fmlooki.blogg.se

The Wintersteins, a Romany family who drove down from Bannoncourt. Jazz is an American phenomenon Django is one of the few non-Americans in the pantheon of jazz greats, and one of even fewer to have generated a school of guitar playing. They come to pay homage to the man who created the music, reconstituted guitar playing and its position in the European jazz world, and, by virtue of his fame, almost singlehandedly transformed the image of the gypsy. The Django festival is a kind of pilgrimage for enthusiasts of Manouche jazz guitar. Both are unremarkable except for the crowds that gather each summer.

Django’s house is at the bottom of the hill, near the water, his grave at the top. The neck of the Seine running through it is a perfect rendering of a Monet painting: dapples of light dot the surface of the water in a cadenced composition of this gentle, sloping hillside town. Samois is a commuter’s distance from Paris and was home to Django for the last few years of his life. Though the Claridge Hotel has forever lost its magic, the annual three-day festival in Samois-sur-Seine that celebrates the life of Django Reinhardt burns like a cudgel in flame. Somewhere between the hat and the rabbit. Legends sit somewhere between the physics of the trick and the magic produced.

The room I was hoping to find-that, in 1934, had witnessed the historic musical encounter between Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, the makers of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, an entirely new sound in jazz-simply doesn’t exist anymore, and what’s worse, it’s as if it never did.