Django on the Go

Django Reinhardt never had a hit record. He only toured the United States once, as a guest with Duke Ellington's band in 1946, a jaunt legendary for Reinhardt's nonchalance: He arrived stateside without his band or a guitar; he couldn't read Ellington's music; and he ran on Gypsy time, showing up two hours late for a Carnegie Hall performance because he'd got to talking with a Frenchman in a bar.

Reinhardt fretted his guitar with two fingers fewer than the usual complement because the other two had been burned and paralyzed in a caravan fire. Born outdoors in a Gypsy camp in Belgium in 1910 and nominally a resident of France, Reinhardt lived a semi-nomadic life, sometimes missing entire weeks of performances because he was fishing or off in a caravan. Gypsies were a historically unpopular and set-upon people, who, even when romanticized in the movies, tended to trail werewolves or worse in their wake.

These factors, plus Reinhardt being dead these past 55 years, would seem to make him a difficult commodity to market. So what accounts for the fact that, unlike any other personage in jazz, there is a host of annual music festivals devoted to his music, with US fests stretching from New York City to the pastoral coastline of Washington State's Whidbey Island?

'Jazz a kid can love'

“A lot of jazz is cool and laid-back, so when many people hear the word 'jazz,' it scares them off, but Django's music is joyous, rhapsodic and inviting," says guitarist John Jorgensen, a veteran of some 16 Django festivals. “He attacked the guitar the same way Louis Armstrong attacked the trumpet. His technique and virtuosity really challenge musicians, but the music is very accessible to any listener because he played with so much vitality and emotion. It's jazz a kid can love."

Even with two fingers, Reinhardt could outplay and out-swing most other guitarists, and was a fountainhead of invention. Fronting the Hot Club of Paris in the 1930s, the emotion and unpredictability of his soloing lived on to influence such disparate musicians as Willie Nelson, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and Richard Thompson. A love of his music is practically a virus that's passed from musician to musician.