Django! - Hindustan Times
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Django!

Hindustan Times | ByLuke Kenny, Mumbai
May 23, 2011 02:58 PM IST

Today we remember one of the greatest guitarists in music history. The era was the 1920s and jazz was the new burgeoning music art form.

Today we remember one of the greatest guitarists in music history. The era was the 1920s and jazz was the new burgeoning music art form. In came the Belgian-born gypsy Jean ‘Django’ Reinhardt who set the scene on fire, literally! At the age of 18, Django was injured in a fire and was badly burnt, leaving his right leg paralysed and the third and fourth fingers in his left hand useless. Refusing any medical attention, he hid away while his brother Joseph tutored him on the guitar. As a result, he impressed a style that allowed him to play with his remaining fingers, and subsequently and amazingly, played all his guitar solos with only two fingers!

During the heyday of swing jazz from the mid ’20s to the early ’30s, Django would unleash his magic with his ‘brothers’ Louis Armstrong and Stephane Grapelli.

Django was an extremely eccentric person and thoroughly unpredictable. He would show up for performances without a guitar, and sometimes not even turn up for sold-out concerts, saying he was going to take a walk on the beach or in a garden.

It was on one of these walks back from a performance in a Paris club on May 16, 1953 that he collapsed from a brain haemorrhage at age 43, leaving behind a world of musical possibilities and collaborations that could have been. So let’s hear it for the gypsy soul, Django. May his tunes reverberate the heavens… if I may say so.

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