Django Reinhardt

Charles Delaunay's book covers everything you'd ever want to know about gypsy guitar legend Django Reinhardt in a captivating, readable form. Included anecdotes make you feel like you really got to know Django from the perspective of friends and fellow musicians. Many of them are quite funny too.In addition to the exceptional story of Django and his music, Delaunay's book includes many pages full of rare Django Reinhardt photographs.Get this book now! You won't be sorry :)

Although I wouldn't necessarily call this book a literary classic, it's quite readable and certainly worthwhile for anyone who likes the music of Django Reinhardt and is interested in learning more about him as both a person and a musician, as well as the other musicians (such as Stephane Grappelli) of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France and others that played and recorded with him. There are plenty of anecdotes that bring their songs to life for me in a new way. Just to take one example, the first song on the first disk of the 5-CD set "Django Reinhardt: The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order" (which I'd highly recommend, by the way) is a popular song that was new at the time, called "I Saw Stars." It's a nice little tune, with some great solos by both Reinhardt and Grappelli, but I learned from this biography that the newly-formed quintet had never played it before. They were on their way to their first-ever recording, and were concerned that their music might not be commercial enough to be accepted, and Grappelli had just obtained a copy of the sheet music for "I Saw Stars" (which was a popular hit in the U.S. at the time). They went over it a couple of times in the taxi on the way to the studio, stopping along the way to pick up vocalist Bert Marshal, who Reinhardt thought might give the group a more commercial sound. (In later recordings, the QHCF rarely used vocalists.) To listen anew to the recording knowing now that they were just improvising on a song they'd never even played before just brings home all the more how intensely talented these musicians were. This biography is full of similar examples, as well as filling the reader in on Reinhardt's early background and musical studies while travelling on gypsy caravans as a boy, and on his teen years spent backing up "musette" dance musicians in Paris cabarets and so on. All in all, I'd say that if you're a fan of the great Django Reinhardt's music, this biography will enhance your appreciation of it all the more. (The author, Charles Delaunay, by the way, was a French music critc and contemporary of Reinhardt and Grappelli, who was instrumental in getting their professional careers started and who probably knew them and their music as well as or better than anyone. So this is as authoritative a biography of Django Reinhardt as there is ever likely to be.)