The life of Django Reinhardt

A happy place to spend a winter afternoon in Paris is a bar called the Chope des Puces, just outside the Clignancourt flea market. Every Sunday, for longer than anyone can remember, two battered, time-worn guitarists have met there to play, on battered, time-worn guitars, popular jazz tunes in the manner of the Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and his Quintet of the Hot Club of France. The ringing chords, the jaunty minor-key-ballade melodies, the peculiar heavy, heartbreak vibrato, the broken-icicle chromatic runs up and down the fretboard, all played against the steady boom-chick, boom-chick of the cast-iron guitar chords: the cherished Django sound is there, and something of the feeling, too. Jazz imitators are in general extremely sad—the “Dixieland” players in their straw hats trying to play like Louis Armstrong, the ghost big bands, courts without their Counts and Dukes—yet these Sunday Djangoists, like so many others throughout Paris and the world, are somehow not. There are Djangoist “hot clubs” in Norway and Denmark and San Francisco, playing a near-perfect revival sound, and the now annual Django festival in New York has just concluded at Birdland in pseudo-Gypsy conviviality. Django’s manner, seemingly so inimitable, gets imitated with precision: that Hot Club de Norv�ge is hot.



How and why this should be—how an illiterate, happy-go-lucky Gypsy could have created a style that goes on creating itself—is at last the subject of serious study, in Michael Dregni’s biography, “Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend” (Oxford; $35). Dregni, who writes for the magazine Vintage Guitar, and whose first biography this is, not only has managed to break into the French milieu of jazz aficionados and sects in which Django worked but has penetrated the Gypsy, or Romany, world from which Django emerged—a clannish world whose existence, well into the nineteen-fifties and sixties, was still largely furtive, outdoors, vagabond, and, occasionally, criminal. Dregni clears up the two much mystified areas of Django’s life—what exactly he did during the Second World War, and what really happened on his one trip to America, in 1946—and he sorts through the music and, nice bonus, manages to suggest plots for at least three fine French movie musicals.



“Django” is a Romany word—the first-person singular of the verb meaning “to awake.” It was the Gypsy name that Django’s mother gave him when he was born, in January of 1910, in a caravan on the road in Belgium. Romany families in those days seem to have given their children both a public name—the new baby’s was Jean—and a private name. (This was partly a time-honored way of avoiding conscription; the government not only never knew where you were but never quite knew your name.) Django’s family, Dregni explains, were Manouche—one of the two bands of Gypsies living in France in those days. (The others called themselves Gitans.) The Manouche, it seems, were the kind of Gypsies who caused other Gypsies to raise their eyebrows, draw in their breath, and ask if perhaps these people might not be just a touch too wild and unreliable. Django, Dregni emphasizes, was not merely “of Gypsy descent”; he was, and remained, an honest-to-God caravan-and-tarot-card Romany, illiterate until well into his adulthood (and only semi-literate even then), who, when he was a celebrated musician on tour in England, still liked to stroll off into the farmland to wring the neck of a stolen chicken or two.

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