Django (English)

Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt's teenage affinity with the instrument was tested to the limit when he was maimed in a caravan fire; his career continued only after he painfully relearned to play with a damaged left hand. In his first biography, DJANGO: THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF A GYPSY LEGEND, music writer Michael Dregni recounts the origins of Django's style in musette, a colorful collision of French, Italian, and Gypsy music and an analogue to jazz, and the bals musette, the working-class music halls where the guitarist got his start. Reinhardt's serendipitous discovery of jazz while playing in the South of France in 1931 changed his life. Equally coincidentally, he met violinist and fellow jazz convert Stephane Grappelli soon afterwards, and a successful partnership was born. Dregni explores Reinhardt's movements during the Occupation of Paris during of World War II (contrary to popular belief, he continued playing, and even owned his own club), and his subsequent tour of America with Duke Ellington, traditionally supposed to have been a fiasco but in reality, as Dregni reveals, remarkably successful. In its energetic myth-debunking and lively, detail-rich research into Reinhardt's background, DJANGO brings the charismatic guitarist and his rich musical legacy to life. minimize