100 Jahre Django Reinhardt

Today, Django Reinhardt, the pioneer of Gypsy Swing and European Jazz in general, would have celebrated his 100th birthday! Please feel welcome to listen to the 3-Minute Radio Piece (german) I made for Radio Bremen. More information about Django you will find here. If you are only in it for the music, this is a collection with a lot of important recordings but without liner notes. For guitarists I can recommend this book, with tabs, a play-along-CD, a biography and texts on his technique as well as guitars. This by the way is a movie about Reinhardt, Woody Allen made, who uses a lot of Reinhardts music in all of his works.

Here you can see how two fingers of Django's left hand are crippled from a fire of Djangos caravan. Django caused the fire himself by accidentally kicking a candle into the paper flowers his wife produces for a living. More than a year the Sinti Reinhardt had to spent in a hospital. One can call it a miracle, that he developed such a fast and sensitive technique with only three fingers.

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