Django all the way

Susan Whitall / Detroit News Music Writer

He was an illiterate, superstitious gypsy born in a caravan at a crossroads in France, and he played with a mangled left hand; but Django Reinhardt is acknowledged as one of the greatest guitarists of all time. And although his heyday was back in the 1930s and '40s, Reinhardt's influence continues to resonate, with DjangoFests popping up in most major cities.

In Detroit, the fifth annual Django Reinhardt Festival, spearheaded by guitarist Evan Perri and his swing jazz band Hot Club of Detroit, will happen at the restored Depression-era club Cliff Bell's in Detroit tonight and Friday.

This year's lineup includes jazz guitarist Howard Alden, known for the Django-influenced soundtrack he performed for the Woody Allen film "Sweet and Lowdown," featuring Sean Penn. Penn played Emmett Ray, a fictional jazz guitarist who was supposedly so cowed by Reinhardt that he fainted the two times he met him.

"It was a fun six months," Alden says of the film. "I thought it would be two or three days of doing the soundtrack in the style of Django Reinhardt, but I found out that (Allen) wanted me to follow Sean around on the set of the movie and teach him how to play guitar. He'd never touched a guitar before in his life, but after a few months, he could play a few of the melodies note for note."

What makes Reinhardt's music so seductive? The Romany guitarist, a veteran of the rowdy Parisian bals musette (dance halls), became infatuated with the American jazz he heard in the early '20s. (His response when hearing Louis Armstrong on record for the first time was, "Ach moune, ach moune!" -- "My brother, my brother!")

Reinhardt started playing jazz with a swing that eluded most European musicians of the time, the kind of rhythm that flowed so easily in the jazz played by Americans, especially African Americans. Before Reinhardt, jazz was mostly horn-based; he helped usher in an era of string jazz.

Reinhardt's gypsy jazz, and the swing jazz played by groups such as Hot Club of Detroit, is as unlike modern pop music as it could be, too -- upbeat, sophisticated and unabashedly emotional.
"The music is different; it seems to be very happy," says Hot Club guitarist Paul Brady. "It's the perfect music for playing in bars and clubs. It makes people want to hang out and party. When you add Django Reinhardt, here's this two-fingered gypsy who's supposed to be the greatest jazz guitarist ever, a guy with only two fingers on his left hand -- there's a weird mystique surrounding his name."

The New York-based Alden, 49, who plays on Friday at DjangoFest, doesn't play guitar in the style of Reinhardt exclusively, but he is acknowledged as one of the best at it, performing at many DjangoFests around the country. Alden sees an upsurge of interest in the swing era, swing guitar and a more acoustic sound.

"People come at it from so many different angles," Alden says. "Some come at it more from a country and bluegrass style, a lot are bringing in more Eastern European sound, concentrating more on the gypsy than the jazz. It's great because the music can cross so many borders that way. It's not a snobbish, focused-jazz thing. And it can be real personal; you can just have the sound of the instrument and yourself. It can be as intimate or as big as you want it to be."
Brady believes the appeal of Reinhardt-style gypsy jazz (or jazz manouche) is to young guitarists bored with rock but put off by jazz snobbishness. They find it fun to play because it's so guitar-centered.

"The guitar is able to pull in this group of people that might not otherwise be into jazz or classical music," Brady says. "It's a link to the guitar in pop and rock music. It's a flashy style, very fast and virtuosic, so you attract the interest of rock guitarists. On top of that it's a very fun, upbeat music that everybody gets a kick out of."

You can reach Susan Whitall at (313) 222-2156 or swhitall@detnews.com.