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Posts Tagged ‘Django Reinhardt’

Day 147. Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker and a box with a picture of Dizzy Gillespie on the cover.

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

I had some Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman on earlier tonight, and it had both Mira and Celia dancing in their seats during dinner. And hearing Charlie Christian made me want to hear some Django Reinhardt, so I went downstairs and grabbed two JSP boxes that were hiding in the back shelves.

JSP (and in some ways, Properbox as well) have taken advantage of recordings going out of copyright, or of licensing recordings as they get ready to go out of copyright, and what this has meant to those of us who like early jazz is usually some pretty cheap box sets of music where the recordings have been cleaned up a bit. The Django boxes are generally well done. No documentation really (basically an article and personnel listings when possible) but packed CDs of music. In the early ‘90s, I had bought a 10 CD Django Reinhardt box-set that was an import distributed by Cema Distribution… the box was great, and I sold it to a friend (for pretty cheap) when he was having a rough time. I figured it would turn up again and I could re-purchase it, but it never happened. The two JSP boxes clock in at 9 CDs, and while it isn’t everything that was on that import box-set, it’s pretty close… and I’m sure it was a third the original boxes price.

Properbox has done an interesting job as well putting together some nice collections for around $30. I have a 4 CD Charlie Parker set to rip tonight (if I get to it) as well as a set called ‘BeBop Spoken Here’. Another set I previously ripped was a Lester Young collection that I enjoy quite a bit. These are old mono recordings, often transferred from disc. They will never sound great, but the performances are well worth having, and it is nice to see the label going to a large volume of sales rather then gouging the rare performance collector that would probably plop down serious cash for some of these recordings. Both of these labels have appeared in the waning days of the record store (or more precisely, the waning days of the CD). I imagine the parties putting these together see this, at least in some way, as a labor of love. These recordings won’t survive well in the MP3 age (they are too noisy and will just sound worse)… but in 5-10 years, when lossless recordings finally kill lossy formats.

We’ll see if the girls groove as much tomorrow night… I imagine they will.

Day 30. Django Reinhardt.

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

I have never been a huge fan of jazz guitar, with a couple of exceptions. Django is the big one. Such amazingly melodic playing on the one hand (actually – the hand with only two fingers that could play) and at times he treats the instrument like it is percussion. Such rhythm and drive.

I came to Django Reinhardt through David Grisman. My dad had ‘Hot Dawg’ (an alum cover that for some reason freaked me out as a kid) and there was a version of ‘Minor Swing’ on it with Stephane Grappelli. When I got older, I realized the song was written by Django and tracked him down. As a teenage guitarist, he thrilled me. A little obscure, a really interesting life story, and his playing really can’t be compared to anyone else. He could do with two fingers on his left hand what most guitarists would probably need ten for!

During my first year working at Tower, I hit the motherlode – an import 10 CD box set that covered his whole recording career. I listened to those discs a lot, but there were two tracks that immediately struck me. They were two interpretations of the Bach D Minor concert for two violins… though at the time I didn’t know it. I just knew the track numbers and loved playing them. The interplay between the violinists was so intricate and the mood really swung (as I would figure out later these were called ‘swing interpretation of the Bach D Minor concerto’). I’ll never forget hearing the Bach concerto a year or so later on the radio and thinking ‘huh! It’s that Django Reinhardt song!’. When the announcer said it was Bach, I was quite surprised… got home and found the discs and sure enough it was Bach credited as the author. They had been playing Bach this entire time! So I went to the Tower on Sunrise in Sacramento (which had more classical music then the Roseville store) and I picked up the Bach violin concertos (which would then sit next to my only other Bach CD at the time – an old E. Power Biggs disc of organ work).

I love that listening to David Grisman led me to Django Reinhardt which then led me to Bach. The music world can have such strange connections sometimes, and that is really one of the wonderful parts of music for me. In our own ways, what we do musically is also a historical connection to music. I’ve studied with people who studied with people that studied with Schönberg, another who studied with Ravel. When I work on a piece with a performer, I also get to work with the things that their teachers and their teacher’s teachers taught them. And when I compose, everything I have ever heard is somehow influencing my musical thinking. And somewhere in there is Django, swinging my decisions.