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My take on the original question: Django's music is just...beautiful.
There is an innate beauty to how he generates sounds from his instrument. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow, but it's inevitably always beautiful. Listening to his music gives me the feeling that I'm looking at a gorgeous sunset.
It has a balance, a soul, a feeling, a tenderness, a delicateness.
I've often thought about what it is that makes Django's music so magical, consistently excellent & special. One of the elements that has occurrd to me (and forgive me if it's been mentioned) is a rare combination of unique and innate musical ability coupled with a lack of musical knowledge in the modern sense (ie. lack of understanding of scales, chord charts, etc). Most of us rely on that stuff to play this music (i know I sure do), while a guy like Django merely relied on the glorious music he heard in his head & had the rare talent to produce it on the guitar with what appears to be great ease. It's that left brain/right brain stuff taken to an extraordinary degree. Sometimes I feel like all of our modern knowledge of chords, arpeggios, scales, etc, while wonderful for what they can do for us, can actually get in the way of the flow of the pure music that's in our hearts & wants to come out. For him, it seemed to just pour out in a beautiful, mystical way that we'll never truly understand, without the over-thinking and analyzing of it to get in the way.
There's a lot to what you said. His music never sounds like a formula. I had a friend who, when recording a song, he would sometimes advertise for a lead guitarist. One of his requirements was that he was not a performance graduate from ******* University. His reasoning was that they all sounded like clones and that was not what he was looking for.
In Django's music there is mystery, poetry, power, beauty, virtuosity, passion, joy, melancholy, liberty, elegance, purity - all the things we once desired from art, expressed without restraint. Listeners of all kinds recognized this from the start, it's why his records continued to sell and never went out of print.
He didn't copy. He lay on his bed, creating. No transcriptions, tablature, slowing down of records, no prior guitarists that he wanted to imitate. Playing was discovery and invention. I'm sure he derived pleasure from those acts themselves, not the ability to play a line that someone else had played.
mystery, poetry, power, beauty, virtuosity, passion, joy, melancholy, liberty, elegance, purity
Nicely put!
... and sometimes it seems to me as if he is sitting up there on his own personal Nuage Numero Neuf, oblivious to the cares of the world...
Edgar Degas: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.... To draw, you must close your eyes and sing."
Georges Braque: "In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that can’t be explained."
What we are talking about is a unique musician. Everything that everyone has written above is entirely correct and valid but there is always something special about the FIRST.
Django invented a new way of playing, a new language, a new style. He started with his teenage dance hall background of playing popular tunes of the day, or even playing in the street, and he already had the 'Gypsy' upbringing which added another dimension. Then he famously heard Louis Armstrong, mixed jazz into his vocabulary and formed a strings only quintet that had as powerful a sense of rhythm as any drummer. Later in his career he went electric, and absorbed bop and classical forms into what was already a unique mix.
This was all new, he created something never heard before and many have followed but there is usually something special about the first that always stands above the imitators. Think Armstrong, Elvis, Beatles, Hendrix....there are those that lead the way, and the rest of us follow. Sure there are many great players and however much Stochelo or Bireli influence the next generation, or whatever my leanings towards Tchavolo's style, it was Django who started it and he will always be the first, the best and the one to which we should all go back to for inspiration.
Only one can ever be the first.
What a treasury of great comments!!!