A Manouche guitarist made jazz lead with six strings
Django Reinhardt, born in a Belgian Romani camp in 1910, co-founded a Paris Hot Club quintet with violinist Stéphane Grappelli in 1934. Their swing put guitar up front in Europe, and tunes like Nuages and Minor Swing still define gypsy jazz worldwide.
Jean "Django" Reinhardt (23 January 1910–16 May 1953) was a French jazz guitarist and composer, among the first major jazz talents to emerge in Europe. In 1934 he and violinist Stéphane Grappelli launched a Paris ensemble, the Quintette du Hot Club de France, that put guitar out front as a solo jazz voice. He recorded in France with visiting Americans such as Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. Standards from his pen include Minor Swing, Daphne, Belleville, Djangology, Swing '42, and Nuages. Guitarist Frank Vignola has said nearly every major popular guitarist has felt his influence.
He was born in Liberchies, Belgium, into a Manouche Romani family. His father used the Reinhardt surname to dodge French conscription; mother Laurence Reinhardt raised him in encampments near Paris where he took up violin, banjo, and guitar. Authors sometimes gloss Django as Romani for "I awake," though it may simply be a pet form of Jean. He had little schooling and learned literacy only as an adult.
A banjo-guitar gift at age twelve let him copy local virtuosos by eye. At seventeen he married Florine "Bella" Mayer by Romani custom (not French civil law) and recorded the next year, 1928, still on banjo-guitar. On 2 November 1928 a candle set fire to the celluloid his wife used for artificial flowers, and the blaze in their caravan badly burned the ring and little fingers of his left hand; doctors said he would never play again, yet over months of recovery he retaught himself using mainly his index and middle fingers. From 1934 until war broke out in 1939 the all-string group, with his brother Joseph and Roger Chaput on guitar and Louis Vola on bass, was Europe's most inventive jazz band of its day.
Source: Django Reinhardt
