How to Learn to Phrase like early Django

A Gent

Evan Christopher has some interesting insights on this very subject.

Lango-Django

Thanks for sharing that! I hadn't heard of Evan Christopher before. Very insightful.

The question in my mind is, in the term "gypsy jazz" there's a lot of room for disagreement about the proper proportions of "gypsy" vs. "jazz", "tradition" vs. "Technique".

Being firmly in the Mouldy Fig camp myself, I agreed with most everything Evan said about the primacy of Louis Armstrong, choosing proper dance tempos, embellishing the melody, etc. etc.

But at the same time I realize that for a lot of younger players, and non-jazz listeners who play gypsy jazz, these concepts are pretty much passé and irrelevant, and I would hazard a guess that the music of Louis Armstrong would not really inspire them, any more than the playing of some heavy metal guitar god would inspire us vintage jazz lovers.

As much we all love Django's playing, he and a handful of other guitarists (Lang, Aleman, Christian) were like the Wright Brothers of guitar jazz... so the question becomes how we respect their legacy: imitation or evolution?

Very much the same kind of stuff that folk, blues and bluegrass musicians often obsess about, I'm told...

I guess there's no right or wrong to art, but it does give us a lot to think about.

AmundLauritzen

I'm going to be captain obvious here with my suggestion, but it IS the true and tested way:
learn Django note for note from the records. Now we have programs like "Transcribe" that allow us to slow down the audio and tune the audio in cents(most of Django is offset tuning wise, maybe from the recording equipment of that time or the fact that they didn't have tuners).

Solos like "I'll see you in my dreams" contain the nucleus of Djangos style. How he develops ideas with chord forms and will modify one note of that idea to fit the next chord. It's all over that solo.

They key is to identify those aspects and try to come up with your own lines using his timing and concept, but with your own ideas. "I'll see you in my dreams" is a great solo to analyze, and coincidentally, the chord changes are something you find in a lot of other tunes so it is a great workhorse tune as well.

Listen:


It happens from the first idea in Djangos solo, at 0:48, how he takes that simple idea outlining the maj6 sound, and changes the notes necessary to fit the next chord, using the exactly same idea but now it's a m6 instead.

The same concept of repeating the line but adapting to the chord changes happen around the 1 minute mark where he develops a simple idea through those cycling dominant chords.

There is no need for me to list all the occurences of this concept in the solo, because it's littered with it all throughout!

I think working that way will help you understand a lot about Djangos style and help you incorporate it into your playing.