“Django’s Tiger”: From Jazz to Jazz Manouche

Abstract

Not long ago, I saw an online amateur video of the French guitarists Adrien Moignard (b. 1985) and Sebastien Giniaux (b. 1981), who are two of the leading players of the genre known as (or gypsy jazz) (Moignard and Giniaux 2010). They had been filmed in 2010 at the French village of Samois-sur-Seine during its annual Festival Django Reinhardt. Seated outdoors at sunset, closely encircled by throngs of festival-goers, the two musicians were performing a composition called Django's Tiger by the festival's dedicatee, the guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910-53). Midway through a breakneck virtuosic solo, Moignard insistently reiterated several high B-naturals, halfway down his guitar's neck, before launching decisively into a four-bar phrase, high up the fretboard. A more tentative, indistinct arpeggiation followed. And then, for a fleeting instant, he stopped playing, his left hand slack against the instrument. After scrambling through another rapid arpeggiation, his left fingers only grazing the strings, Moignard fully reconnected physically with his guitar and confidently concluded the chorus. I laughed. It seemed to me that this was not merely the sort of everyday stumble that adventuresome, risk-taking improvisers inevitably make from time to time. Moignard was paraphrasing a melodic passage that Reinhardt had improvised on a recording years ago, but it did not work out as deftly as it had for Django. Its harmonic context was different, for reasons that were far from trivial. In fact, it occurred to me that this near-imperceptible musical disruption encapsulated an epistemological contradiction within an entire musical genre inspired by a single musician. It embodied the disjunction between the real historical figure of Django Reinhardt and his own posthumous legacy. Before proceeding, it's worth mentioning that, ever since I first heard his recordings during the early 1980s, I have always thought of Django Reinhardt as a jazz musician. In the last three decades, however, the world has changed, and with the recent emergence of the jazz manouche genre, many musicians and listeners now see him in an altogether new light. Moignard and Giniaux's videotaped performance motivated me to gingerly begin to explore this new genre, and to try to understand how, and why, many people today think of Reinhardt's place in music and in history quite differently from the way I do-or, at least, used to. To that end, I set out to take stock of published literature by journalists and music scholars, to analyze recordings, and to observe and interview some professional and amateur players. The project has brought into sharper focus certain common misapprehensions, originating in a persistent essentialist racial ideology, concerning both Reinhardts musical identity and jazz manouche's history and aesthetics. It has also raised interrelated questions about how musical genres take root and evolve, how music history is written, and how, in both instances, past realities can be effaced by present-day artistic, social, and political concerns. These questions are not solely theoretical; from time to time, glimpses of truth burst into plain view, even if only evanescently, hurtling across the frets of a guitar. Django Reinhardt in the Jazz World Today widely regarded as the first European to become a major influential jazz musician, Django Reinhardt was born, not long before World War I, in the Belgian village of Liberchies to a family of Manouche Romanies (gypsies). (1) Like most Romanies, the Manouche trace their roots to Northern India; they have lived peripatetically in Northwestern Europe since at least the late fifteenth century (Williams 1998, 7-8). Reinhardt, who spent most of his life in France, began his professional musical career during the early-to-mid 1920s as a banjo-guitarist playing musette music in Parisian cafes and cabarets (Delaunay 1961, 40-42; Dregni 2004, 25-33). Around 1930, after recovering from a severe hand injury that almost derailed his career, he adopted the acoustic steel-stringed guitar as his main instrument and began playing the popular music, African American in origin, known as jazz. …