First time you discovered this music...

Bones

Haha Buco, I was wondering about that....

billyshakes

Separated at birth?

Lango-Django

Thanks, Buco! i corrected it above... Howard ALDEN!!!!!!

will

PS Did you hear the guy who invented Autocorrect died?

...on his gravestone it says, “Restaurant in peace”...

djangology

For me, I was a Lindy Hop dancer, since before "The Gap commercial', and I loved swing music.

Some swing dancer friends wanted to start a band, and so we did. It was called "The ACME All Purpose Swing Band", and we had a few gigs.

Then one day, our drummer said we should go see Pearl Django playing at Borders Book Store in downtown Portland, and so I went.

I sat in the front row: Neil Andersson on guitar, Shelley Park on rhythm, and Dudley Hill on electric guitar.

I was floored by the sweep of arpeggios. Never had I seen anything like it. I have been hooked ever since. I bought a Park guitar in 1999. I joined the Yahoo group early on when I think it had 300 members or so.

scot

I first saw the name Django in a book about life on an army post in Hawaii c1940 called "From Here to Eternity" by James Jones when I was stationed in Hawaii in 1976. One of the guitar players in the barracks had heard Django's records in San Francisco and was describing his playing to the other soldiers. The description of his playing was so perfect that the first time I heard a recording of Django I thought to myself "That's got the be the guy from that book" and sure enough it was. Jones wanted to write a biography of Django but it never worked out. Those concrete WW2 barracks in Hawaii were great places to play a guitar!

jonpowl

Gonzalo was the first GJ player I saw, and I bought a GJ guitar a few weeks later. He was playing with Brian, Jeff and Leah at the Monterey Dixieland Jazz Fest as they occasionally had a hot club band in the lineup. Somebody had offered me a free ticket, and not being a Dixieland fan, I wasn't too eager. I was smart enough to check out the lineup and for some reason GBQ playing the music of Django sounded great, and it was. Of course, it's always fun to visit Monterey/Carmel.

Buco

Are you listening @rimm

Elroy Montano

Around 2008, i was playing a video game called "Bioshock" then I downloaded the soundtrack and heard "La mer" version of Django Reinhardt. My brother-in-law made me listen to Djangology and Rosenberg trio after that. Right now, I always watch Angelo Debarre live videos on youtube, very fascinating player.

Bones

Started getting interested in country blues, then classic jazz back in the late 80s(??). I think the classic jazz crept in because that is what my folks listened to and a family friend (Johnny Lucas and HIs Blueblowers, Firehouse 5, etc) played New Orleans style jazz in LA back when I was a kid and I heard them many times at parties. (To be fair, Johnny Lucas hated the Firehouse 5 arm garters and suspenders style of "Dixieland" jazz because he thought it was a disrespectful caricature of classic New Orleans jazz a la Louis Armstrong, who was his idol). There was a pretty big classic jazz scene in LA back then (1950S-60s ???). So it was in my head and in the 80s-early 90s (fast forward) I would listen to blues shows on public radio but then a classic jazz show would come on and eventually it clicked. Then heard some Venuti and Lang. And then of course the Hot Club. That was it. Hooked for life. No one in SB was playing that stuff but there was one teacher (LaRae Johnson) in town who played violin and guitar and knew "Freddie Green" chords so she showed me how to play them and I quit playing country blues and started trying to play rhythm along with the radio. Nothing really online back then and not much written materials. I would tape radio shows like "Riverwalk live at the Landing" and try to hear the changes and play along. Burned out a half-speed cassette player trying to hear the bass line and figure out the chords.

BTW, was sitting in on rhythm with some of the (at the time) still living musicians in LA that Johnny Lucas used to gig with when he was around. These guys were all legit pro classic jazz guys. We got to chatting about GJ during a break and Gonzalo's name came up since he had been in and around the So Cal area at that time. The reed player who was an amazing musician said Gonzalo was one of the best guitarists that he had ever heard.

Bones

To complete the Django/Johnny Lucas connection, I went to visit Johnny in like the late 80s at his home in Arcadia, Ca. and as I was still into country blues at the time I took my guitar along and played him a fingerstyle blues. His eyes lit up and he said "oh, that's How Long How Long Blues!" Years later on another visit, by this time I was playing rhythm guitar in the classic jazz style (on my own at home with the radio) and Ann was singing some of the heads so we gave Johnny a little concert. After that he invited us to sit in on a couple songs at a few low key house parties. He really was thrilled that some young folks were interested in the old jazz and liked that I was playing on an acoustic guitar (a flat top) when everyone was on electric back then and he gave me a copy of his GIANT fakebook of all the old classic jazz songs so now I finally had a source that showed what the actual chords were (and melodies) as played by the guys in LA at the time. Once I got better I actually got to play some whole gigs with them which was great since they were really way out of my league but Johnny let me do it to encourage my interest in classic jazz.

Johnny passed away in 2001, and I was invited by his estate to have his HUGE 78 collection. I've never been really interested in inventorying lots of old stuff and there were way more than I had space for anyway but I did grab a few just for keepsakes. As I was thumbing thru them I came across quite a few Hot Club 78s! By this point I was interested in Django so I kept those and some Charlie Christian and a few others. The rest went to the music library at UCSB for academic purposes.