Gypsy Jazz Guitar – A One-Man Genre
Gypsy jazz guitar is a genre based on the music of Django Reinhardt, a guitar player who overcame a severe disability to become a legend in jazz music. Most people have heard music by the Quintet du Hot Club de France or one of the gypsy jazz groups devoted to its style of music. Born in the 1930’s this group with Stephane Grapelli on violin, Django Reinhardt, Joseph Reinhardt and Roger Chaput on guitars and Louis Vola on bass, pioneered the concept of lead and rhythm guitar.
The group played popular jazz tunes of the time with Django and Grapelli alternating on the lead with the two other guitars playing rhythm and Vola playing walking bass figures. A drummer was never in the mix. They also wrote their own tunes, many of which have themselves become standards. Some of the group’s compositions include blue Drag, Minor Swing, Djangology, Django Rag, Django’s Blues, Django’s Tiger and Nuages.
The group’s violinist, Stephane Grapelli continued making music until his death in 1997 but the figure that has proved to be the inspiration of many gypsy jazz groups, Django Reinhardt only lived to be forty-three years old. Gypsy jazz has been behind the popularity of the Maccaferri and Selmer style guitars. The guitar that Django Reinhardt made famous was made by the Selmer company in Paris based on a revolutionary guitar design by Mario Maccaferri, one of the first generation of classical guitar players. Surprisingly, Maccaferri was never familiar with Django Reinhardt’s music.
As with all music associated with the tag “gypsy” the music is usually passed on directly from one musician to another. The Quintet Du Hot Club came out of an environment where playing music was simply a part of life. Each musician was both student and teacher. And there were not too many note readers among them. In fact Stephane Grapelli, a classically trained musician used breaks in the groups playing schedule to tutor Django in music. So every guitar player wanting to learn to play gypsy jazz is faced with learning the music of Django Reinhardt, as played by Django Reinhardt.
One element that made Django’s music unique was the fact that, due to an injury in a fire, Django played the guitar using only the first and second fingers of his left hand. This limited the range of notes available to him as he worked his way up and down the fretboard was severely limited. As a result of his injury, barre chords are not found in gypsy jazz guitar music. A close look at Django’s music will tell you he had little use for sevenths in his music.
If you want to listen to some contemporary gypsy jazz guitar, American groups devoted to the genre are Pearl Django and the John Jorgenson Quintet but Europe is still the place where there is most interest in this music, with groups like Hot Club of Hungary and Hot Club of France. If you want to learn to play gypsy jazz guitar, the ability to read tab would be a minimum requirement because there are many examples of Django’s music available as guitar tab.
By: Ricky Sharples