Django and Charlie Christian

Jeff Moore

Dennis, I enjoyed your insights and didn't see the whole article.
My response became a topic?
My comment was just my view of comparing musicians. I do it myself, otherwise I couldn't choose what to listen to, but I found that for me there was an inherent problem when I tried to rank artists in discussions. Not a big deal, but I thought it might help to bring comparison up as part of the discussion.

dennis

michael will publish the article next month... but i m still revising things/fleshing things out, and like i ve said 10000 times already, i have to be very careful with my words... people will always try to interpret words in ways that are much different than the original intent... any kind of comparison between players should be objective, and the comparisons made should not be about one being better than the other from an artistic point of view. in this instance, it is useful to understand what was going on in that era. CC and DR were the two BIG guys as far as non-classical guitar went... Django was 6 years CC's senior so he had a head start as far as career goes, but then CC bathed in jazz and was right in the middle of it, and CC was also American, whether one likes it or not, fame is not always just attributed to talent (though it is certainly an important factor), but it's often the result of a complex network of media/hype. It makes sense that despite segregation laws, CC would become the pride and joy of American guitar history.

Anyway, in my full article (which i remind you is 11 pages long at the moment), i do talk about the difference between their styles, objectively of course.

The fact i,s historically speaking, NO one was doing what django was doing as far as the guitar is concerned... He was taking absolute full advantage of what the instrument had to offer... again , i ll remind people who cannot read carefully, this does not mean that Django's music is better than CC's, that is not the point of this. Django's artistic and musical vision was extremely deep, this is the result of me spending the last 15 years (on and off) investigating his music by transcribing it, analyzing it, and checking out what else was going on in those days... the same way i'm currently analyzing CC's music these days.

Yet throughout history, as others have pointed out, outside of our django community , django has often been just a footnote and his genius downplayed; what people talk about is his handicap... i also mention in my article that despite popular belief, from a practical point of view, django only lost the use of his ring finger... in those days, and still for many players today, the guitar was a 3 fingered instrument, the pinky was only used on occasion for certain stretches or chords/octaves. If django had not had his accident, he'd be soloing with 3 fingers, as charlie christian did, wes montgomery, george benson, etc...

anyway i love both their music and would not dare to compare their artistry... but the fact remains, django s musical vision compared to all other guitar players at the time was extremely deep and unprecedented, he was a true guitarist's guitarist (taking full advantage of what the guitar could offer) and a true musician's musician (his deep interest in all forms of music, classical, jazz, heavy metal, hip hop, electronica).

Jazzaferri

Well, I will throw the name of Oscar Aleman into the mix....he was a contemporary and .IMO he was in the same league.

He had quite a different sound from either...obviously much more Latin influence......

dennis

i talk about oscar as well!! again back when i was first writing the article last summer, i had been corresponding with teddy dupont... this is of course subjective, but i really think that as far as pure old school swing goes, oscar aleman was quite similar to django... Teddy disagreed with me, but that's subjectivity... indeed Django has a deeper musical vision in the long run, but for the hotclub swing style, Oscar, for me, was django's equal.... have i committed blasphemy against the django police? haha

If Django was playing Gypsy Jazz, then one must say that Oscar was playing Gypsy Jazz as well, and in some instances Charlie Parker as well: listen to this:



this is all part of the research i did for my article

sadow

Did Parker do much in that acoustic gypsy jazz style? Couldn't find that version of Cherokee on iTunes. Wouldn't mind an entire album of that.

dennis

here's another:

dennis

That s precisely the point, this django community exists because of the unique set of circumstances that led to the codified genre of gypsy jazz! CC influencrd legions of musicians but no one really codified his style and continued that legacy...

Teddy Dupont

stuart wrote: »

It's certainly not the case that Django's gone from being a niche interest for enthusiasts to a mainstream figure, ......

True and that will always be the case but how many people have heard of Charlie Parker or Bix Beiderbecke (today probably more have heard of Django Reinhardt)? Jazz itself is a niche interest. I can't quanitify it but there is no doubt in my mind that a lot more people listen to Django today than did in the 50's and 60's. I agree the internet has really fostered that growth.

For me, the issue of recognition is of greater significance. There has been a major change in the way critics and "experts" view him. His ability and contribution to the development of the guitar and even to jazz itself is much more appreciated today than when I started reading about him in 1955. Partly perhaps because fewer people, particularly jazz critics and enthusiasts, are concerned with musical compartmentalization than was the case in the 50's.

stuart wrote: »

..... but I know who you are now and I've really benefited from your work because of the internet.

Thanks.

Jeff Moore

The discussion of how Django's contribution survived is a good one. He seems so important to music writ large (for me at least) that I'd never contemplated the notion that without his clan, his legacy might have been lost. Not sure that's exactly what your saying, but it's plausible. To be a "jazz musician" and not be American certainly would have brought up issues of credibility and even acceptability in the era of Django.
It seems like the best known US guitarists will reference Django more often than others? If so, it's unlikely that Django would have fallen off the planet, but who knows. Maybe guitarists as a group have some responsibility with keeping Django in the light. They seem like the group (besides his camp mates) who would be first to extol a Django. Les Paul and Chet often mentioned his influence.
Like a lot of artists, it's hard to put in words what is so remarkable about this or that musician. Django is one of those. There are jazz musicians whose melodic thrust is so diffused that I can't even listen willingly. Django continually takes odd turns, but in his case, and even when its truly "weird", it seems to fit and sometimes sounds like an "obvious turn of melody" when its in fact wasn't obvious at all until he played it. Exotic and familiar all at once. Dissonance converted into sugar. A practical impossibility. A Houdini kind of effect in the mind.
As the article points out, he was pretty deep.

Jazzaferri

When I was giving my presentation on Django to a class of jazz students at the Conservatory I played Blues for Ike at the beginning. All the kids thought it sounded modern and wondered who it was, why wasn't I playing a Django tune.

They really liked it and were surprised to hear it was DR. That recordings of early Bird always gets me wondering if he had heard a Django record.

I rather suspect if his American tour had been a big success, his life and recognition would have been different. Personality and events conspired against that.