Club Django

Description

Accounts of the fabulous musical gifts of the young Manouche (4) began to circulate in the Gypsy camps. How, for example, he had won a bet by playing from memory, and in the right order, seventeen melodies which he had heard just once played on an accordion - and this with a banjo too big for him and a whalebone collar-stiffener as a plectrum. One can see that the seeds of the Django legend were already being sown, with their heavy emphasis on his picturesque nomad background and his personal magnetism, and that these, plus the "ethnic additive" of which the critic Michel-Claude Jalard has spoken, have combined to give a mythic quality to his life and work. "Legend is flesh on the bones of fiction", said Jean Cocteau. What does it matter, then, if there remains a gap between the reality (or otherwise) of these anecdotes of Django's youth and that other reality - the symbol he became for so many jazz lovers and for every guitarist ? We are dealing here with a music whose full appreciation demands that one surrender to the gentle naturalism, to the dreamy melancholy tinged with the miraculous, of the Gypsy spirit, to the spontaneous freshness which Django carried with him even into the recording studio. The tone and the very titles of his compositions carry the same message Manoir de Mes Reves, Melodie au crepuscule, Fleur d'ennui, Nympheas, Feerie, Oubli, and of course Nuages. Here are dreams painted in sound, musical impressionism, the nostalgia of a man contemplative -...

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