When Apple Inc. announced the iPad last month, CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated the device with a surprising choice of music. The first notes publicly heard on the new device were not a snippet of cutting-edge contemporary pop—not Radiohead or Norah Jones—but a jazz classic recorded in Paris 73 years ago. It was “Swing Guitars” by guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli, with the Quintette of the Hot Club of France.
Reinhardt, who died tragically young in 1953 at the age of 43, was both the greatest jazz guitarist and the most significant international jazzman. He proved that non-Americans could contribute to the tradition. And he fused it with the rich heritage of Gypsy music, creating a style, “jazz manouche,” that in recent decades has continued to grow in world-wide popularity.
Both the greatest jazz guitarist and the greatest international jazzman.
Possibly Mr. Jobs was mindful that the Reinhardt Centennial had occurred on Jan. 23, just a few days before the iPad presentation. But probably not. The legacy of Django Reinhardt enjoys a currency that those of comparable jazz icons do not. In recent months, the centennials of both Lester Young and Art Tatum came and went almost unnoticed, but Reinhardt is omnipresent—more so than during his lifetime. Tribute concerts have been a way of life in New York and around the world for the past decade. There are also new tribute albums and a new book.
The past few years have been good ones for Reinhardt’s legacy: The French label Fremeaux finished its epic “Intégrale Django Reinhardt” series, which ultimately consisted of more than 800 tracks contained in 20 double-disc CD sets; Oxford University Press published Michael Dregni’s definitive biography, “Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend”; Tony Bennett sang his own lyrics to “Nuages,” Reinhardt’s most famous melody, calling the result “All for You”; and Woody Allen lovingly mythologized Reinhardt in his 1999 film, “Sweet and Lowdown.”
More importantly, another film made Reinhardt’s existence concrete: No genuine sound footage of Reinhardt in action was believed to exist until recently, when a four-minute clip of the Quintette playing “J’Attendrai” was included in the DVD “Stéphane Grappelli: A Life in the Jazz Century.” Readily viewable on YouTube, it shows us what recordings cannot: how Reinhardt was able to make this incredibly virtuosic music despite being able to use only two fingers on his right hand (the result of a fire in his caravan at age 18). Reinhardt looks like the very image of continental cool with his tiny gigolo mustache and his index and middle fingers bouncing across the fretboard.
Tune In
Listen to clips of songs by Django Reinhardt:
A new book, “The Music of Django Reinhardt,” by Benjamin Givan (University of Michigan Press), is an extremely technical treatise, aimed at guitarists and music teachers, that analyzes Reinhardt’s improvisatory style primarily through the recurrence of specific formulas and motifs. What I think the lay listener responds to in Reinhardt’s music is his amazing sense of drama; the Gypsy was one of Louis Armstrong’s earliest and most immediate heirs, and like Pops he had a well-stocked and fine-tuned arsenal of techniques for grabbing and holding your attention.
Take the track that so captivated Mr. Jobs. “Swing Guitars” opens with a full-bodied solo by Grappelli—Reinhardt’s longtime musical partner—stating the melody (credited to the two of them). In Reinhardt’s own two-chorus solo, he does a little bit of everything: He rushes ahead of the beat in spots and lags behind in others. For a while he throws out a dazzling array of notes, so many you can barely follow them, while, at other points, he spaces out the notes so slowly, at such wide intervals, that he creates a considerable amount of tension as you wonder when the next note is going to arrive. He plays some passages whisper quiet, then quickly turns up the volume just to catch you off guard. Sometimes, rather than move forward, he’ll stay in one place and repeat a phrase for a few measures, varying it only slightly, and then, when you least expect it, charge full steam ahead and wind up anyplace but where you excepted him to be. He plays mostly single notes, but near the end of his second chorus he surprises us with a few bars of octaves, an approach that anticipates Wes Montgomery 25 years later. He ends with a quote from “Doin’ the New Low Down” delivered like a punchline.
Within a few generations, jazz improvisation would become a given, but back then, soloists like Reinhardt refused to take it for granted. Every solo he played sounds like he’s battling to justify the very concept of improvisation. Reinhardt was never completely removed from his beginnings as a street musician, and he always sounds like he’s trying to entertain an audience, rather than just to amuse his fellow musicians. He knew how to make an entrance and he knew how to leave us laughing. If we’re still using the iPad, or its spiritual descendants, even for half as long as we’ll be loving the music of Django Reinhardt, Mr. Jobs will have really accomplished something.
Mr. Friedwald writes about jazz for the Journal.
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