Django Reinhardt

The caravan at the edge of Paris

He was born Jean Reinhardt on 23 January 1910, in the back of the family caravan in the Belgian countryside at Liberchies, to a Manouche family — the Manouches are a Romani people long established in eastern France and in Germany. His father was a musician, his mother an acrobatic dancer, and 'Django' was the name the family used. After the First World War his mother parked the caravan in what Parisians called the Zone: the strip of open ground at the foot of the city's demolished fortifications, crowded with shacks, where the poorest of Paris lived and which the photographer Eugène Atget spent years recording.

That is where he learned to play, and the city gave him his first work. Accordionists noticed the boy and hired him to back them on banjo in the bals musette — the cheap public dance halls of working-class Paris, above all in the rue de Lappe behind the Bastille and up in Belleville, where couples danced the java and the valse musette — the house dances of those halls — to accordion and banjo for a few sous, the small coins of the day. He was backing the star accordionists of that world — Guérino, Jean Vaissade, Fredo Gardoni — while still a teenager. He never learned to read music, and he never went to school.

The fire, and the hand he made afterwards

On the night of 25–26 October 1928 the caravan he was living in caught fire — it was stacked with the celluloid flowers his household made to sell, and celluloid burns like a fuse — and he was badly burned down his right side and across his left hand. He was eighteen. He spent close to two years recovering, nursed by his companion Naguine, and when the burns healed the ring and little fingers of his left hand were fixed in a curl he could not straighten. For a guitarist this is normally the end.

Instead he redesigned the instrument's use. Melody lines and solos were played with the index and middle fingers alone, at a speed that made other guitarists doubt what they were hearing; the two damaged fingers were pressed into service for chords across the top strings. The compensation became a style — the leaping, ornamented single-note lines and the abrupt chordal punctuation that anyone playing gypsy jazz today is still copying. He got the sound because of the injury, and he made the injury inaudible.

The records that changed the plan

In Toulon, on the Mediterranean coast, he met the photographer and painter Émile Savitry, who put jazz records on for him — among them a big-band recording by Louis Armstrong, the New Orleans trumpeter whose solos had just turned jazz into a soloist's music. Reinhardt had been playing dance music for accordionists. The Philharmonie de Paris, which mounted an exhibition on him in 2012, describes the hearing as a revelation, and it redirected everything he did afterwards.

Paris in the early 1930s had somewhere to put that ambition. The Hot Club de France, founded by a group of young enthusiasts including Pierre Nourry, the critic Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay — the son of the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay — existed to argue that jazz was serious music and to put on concerts proving it. Panassié's book Le Jazz Hot, published in Paris in 1934, was among the first attempts anywhere to write about the music critically. When the club decided it wanted a band of its own, Reinhardt was the player it had.

The Quintette du Hot Club de France

The Quintette played its first concert on 2 December 1934, billed on the posters as a new kind of hot jazz orchestra, and the novelty was real: it was made entirely of string instruments. Two soloists — Reinhardt's guitar and Stéphane Grappelli's violin — rode over two rhythm guitars and a double bass, with no drummer and no horn section anywhere in it. The rhythm guitars supplied the pulse with a hard downstroke that French players call la pompe, 'the pump'. American jazz had never sounded like this, because no American band was built like this.

It made him internationally famous within a few years, and it made Paris a place American musicians came to record. Passing through the city in the 1930s, the saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter, the trumpeter Bill Coleman, the violinist Eddie South and the trombonist Dicky Wells all cut sides with him. In April 1939 he met Duke Ellington, whose orchestra was on a European tour; while they were in Paris, three of Ellington's players — the cornettist Rex Stewart, the clarinettist Barney Bigard and the bassist Billy Taylor — recorded a handful of small-group pieces with Reinhardt, among them 'Finesse' and 'Solid Old Man'.

Nuages, under the Occupation

The Second World War split the Quintette: Grappelli was in London when war broke out and stayed there, and Reinhardt returned to Paris, which the German army occupied in June 1940. He formed a new quintet with the clarinettist Hubert Rostaing, replacing the violin with a clarinet, and in December 1940 recorded 'Nuages' — 'Clouds' — a slow, resigned, endlessly returning melody that sold more than ten thousand copies and became the tune the Occupation years are remembered by in France.

His position was dangerous in a way the fame disguises. The Nazi regime was interning, deporting and murdering Roma across occupied Europe, and Reinhardt was the most recognisable Romani man in France. He kept his head down in La Roulotte — 'the caravan' — a small cabaret in Pigalle, the nightlife district at the foot of Montmartre, and went on working; he also began, in those years, an ambitious symphonic piece and a mass for the Romani people. He survived, which many of his relatives did not.

Ellington, the electric guitar, and Samois

After the Liberation he played as featured guest with a United States Army big band in 1945, and in late October 1946 he sailed to America at Duke Ellington's invitation, touring with the Ellington orchestra and appearing at Carnegie Hall in New York. It went less well than the invitation promised — he was a soloist grafted onto a band that had no arrangements for him — and he came home.

Then he did the thing few musicians of his generation managed: he changed again. In 1951, after months away from music, younger players brought him bebop — the fast, harmonically restless style the saxophonist Charlie Parker and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie had made in New York — and he took to it on an amplified guitar — a French Stimer pickup fitted to his Selmer guitar — in the Club Saint-Germain, on the Left Bank, alongside the saxophonists James Moody and Don Byas and the American drummer Kenny Clarke, who had settled in Paris. He had left the city itself by then for Samois-sur-Seine, a village on the river below Fontainebleau, south-east of Paris, where he fished, played billiards, and spent time with his young son Babik.

He died there of a cerebral haemorrhage on 16 May 1953, aged forty-three. One of his guitars — built at Mantes in 1940 by the Paris instrument maker Selmer, the 'small-mouth' model the firm made from 1936 until 1952 and that he had adopted as his own — was given to the Musée de la musique in Paris in 1964, where it is now among the most-visited objects in the collection. The music outlived him as a living tradition rather than a repertoire: jazz manouche is still played, taught and argued over, and it is the only major style of jazz that did not come out of the United States.