Talking jazz

The raw genius of gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt has given jazz a unique legacy

Fifty years ago this month, the Belgian-born Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt died of a stroke after a day's fishing. It's hard to credit that it was that long ago, perhaps because Reinhardt departed so young (aged 43), whereas his fellow luminary in the Hot Club de France, Stéphane Grappelli, lived until 1997.

If Reinhardt had survived, it seems unlikely that he'd have proved as avuncular a figure as Grappelli who, with his endearing Gallicisms and duets with Yehudi Menuhin, was safe to book for Parky or Aspel. Reinhardt, one feels, might have done an Oliver Reed. Grappelli told of an occasion when they were invited to dine and perform at the Elysée Palace. After the plates had been cleared, there was still no sign of the guitarist, so Grappelli went to look for him. He eventually found him playing billiards in a bar with "two days' barbe on his face and his slippers on".

Such is the legend of the astonishing Gypsy guitarist (with only two working fingers on his fret hand), that consideration of how he became who he was is often lacking. This is a man, after all, whom the late Benny Green described as the "one non-US figure in the entire history of jazz who had something original and also valid to contribute. I am quite convinced that Django Reinhardt could have played great unaccompanied solos on his head, under water, or wearing boxing-gloves, there being no extremity I could imagine that would have curbed his gift". As far as guitar-playing is concerned, he is Genesis, and we don't ask what came before that.

But in a forthcoming Radio 3 documentary, Alyn Shipton has explored Reinhardt's roots among the Manouche gypsies, found mainly around Alsace, northern France, and the Low Countries. Shipton thinks that it was this musical tradition that made the guitarist so distinctive that he was sought out by the American greats in the Thirties and Forties. "I had him on a concert tour with me in 1946," said Duke Ellington, "so I could enjoy him the more." One theory is that the reason for the musical empathy was that the Manouches were as oppressed a people as the black Americans from whom jazz sprung. Certainly, there were rough edges to Reinhardt, as there were to many of the Americans who had come from similarly deprived backgrounds.

The US critic Whitney Balliett quotes Reinhardt's friend Charles Delaunay as saying: "There were two personalities in him. One was primitive. He never went to school and he couldn't stand a normal bed. He had to live in a Gypsy caravan near a river, where he could fish and catch trout between the stones with his bare hands, and where he could put laces between the trees and catch rabbits. But Django also had a nobility."

Shipton found that proud spirit surviving in pockets of Belgium and France. But it also lives on through former fusionistas such as Biréli Lagrène, who has returned to Django-style "hot jazz". And if proof were needed that this style can embrace more recent advances, one only has to look to the UK's John Etheridge. A former member of Soft Machine, he's equally at home taking his Reinhardt-style group through angular Don Grolnick numbers. A half-century in the grave has done nothing to diminish Django's legacy.

'Django's People' is on Radio 3 at 5.45pm on 11 May