Django corner

[fasstrack]

I don't know if there's a thread already. If not, here it is.

I was just watching a sort of ridiculous video which is yet a historical gold mine. It shows the Hot Club Quintette on a train, smoking and playing cards, except Django who is playing. Grapelli picks up the tune and soon the film cuts to the group in performance (possibly in Den Haag?).

Django plays this astonishing chromatic run (I'll post a link, I'm too excited right now) with his two working L.H. fingers. I played it over and over and am still wondering what I did when I was seventeen (yes, it was a very good year....): How is this much genius humanly possible?

I love Grapelli too, and the joie de vivre that group achieved.

Favorite Django tracks? Stories?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQVVD0b-wBg

Edited November 30, 2013 by fasstrack

[jazzbo]

I've been enjoying the Complete Vogue set of Django recordings lately. The final discs are mostly new to me and feature Django on electric guitar. They are really great listening.

This set also contains the recording of one of his featured spots with the Ellington Orchestra, this one from a Chicago Concert. (The concert was released on a two cd set from Music Masters.) Always fun to listen to that.

[Larry Kart]

Bill Coleman solos on tpt. on both of the above.

[Larry Kart]

[king ubu]

Oh, I love those Dickie Wells sesssions!

And I love Django ... saw that Vogue box, too, but since indeed I eventually had to go for the three Fremeaux "season" sets, I figured I'm all set regarding Django

[danasgoodstuff]

Django, there's a guy who could play some solo guitar! But how much is there, I just have the one thing that's supposedly an excerpt of a longer performance - Django's Castle is it?

[John Litweiler]

Glorious, grand Wells and Reinhardt, Coleman at his best -- surely one of the greatest recording dates in history.

[Larry Kart]

On some of those solos from the Reinhardt-Wells and Reinhardt-Stewart-Bigard dates, there are moments when I feel that Django is almost able to make time come to stop -- in the sense that he and we seem to have the time to walk around the phrases he's playing and look at them from all sides.

[Cyril]

How Django Reinhardt survived German occupation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi6HK7ryphg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViBHRNeMfg8

&

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZETFSpSPtCk

Edited December 1, 2013 by Cyril

[king ubu]

Django, there's a guy who could play some solo guitar! But how much is there, I just have the one thing that's supposedly an excerpt of a longer performance - Django's Castle is it?

Not to be linky-dinked (though I wonder if that policy has been losened a bit?), but there's this one:

from the allmusic review (by "arwulf arwulf"):

Gathered together in one album for the very first time are 15 solos recorded between 1937 and 1950 in Paris, London, Chicago, and Rome. Some were waxed as warm-ups in recording studios, others were committed to acetates for radio broadcast purposes; one "Improvisation" was recorded live at Chicago's Civic Opera House while two extended pieces ("Belleville" and "Nuages") were intended for use as the soundtrack to a film that was never completed. For the closing track the producers stepped away from the otherwise immaculate chronology (or looped back to track one like a Möbius Strip) to include a three-and-one-half minute sequence entitled "Two Improvised Guitar Choruses," culled from a rare and terrifically scratchy broadcast acetate cut in 1937.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I've been wondering about Django lately. If one has the Mosaic HMV & Swing set and the Vogue set, is that more or less it? And it seems silly to ask if those two sets overlap, but do they?

MG

[Cyril]

Docu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfNfseyQsPw

Edited December 1, 2013 by Cyril

[king ubu]

I've been wondering about Django lately. If one has the Mosaic HMV & Swing set and the Vogue set, is that more or less it? And it seems silly to ask if those two sets overlap, but do they?

MG

Not sure if I'm saying something wrong ... don't know how the Vogue kicks in (I think Vogue and Swing belong together, don't you have massive overlap there?) ... but the Jazz in Paris discs have no overlap with the Mosaic, if I remember right. And some of them are glorious!

This here might help: http://www.gould68.freeserve.co.uk/django.htm

[jazzbo]

Allen, there's a lot more, lots of Decca recordings, a good crop of broadcast material, etc.

Flurin, the Swing and Vogue sides are all together in that Vogue set.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Oh, so the two boxes both have the Swing material. Is that a lot of them or just a bit? I can't get the discography of the Mosaic box up on the site, for some reason.

MG

[jazzbo]

It's about 60 tracks.

[fasstrack]

Primarily of interest to guitarists: the OP video shows Django doing something I have long suspected, i.e., making a ninth chord (which requires three fingers) with his index, third and 'dead' fourth finger. He made his runs and most chords with his index and third. Intuitive ingenuity at its best.

Edited December 2, 2013 by fasstrack

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

It's about 60 tracks.

Oh, that's quite a lot. Thanks Lon. Some thought needed.

MG