Baro was enticed to pick up his guitar again and re-record his valses bebop that Django so admired. Various versions of Baro’s recordings were released on LP and EP, both entitled Swing valses d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. These tunes by Baro remain some of the most idiosyncratic and adventurous jazz masterpieces ever bar none—including the best of Django.
During Django’s lifetime, none of his Gypsy sidemen dared take a solo in Django’s presence as musical prowess was so admired and feared. But following his death, a pent-up flood was let loose.
Joseph Reinhardt had set his own guitar into its case and vowed never to play again, a silent tribute to his brother. In the mid-1950s, several French jazz aficionados cajoled him into recording again, and through the next decade he released a sporadic series of LPs and EPs. He covered songs by Django, but more impressively composed his own melodies, dark tunes that were nostalgic and exotic. When his fellow Gypsies began to meet for a weekend each summer in the late 1960s in Samois-sur-Seine to honoro Django, Joseph performed for his people in groups with his old compatriot Léo Slab, as well as Django’s sons Lousson and Babik. He passed away in 1982, and was buried alongside his brother.
Perhaps Django’s greatest admirer, Sarane Ferret continued to record and play in Montmartre and Montparnasse into the 1960s. While his brothers explored new musical directions, Sarane remained devoted to jazz in Django’s mode. His band became a school for a younger generation of guitarists, including Gitan Laro Sollero and Frenchman Francis-Alfred Moerman.
Matelo Ferret created his own music. From years playing Tzigane melodies in the Russian cabarets, he forged a style of traditional Eastern European Gypsy music played on a nontraditional instrument, the guitar. He recorded several masterpieces in the coming years. In 1960 and 1966, he played alongside Jo Privat in two sessions that collectively became known as Manouche Partie, a nostalgic revival of the bal musette milieu. In 1978 Matelo recorded a two-album set for Charles Delaunay entitled Tzigansakaïa, an exotic medley of jazz melodies, traditional Tzigane pieces, and original compositions all played with Romany finesse. He passed on his legacy to his three sons, all excellent guitarists—Michel “Sarane,” Jean-Jacques “Boulou,” and Elie “Elios” Ferré.
René “Challain” Ferret followed Matelo’s path in playing traditional Tzigane music. Throughout the 1950s, he accompanied musette accordionist André Verchuren and Gypsy violinist Yoska Nemeth. He married a Toulouse woman and moved to the Midi where he continued to perform, launching a jazz group in the 1980s called Django Jazz. His son Paul “Challain” Ferret learned at his side and today plays modern jazz.
Yet by the late 1950s, many Romanies had all but forgotten the jazz played by one of their own. Beyond Django’s old accompanists in Paris, there were two Sinti violinists of Django’s generation still playing swing—Piotto Limburger was leading his own band in the Netherlands while German Gypsy Schnuckenack Reinhardt recorded an album series, “Musik Deutscher Zigeuner.” Yet few Gypsies owned a record player in their caravans, and Django’s music lived on in silence in the memory of the elders. Most among the younger generations had never even heard his music. Django’s legacy was on the way to being lost among his own people.
Thanks to the invention of the cassette tape player, Django’s jazz was not forgotten among the Romanies. Starting in the 1970s, Django’s music was reissued on cassette by mainstream labels such as Vogue and EMI-Pathé, and Gypsies rediscovered the music of one of their own. Cassettes were portable and inexpensive, ideal for a transient Romany market. This revolution of rediscovery brought a renewed interest in playing Django’s music among the Manouches and Gitans, coinciding with a movement of Romany pride in Europe. Ironically, gadjé jazz fans had kept the heritage alive for almost two decades before being passed back to the Gypsies.
For a people without a documented past, here suddenly was a sense of history. Manouche and Gitans proudly played Django’s music and pronounced it mare gilia—“our music.” His legacy had been on the verge of being lost; now suddenly, it was positioned to become a mainstay of their cultural heritage. Django’s guitar spoke with a new eloquence to his own people, becoming an emblem of Gypsy identity. He had become a cultural hero for a people with few heroes.
Not only was Django’s music disseminated by cassette but a new generation of Gypsy guitarists emerged playing his jazz. They began by copying his song heads and solos off the tapes, faithfully picking out his choruses note for note in a near-religious devotion to his musical canon. With tape recorders, they now made their own cassettes and sold or traded them among themselves.
To the gadjo world, this was a lost generation of Gypsy jazz musicians. Most of them never recorded commercially as few outside their world wanted to hear this new Gypsy jazz in a dawning era of folk music and rock and roll. As some Romany musicians cursed, the world now wanted to hear only soupe—their slang for fluff music that tastes good but has no body. And yet with homemade cassettes, these Gypsy musicians reached their market.
Among the most famous of this lost generation was Jacques Mala, who took the nom de jazz “Jacques Montagne” in honor of an earlier Gypsy guitar genuis, Jacques “Montagne” Mailhes, the nickname meaning simply “mountain” or the summit, the best. This second Montagne accompanied Joseph, Baro, and others of the elder generation, serving as a connection between the two. He even fretted his guitar with just two fingers in an attempt to replicate Django’s sound. Montagne was primarily fired by Django’s bebop, fashioning a hard-edged jazz. After Baro’s retirement from the underworld, Montagne took over his “accounts.” One day when the heat got too close, he simply disappeared for his own good. In the 1990s, he was still hiding from the gendarmes and thus, the mainstream jazz world.
Manouche Piton Reinhardt played a fierce and fast guitar, making music with a savage charm but played with the ferocious energy of early bebop. Piton was said to be so undomesticated and fiercely a Gypsy that he could not function in the gadjo world. Photos of him show a stately man behind a graying mustachio picking out his song on a battered guitar made by luthier Jacques Favino. Piton’s sons, Coco and Sanson, learned at their father’s side and were also renowned musicians. Gitans Jacquet and Cérani Mailhes and Manouche Savé Racine—who was married to Django’s cousin Carmen Ziegler—also never recorded commercially. A comrade of Piton’s, Spatzo Adel played guitar, violin, and piano.
Also among this lost generation was Django’s own son, Lousson, who performed regularly in Paris bars throughout the 1960s but never recorded commercially. Lousson’s style was electric and modern. He died in 1992.
Others of the lost generation followed Django’s bebop stylings. Laro Sollero and René Mailhes took the lead of Django’s bebop and blended it with American influences such as Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and Jim Hall in creating a vibrant modern music. Only Mailhes recorded commercially but not until the 1990s.
During the years of the lost generation, Gitan Paul Pata from the Côte d’Azur was one of the few who got the chance to record commercially primarily because he played a melodic music that was more soupe than jazz. Pata claimed he was an illegitimate son of Baro Ferret, yet his musical father was Henri Crolla.
In the Midi during the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of Gitan guitarists was also playing their own brand of Django’s music, blending in Corsican and flamenco influences and recording for several small labels in southern France and Lyon. Because they were able to record during this era of the lost generation, their music became influential in keeping Django’s legacy alive and in passing on a southern Gitan style.
The most influential was Étienne “Patotte” Bousquet. Performing at the infamous Marseille dive Au Son des Guitares, Bousquet played with such ferocity that he at times broke all six strings with one strum of his plectrum. His music was based in Django’s legacy, but also incorporated musette waltzes and Corsican melodies. He recorded a handful of EPs and LPs that kept songs such as Django’s “Montagne Sainte-Geneviève” from being forgotten. In later years, Bousquet gave up on life as a musician and became a shoe vendor in the Midi’s flea markets.
Paul Vidal was known mysteriously as “Tchan Tchou,” a Chinese-sounding nickname bestowed on him for his slanted eyes. Born in a caravan on November 22, 1923, in Aix-en-Provence, Tchan Tchou learned guitar from his father and from watching Django, whom his father played with when Django visited the Midi. Tchan Tchou was soon performing with two other guitarists in Lyon as the Hot Club de Jazz de Lyon, playing on radio and television broadcasts, including Radio Monte Carlo concerts, and recording a first EP. In later years he recorded sporadically, including three LPs, Guitare Party, Swinging Guitars, and Nomades, backed by his long-time accomplice, Corsican guitarist François Codaccioni as well as Django’s one-time sidemen bassist Alf Masselier and drummer Roger Paraboschi. Tchan Tchou also accompanied Gypsy accordionist Tony “Tieno” Fallone. In later years, Tchan Tchou’s chief accompanist was young Alsatian guitarist Moréno Winterstein, who would carry on the elder’s guitar style and repertoire, including Tchan-Tchou’s famed waltz, “La Gitane.”
At the same time, Django’s music was born again in a different yet related realm. Brittany cleric Clément Le Cossec founded in 1952 La Mission évangélique tzigane de France, an evangelical Christian church run by and devoted to Romanies. By the mid-1960s, Le Cossec’s Mission won over many of Django’s “followers,” including Piton Reinhardt, Laro Sollero, Vivian Villerstein as well as Naguine. The church spread from France throughout Europe to India and the United States in the following decades. The cleric’s goal was to convert Gypsies to Christianity but not convert them from being Gypsies. Thus Django’s music found a home in the service of the church, transformed into devout music in the truest sense. In 1943-1944, Django tried and failed at writing a mass for his fellow Gypsies, but now hymns were written to the scores of Django’s jazz compositions and played in Gypsy church services. La Mission’s musical director was violinist Pierre “Gagar” Hoffman, part of the Hoffman clan Django played with while trying to escape to Switzerland. Gypsy preacher Charles “Tarzan” Welty sang to his flock armed with his Selmer modèle Jazz guitar. And resistance hero, guitarist, and priest Armand “Archange” Stenegry recorded several hymns in 1965 backed by violinist Villerstein and Sollero’s bouncing electric guitar lines in the best tradition of Django.
To his fellow Gypsies, Django’s music had become sacred.
In 1980, thirteen-year-old Alsatian Sinto prodigy Biréli Lagrène recorded an LP entitled Routes to Django. The songs were primarily originals yet the music was steeped in Django’s influence. Lagrène played with a sure swing belying his age, and when Nin-Nin heard him pick his guitar, he broke into tears, stating it was Django born again.
Lagrène heralded a new generation of Gypsies playing mare gilia. Other child prodigies also appeared, including Matelot Ferret’s two sons, Boulou and Elios. Under Matelot’s tutelage, they were raised on a wide variety of musical influences and were never mere copycats of Django. Their music was some of the most daring and innovative to follow Django and the Ferrets’ legacy. At the same time, Baro, Sarane, and Matelot’s long-time accompanist, Francis-Alfred Moerman continued to release albums, each more beautiful than the last. On his collection, 1993 Gitan & Tzigane magie de la guitare, Moerman played John Lewis’ homage, “Django,” with a sensous grace that has perhaps never been equalled.
From Schnuckenack Reinhardt’s ensemble came guitarist Häns’che Weiss, who in turn discovered prodigy violinist Titi Winterstein, who was friends with guitarist Lulu Reinhardt. And Piotto Limburger was backed by Belgian Gypsy Fapy Lafertin, part of the Ferret clan on his mother’s side. As well as playing in his group Waso with multi-instrumentalist gadjo Koen de Cauter, Fapy also played alongside his uncle, violinist, guitarist, and singer Eddie “Bamboula” Ferret.
Out of the Netherlands came prodigies Stochelo Rosenberg and Jimmy Rosenberg. From the Alsace were Mandino Reinhardt, Dorado Schmitt, and one of the brightest guitarists of his generation, Tchavolo Schmitt. In France, Christian Escoudé was playing modern jazz while Raphaël Fays was true to Django. Fays had learned from his father, Louis Fays, who had accompanied dancehall accordionists Verchuryen and Amiable, and also tutored Angelo Debarre. And beyond the star players were scores of others playing their guitars around the campfires.
In the 1990s, several bands began breaking away from the past to create novel takes on Django’s music, sounds at once old and new. Patrick Saussois—long one of Jo Privat and Moerman’s accompanists—launched his Alma Sinti band with accordionist Jean-Claude Laudat while Patrick “Romane” Leguidcoq crafted novel modern compositions and arrangements based on Django’s style. Dominique Cravic, together with the loose-knit ensemble Les Primitifs du Futur including musicians from Didier Roussin to cartoonist R. Crumb, celebrated the roots of musette and jazz. Thierry Robin’s Gitans group created a fusion of North African, Spanish, and French Romany music strongly influenced by Matelot. And the pop group Paris Combo was infused with Django’s chanson and jazz legacy, propelled by Gypsy guitarist Potzi.
At the dawn of the new millennium, two of Django’s grandchildren—Babik’s son David Reinhardt and Lousson’s grandson Dallas Baumgartner—were beginning to perform. Today, in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, Gypsies often teach their children Django’s music note for note like a catechism, handing down mare gilia from generation to generation starting when children can first finger a guitar or violin. |
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