Gypsy Jazz (Legacy of Django Reinhardt)

Gypsy Jazz (Legacy of Django Reinhardt)
 
Introduction
Music is probably the most understandable international language, human have invented  so far. Together with other forms of art it’s a way to express ourselves, our feelings, our experience. Aside from all the unpleasant things human can cause, music seems to keep its innocence and sincerity.
I consider myself a music-addict, who is well up in some areas of music. Nearly three years ago, while discovering jazz, nothing caught my attention so much as the thirties. Especially the “art” of Django Reinhardt. Somehow, the optimistic “swinging” atmosphere of the last century filled up with the gypsy elements formed an untypical symbiosis, which automatically started off my obsession. Usually, I refuse to speak about music, because I think it’s avoidable. “Music should be played and heard, nothing else”. On the other hand, it’s always interesting to acknowledge something about its background and roots. Therefore I tried to put together a brief summary of the “jazz manouche” or either I could say: “Legacy of Django Reinhardt”, which I still consider one of the most original and authentic.

1.  Jazz manouche? Django Reinhardt?
“Gypsy jazz” or “gypsy swing” is a style of jazz that is often attributed to a gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grapelli who founded the all strings jazz ensemble - The Quintet du Hot Club de France, in the 1930s in Paris, France. This style is sometimes also referred to as “jazz manouche”, from the French term meaning “gypsy”. The style’s creation is being attributed to a gypsy, the musical characteristics of the blending of gypsy musical elements with jazz and the fact that it has largely been fellow gypsies (until recently) who have carried and preserved the musical legacy of Django Reinhardt since his death in 1953, makes the term “jazz manouche” one that is quite fitting in describing this genre.
 
2.  1910 - 1953
Jean Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953) was a pioneering virtuoso jazz guitarist and composer. Born into a family of Sinti gypsies Django invented an entirely new style of jazz guitar technique (sometimes called 'hot' jazz guitar) that has since become a living musical tradition within French gypsy culture. With violinist Stéphane Grappelli, he co-founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France, described by critic Thom Jurek as "one of the most original bands in the history of recorded jazz." Django‘s most popular compositions have become jazz standards, including "Minor Swing", "Daphne", "Belleville", "Djangology", "Swing '42" and "Nuages".

As a guitar-banjo player he joined the accordion players in the Bals Mussette of Paris in his youth. Django later switched to the guitar during convalescence after his near fatal injury when his caravan caught fire leaving his left hand ring and pinky fingers damaged for life. This forced him to approach his instrument differently than many conventional guitarists. With only the use of his index and middle fingers on his fretting hand he adopted many different chord voicings and fingering patterns that one does not see as much in more conventional jazz guitar. This is a large simplification at best but it does illustrate to a degree the challenges that Django faced physically as well as what had to be done in order to overcome his handicap. 

The period between 1929 and 1933 were formative years for Django. He decisively abandoned the banjo-guitar in favour of the guitar. He was particularly impressed with Louis Armstrong, whom he called "my brother". Shortly afterwards he made the acquaintance of a young violinist with very similar musical interests - Stéphane Grappelli. In the absence of paid work in their radical new music, the two would jam together, along with a loose circle of other musicians.

In 1934, Django and Parisian violinist Grappelli were invited to form the "Quintette du Hot Club de France" with Reinhardt's brother Joseph and Roger Chaput on guitar, and Louis Vola on bass. Occasionally Chaput was replaced by Reinhardt's best friend and fellow Gypsy Pierre "Baro" Ferret. The vocalist Freddy Taylor participated in a few songs, such as "Georgia On My Mind" and "Nagasaki". Jean Sablon was the first singer to record with him more than 30 songs from 1933. They also used their guitars for percussive sounds, as they had no true percussion section. The Quintette du Hot Club de France was one of the few well-known jazz ensembles composed only of string instruments.
Django also played and recorded with many American jazz musicians such as Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Rex Stewart (who later stayed in Paris), and participated in a jam-session and radio performance with Louis Armstrong. Later in his career he played with Dizzy Gillespie in France. Django and the Hot Club of France used the Selmer Maccaferri, the first commercially available guitars with a cutaway and later with an aluminium-reinforced neck.

When World War II broke out, the original quintet was on tour in the United Kingdom. Django returned to Paris at once, leaving his wife behind. Grappelli remained in the United Kingdom for the duration of the war. Django reformed the quintet, with Hubert Rostaing on clarinet replacing Grappelli's violin. In 1943, Django married Sophie "Naguine" Ziegler in Salbris, with whom he had a son, Babik Reinhardt, who became a respected guitarist in his own right. Django survived the war unscathed, unlike many Romanis who perished in the Porajmos, the Nazi regime's systematic murder of several hundred thousand European Romanis. He was well aware of the dangers he and his family faced, and made several unsuccessful attempts to escape occupied France.

After the war, Django rejoined Grappelli in the UK, and then went on in fall 1946 to tour the United States as a special guest soloist with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, when he got to play with many notable musicians and composers such as Maury Deutsch. Despite Django 's great pride in touring with Ellington (one of his two letters to Grappelli relates this excitement), he was not really integrated into the band, playing only a few tunes at the end of the show, backed by Ellington, with no special arrangements written for him. After the tour he secured an engagement at Café Society Uptown, where he did four solos a day backed by the resident band. These performances drew large audiences.

Django was among the first people in France to appreciate the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, whom he sought when he arrived in New York. They were both on tour at the time, however. He had been promised some jobs in California but these failed to materialize and he got tired of waiting. He returned to France in February 1947. After returning to France, Django spent the remainder of his days re-immersed in Romani life, having found it difficult to adjust to the modern world. He would sometimes show up for concerts without a guitar or amp, or wander off to the park or beach, and on a few occasions he refused even to get out of bed. Django was known by his band, fans, and managers to be extremely unpredictable. He would often skip sold-out concerts to simply "walk to the beach" or "smell the dew". In Rome in 1949, Django recruited three Italian jazz players (on bass, piano, and snare drum) and recorded his final (double) album, "Djangology". He was once again united with Grappelli, and returned to his acoustic Selmer-Maccaferri. The recording was discovered and issued for the first time in the late 1950s.

In 1951, he retired to Samois-sur-Seine, near Fontainebleau, where he lived until his death. He continued to play in Paris jazz clubs and began playing electric guitar, despite his initial hesitation towards the instrument. His final recordings made in the last few months of his life show him moving in a new musical direction; he had assimilated the vocabulary of bebop and fused it with his own melodic style. While walking from the Avon railway station after playing in a Paris club he collapsed outside his house from a brain haemorrhage. It was a Saturday and it took a full day for a doctor to arrive and Django was declared dead on arrival at the hospital in Fontainebleau at age 43.
 
3.  Legacy of Django Reinhardt
For about a decade after Django's death, interest in his musical style was minimal, with the fifties seeing bebop superseding swing in jazz, the rise of rock and roll, and electric instruments taking over from acoustic ones in popular music. His second son, Babik, was a guitarist in the contemporary jazz style. His first son, Lousson, was more of a traditionalist, but followed the Romani lifestyle and rarely performed in public. Reinhardt's friends and sidemen Pierre Ferret and his brothers continued to perform their own version of gypsy swing. There was a revival of interest in Reinhardt's music from the mid sixties, with acoustic music having become popular through the folk movement. Several of Reinhardt's near-contemporaries recorded for the first time in the sixties and seventies, for instance Paul "Tchan Tchou" Vidal. Django's own brother Joseph had initially sworn to abandon music on hearing of Django's death, but was persuaded to start performing and recording again. In 1973 Stéphane Grappelli formed a successful Quintette-style band with British guitarists Diz Disley and Denny Wright. Grappelli would go on to form many other musical partnerships, including John Etheridge and Nigel Kennedy. He was also to acquire his own emulators, for instance Dutch violinist Tim Kliphuis.
 
4.  What Makes This Jazz Gypsy
The original Quintette du Hot Club de France played acoustically without a drummer, facilitating the use of the acoustic guitar as a lead instrument. Guitar and violin are still the main solo instruments, although clarinet and accordion are also common. The rhythm guitar is played using a distinct percussive technique "la pompe" that essentially replaces the drums. Most gypsy jazz guitarists, lead and rhythm, play a version of the Selmer-Maccaferri guitar design favored by Django himself.

Although many instrumental lineups exist, a group including one lead guitar, violin, two rhythm guitars, and bass is often the norm. Ensembles aim for an acoustic sound even when playing amplified concerts and informal jam sessions in small venues or meetings such as the annual Django Reinhardt festival at Samois-sur-Seine are very much part of the scene. In Eastern gypsy jazz, rhythm section is most likely covered by one or two cymbaloms, or (less frequently) a cymbalom and/or drums and an acoustic guitar. An upright bass fills out the ensembles. Gypsy jazz is a unique guitar discipline, and due to this, it’s associated with multiple techniques that are definitive of the sound of this music.
 
4.1 Rhythm
Rhythm guitar in gypsy jazz uses a special form of strumming known as "la pompe". This form of percussive rhythm is similar to the "boom-chick" in bluegrass styles; it is what gives the music its fast swinging feeling. The strumming hand, which never touches the top of the guitar, must make a quick up-down strum followed by a down strum. The up-down part of la pompe must be done extremely fast, regardless of the tempo of the music. This pattern is usually played in unison by two or more guitarists in the rhythm section.

4.2  Harmony
Another important aspect of this style of playing is based on the chord shapes Django was forced to use due to his injury. Standard barre chords are not an acceptable form in gypsy jazz, and these are instead replaced with chords that use just two or three fingers, often with one or more guitar strings muted by the left hand. Standard major and minor chords are almost never played, and are instead replaced by major 7th chords, major 6th chords, and 6/9 chords. Gypsy reharmonisation is often aimed at giving a minor feel even where a song is in a major key, for instance the substitution of a minor 6th chord for a Dominant seventh. Dominant seventh chords are also altered by lowering the 9th and 13th scale degree.
 
4.3 Lead
Lead playing in this style has been summarised as ornamented or decorated arpeggio. Decorations often introduce chromaticism - for instance, mordents and trills. Particularly characteristic is a figure where successive notes of an arpeggio are each preceded by an appoggiatura-like grace note one semitone below. Other decorations include tremolo and string bends on the guitar, staccatto (or pizzicato on the violin), ghost notes, harmonics, octaves, double stops etc.

Arpeggios on the guitar are typically executed as patterns running diagonally from the lower frets on the lower strings to the upper frets on the upper strings. Such patterns tend to have no more than two stopped notes per string, relating to the fact that Django could only articulate two fingers on his fretting hand.

Commonly used scales, in addition to arpeggios, include the chromatic scale, melodic minor scale, dorian mode and diminished scale. Chromatic runs are often executed very quickly over more than one octave.  A particularly characteristic technique is the glissando, in which the guitar player slides a finger along a string, with a precisely timed tremolo picking out individual notes, in order to get a fast, virtuosic sound. Diminished runs, in which the shape of a diminished seventh chord is played in all inversions, one after the other, is another widespread gypsy jazz technique. Diminished 7th arpeggios are also used over dominant 7th chords. Guitarists often intersperse melodic playing with flamenco-esque percussive series of chords to create a varied solo .
 
4.4   Repertoire
Gypsy jazz has its own set of frequently played standards, which are fairly distinct from the standards tunes of mainsteam jazz. However, contemporary ensembles may adapt almost any type of song to the style. Gypsy swing standards include jazz hits of the '20s and '30s, such as Limehouse Blues, and Dinah; Bal Musette numbers, often waltzes; original compositions by Django Reinhardt, such as Nuages and Swing 42; compositions by other notable gypsy swing players; and jazzed-up versions of gypsy songs, such as Dark Eyes.

Much of the repertoire is in minor keys, and the dorian and harmonic minor modes are frequently heard, lending a distinctively dark and modal sound to the tunes which contrasts with the uptempo and spirited performance style. One popular example is Django's tune "Minor Swing", perhaps the most well-known gypsy jazz composition. Slower ballads and duets may feature rubato playing and exotic harmonies.
 
5.  Gypsy Jazz Today
Gypsy jazz has enjoyed a certain “revival” in a sense over the last decade. This can be attributed to a combination of factors such as the growing popularity of current generation players (for example The Rosenberg Trio, Bireli Lagrene, Jimmy Rosenberg, Angelo Debarre, etc.), a wider availability of access to gypsy jazz recordings and also an ever growing availability of Selmer-Macaferri style guitars. Additionally, technology has made it much easier for people to connect and share knowledge about this music all over the world. Moreover, over the last decade we have seen a huge spike in interest with this music worldwide as can be seen with the ever growing number of bands being created in honor of this music and the growing number of festivals worldwide honoring gypsy jazz and Django Reinhardt specifically.
 
Conclusion
In this project You were able to find some basic information about the gypsy jazz genre and its founder Django Reinhardt. Maybe it wasn’t so necessary to describe some parts so much in detail. However, If You belong to the “music experts”, my aim was to enlarge Your view. But music experience isn’t about dividing people into groups. As I mentioned already in the introduction. If you are going to look up some gypsy jazz recording, after reading this project, my intention will be fulfilled. Nowadays, information sources are absolutely unlimited. On the other hand, throughout all the amount (often with no value) You have to find something that’s suitable for You. But don’t forget, You have to discover. Enjoy!