The Transatlantic Blues:

Django Reinhardt in France and the United States, 1920-1950

Introduction

In Woody Allens 1999 film Sweet and Lowdown Sean Penn plays Emmett Ray, a

fictitious kleptomaniac, womanizing, alcoholic, sometimes manager of prostitutes (he states in

the film that he doesnt like the word pimp and prefers this appellation instead), American

1930s jazz guitarist whose favorite activities, besides chasing women, are going to garbage

dumps to shoot rats and watching trains. He is a prodigiously talented musician, however, but

one who is haunted as only the second-best guitarist in the world after the French gypsy

Django Reinhardt. Near the beginning of the film we are told that Ray had seen Django twice

while in Europe and had fainted both timesan event that is repeated later in the film when Ray,

having stolen his wifes lovers car, crashes into another car that happens to contain Django

himself on tour with some American jazz musicians. Following this fateful encounter with his

idol, Ray fails in his attempts to reunite with his old girlfriend Hattie, falls into despair, makes

his proverbial last recordings in which, we are told, he seems to finally attain the same level of

musical genius as Django, and then fades away to never be heard from again.

I discuss this film because, although a fantasy (and historically inaccurate in placing

Django in America a decade or so earlier than his one and only visit in 1946), the narrative

suggests an important insight concerning the trans-Atlantic relations that characterized the

origins and subsequent development of jazz. For here, contrary to the standard jazz historical

narrative that stretches in an relatively uncomplicated trajectory from its ostensibly singular

beginnings in New Orleans, to Chicago, then to New York and beyond, not only is the United-

States not the privileged site of jazz excellence and authenticity, but it is an American jazz

1
musician, seemingly the best of his kind, who is quite literally struck dumb in the presence of a

European counterpart.

As Bruce Johnson points out concerning traditional jazz historiography that has promoted

this story, emphasis...on what is seen as progress to higher levels of musical aesthetics [is] a

teleology that continues to underpin powerful institutionalized discourses.1 Perhaps the most

notable example of this narrative is Ken Burns PBS documentary series Jazz. In Burns story,

each later stage of jazz is an organic development from that which has come before: Ragtime to

Dixieland, to Swing, to Bop, Cool, and so on. But though there are certainly connections

between these they are not necessarily as evolutionary as this story suggests. The change from

Swing to Bop, for example, is as meaningfully understood as a radical refiguring of the musical

materials in the direction of modernism, perhaps most importantly by rejecting the dance-based

functionalism of Swing. So although powerfully seductive, this evolutionary, teleological

narrative occludes the relation of jazz to, and the dependence of its possibilities on, the new

transportation and communication technologies that facilitated the rapid and global spread of

ideas, practices and ways of understanding that so define modernity. The attempt, therefore, to

find a singular place of jazzs origins is to deny what is most essential about itits diasporic

character. Johnson makes this point perceptively:

The jazz diaspora is thus a case-study of the negotiation between local cultural practices
and global cultural processes, between culture and mass mediations. In such negotiations,
diaspora is the condition of the musics existence and character. Jazz was not invented
and then exported. It was invented in the process of being disseminated. As both idea and
practices, jazz came into being through negotiation with the vehicles of its dissemination,
and with conditions it encountered in any given location. The complexities of diasporic
reinvention are not simply the outcome of which particular versions of jazz were
exported. The conditions that these exports encountered reconfigured the music and its
meanings even further.2 [Italics mine]

1
Bruce Johnson, The Jazz Diaspora, in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, Cooke and Horn, eds. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33.
2
Johnson, 39.

2
In other words, to try to define jazz a-historically in terms of certain supposedly essential

characteristicsmusic that swings for examplenecessarily involves foisting present-day

values onto a complex heterogeneous musical history; a retrospective dissimulation that bears

little relation to how jazz has been understood and to thus misunderstand how it came to be

understood today. Instead, as Johnson also points out, what ties together all that has been

referenced as jazz over the last century or so is far more plausibly to be found in what the music

has meant socially rather than any specific musical commonalities.3

The appearance of Django Reinhardt in jazz histories is by no means unusual but his

place has always been an ambivalent one. As one of the prime early innovators of jazz guitar and

inventor, along with violinist Stphane Grapelli, of the still vibrant genre of so-called gypsy-

jazz, his influence on later musicians is undeniable.4 Yet it is precisely this categorization of his

music as a hybridas somehow not fully jazzthat has enabled the jazz mainstream to

otherize him; to argue, however implicitly, that there is a kind of music which is 100% real

jazz and then there is another gypsy kind that is partly jazz, but also, by virtue of its European

origins, something else as well.5

I will use Django as the focus of this paper in order to show the parallels between how it

was that he fit into the social, political and cultural context of mid-to-late 1930s France, and that

of the United States post-World War II. In doing so Julia Kristevas concept of abjection will be

made use of in order to reveal how Djangos identity functioned within the heterogeneous

3
Johnson, 34.
4
For the most thorough study of this genre, see Michael Dregni, Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the
Soul of Gypsy Swing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
5
One needs only look at that canonical magazine of jazz Down Beat where Djangos name appears repeatedly
during the late 1930s in Top Guitarist polls. And though there is understandably little mention of him during
World War II on account of him having remained in occupied France, by 1946 he is again referenced quite casually
in polls, articles on jazz in Europe and, of course, discussions of his American tour that year with the Duke Ellington
Orchestra.

3
musical streams through which often disparate musical styles came to be constituted as jazz in

the middle of the 20th century in these two countries. And as contemporary debates concerning

the ontology of jazz are informed significantly by these earlier discourses this will then, I think,

usefully inform them.

Part I

Not African American, and not even American, Django Reinhardt has never sat easily in

the New Orleans to New York story of jazz although he has long been recognized as the

international non-American jazz star par excellence. However, this recognition has sat in an

uncomfortable tension with the aforementioned jazz historical narrative on account of its cultural

and geographical limitations. Lacking its ostensibly requisite connection to Africa by way of

New Orleans, Django seems sui generisa wholly original jazz figure without the necessary

ancestral lineage through slavery to Africa. But this is only if one ignores the many profound

musical connections that had already by the 1920s developed between the United-States and

France out of which Djangos connection to jazz ultimately developed.

I have already pointed out the reasons for this ignorance on the American side of things,

but one should not imagine that France has been wholly innocent in this regard either. While the

entry of the United-States into World War I on the side of the Allies in 1917 was ecstatically

welcomed by a France exhausted by nearly three years of trench warfare, the appearance of

approximately 2 million American troops in France by the wars end brought about many

different reactionsboth positive and negative.6 As many historians have pointed out, the music

played by bands associated with then still segregated African-American army regiments became

enormously influential in introducing to France, on a first-hand basis, the ragtime and blues

6
Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), 13.

4
elements that were then in the process of coalescing into jazz. So although still inchoate in

relation to what jazz was to become by the 1930s, the music they played set off a jazz craze

that was enormously influential on the entertainment life of France, and Paris in particular,

throughout the 1920s and 30s.7

At the same time, however, many French were wary of the United-States and felt great

anxiety about its seemingly ever-increasing economic and cultural power. Roxanne Panchasi

points out that while early French visitors to the United-States such as de Toqueville had seen its

freedom from history and tradition as quaint and innocent this view depended on Americas

dependence on Europe for its cultural heritage as well as its continued economic subservience.8

But by the beginning of the 20th century, and certainly by the end of World War I, a dramatic

shift had taken place in the trans-Atlantic balance of power as France and Britain found

themselves for the first time in significant financial debt to the United-States. And whereas in the

19th century Europeans overwhelmingly dominated cultural flows between Europe and America,

jazz exemplified the increasing dominance of American cultural exports.9 The anxiety that

resulted was expressed in various ways, but George Duhamels 1930 memoir of his visit to

America, Scnes de la vie future, published in English the next year with the much more

provocative title America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future, is particularly notable

in this regard. In its preface he writes that

no nation has thrown itself into the excesses of industrial civilization more deliberately
than America. If you were to picture the stages of that civilization as a series of
experiments made by some malign genie on laboratory animals, North America would
7
See Jackson throughout.
8
Roxanne Panchasi, Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the World Wars (PhD. diss.,
Rutgers UniversityNew Brunswick, 2002), 17-18.
9
Jenny Lind and Antonn Dvok being two examples of Europeans who were fted spectacularly upon their visits
to the United-States. See W.P. Ware and Thaddeus C. Lockard, P.T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1980) and Merton Robert Aborn, The Influence on American Culture of Dvoaks
Sojourn in America (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1965).

5
 immediately appear to you as the most scientifically poisoned of them all...for there you
find an aggregate of human elements, free of tradition, of monuments, of a history, and
with no other ties than their redoubtable selves, whose common achievement has begun
to reward them.10

As the French title and English subtitle suggest, Duhamels purpose is to warn Europe of the

future that he believes the United-States represents; a future that Europe should do its best to

prevent, but that he is aware may be unavoidable as he recognizes that its poison has already

crossed the Atlantic.

Not surprisingly, Duhamel was not a fan of jazz. In a chapter entitled Gayety he

describes his visit to a Chicago club on the presidential election night of 1928. After commenting

disparagingly on the alcoholic excess of those in attendance he then discusses the music.

It was the falsest, the shrillest, the most explosive of jazzthat breathless uproar which
for many years now has staggered to the same syncopation, that shrieks through its nose,
weeps, grinds its teeth, and caterwauls throughout the world. Jazz is a triumph of barbaric
folly that has received praise, interpretation, and technical commentary from those
educated musicians who, more than anything else, fear to be regarded as not in the last
degree modern, and thus to vex their clientle, and who bow down to jazz as the
painters of 1910 bowed down to cubism, for fear, as the phrase is, of missing the bus, and
as the novelists of today bow down to the prevalent taste and introduce into all their
stories a pair of homosexuals and three-of-a-kind of drug addicts.11

Here can be seen the double symbolism of jazz in this period: both a depraved modernist fad at

the same time as it is the expression of barbarism and wanton excess. But while Duhamel seems

doubtful that Europe will ultimately be able to resist falling prey to the menace of

Americanization, others in France saw a much more positive side to this apparent sound of the

future.

10
Georges Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future, trans. Charles Miner Thompson
(London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1931), xiii.
11
Duhamel, 121.

6
 Hugues Panassi is an interesting counterpart to Duhamel in this regard. As a writer,

critic and promoter he was arguably the most significant force on the development of jazz in

France in the 1930s. Yet his politics were of an exceedingly conservative kind. Influenced by the

nationalisme intgral of Charles Maurras and the reactionary group lAction Franaise, Panassi

was a devout Catholic and legitimist (one who advocates the restoration of the Bourbon-Orlans

heir to the throne of France) that saw the then Third Republic as a decadent order irreversibly

corrupted by its dependence on the uneducated masses.12 But rather than seeing jazz tout court as

a threat to French culture, Panassi distinguished between the kind of orchestral jazz played most

prominently by Paul Whiteman and Jack Hylton that had dominated France in the 1920s, which

he deplored, and the so-called hot style that began to be introduced in France by the end of the

decademost notably in Louis Armstrongs Hot Fives and Hot Sevens.13 These two styles were

understood by Panassi in explicitly racial terms as his synonym for the latter, Negro swing,

makes clear.14 So although whites could learn to play the authentic hot jazz that he loved, for him

it was essentially music of black Americans.

What is particularly remarkable about this understanding of jazz is how oddly it fits with

his sympathies for the anti-semitic Maurras and the reactionary blood and soil monarchism and

radical Catholicism of lAction Franaise. For Panassi, however, there was no contradiction.

What he loathed about the orchestral jazz of Whiteman was its supposedly thoroughly

commercialized, mass-marketed character. Real hot jazz, by comparison, was for him superior in

virtue of its supposed freedom from the marketplace as it reflected the traditional communal

values of African Americans. Jeffrey Jackson explains this aspect of Panassi well, writing:

12
Jackson, 169.
13
Jackson, 170-171.
14
Jackson, 175.

7
 The fickle tastes of the masses shaped jazz in a consumer society and watered it down to
meet popular tastes, but in the privacy of the jam session musicians could play and
improvise as freely and with as much variety and personalized passion as they
wished...Real jazz represented a liberty for the individual musician, who could craft an
expression of his own inner self through the improvisational character of the
music...Against the tendency toward homogenized, mass entertainment, Panassi held up
the individual jazz musician as an echo of Frances artisan past. For him, the talents and
tastes of individual artists still mattered just as they had in France for centuries. The
popular dance band style of jazz that had been masquerading under that name, he argued
was to be deplored because it merely pandered to the whims of audiences in the
marketplace just like mass-produced goods. Instead, he turned to [what he thought of as]
real jazz, a music that was based on artisanship, skill, and craft, and that was outside the
mass marketplace, he believed.15

Hot jazz thus represented to Panassi a return to the simpler world of pre-Revolutionary and pre-

Industrial Revolution France that his conservative Catholic-informed politics yearned. In

determining the possibility and identity of a jazz franaise this novel only needed the appropriate

individual to personify it.

Part II

A Manouche (meaning French speaking) Roma (or gypsy) Django Reinhardt first rose

to fame as the co-leader, along with the Stphane Grapelli, of the Quintette of the Hot Club of

France. The club referenced in their name was an actual organization begun in 1932 that aimed

to promote the more improvisationally-based kind of jazz, represented most notably by Louis

Armstrong, that had begun to have an impact in France over the previous few years. Although

not its founder, Panassi quickly became one of its dominant voices in its press releases,

speaking tours and organizational efforts throughout France.16 However, it was Django who

became its star and is now most closely associated with it Panassi just a historical footnote.

This is partly on account of Djangos highly advanced and idiosyncratic style on the guitar, but

15
Jackson, 178-180.
16
Interestingly prior to the founding of the clubs own magazine Jazz-Hot in early 1935, the primary venue for news
of the club was published in the trade magazine Jazz-Tango-Dancing. This title makes clear the then understood
international connections between a musical style and dance form now perceived as distinct and unrelated.

8
perhaps even more important, and much more relevant to the thesis of this paper, was his own

status within France.17 As a gypsy Django suffered the consequences of a history of hundreds

of years of persecution in Europe. Michael Dregni provides some disturbing details:

In Europe, popular folklore long held that Gypsies wrought the nails to crucify Jesus in
the cross, and laws were passed in most European countries to rid them of the perceived
Gypsy scourge. Gypsies were first chronicled in France in 1418 with the first expulsion
orders following on their heels in 1427. In a 1560 decree, Gypsies were committed to a
lifetime of pulling oars in French galleys. Louis XIV directed French bailiffs in 1682 to
round up Gypsy men as slaves; the women were to be flogged, then banished. France
deported Gypsies to Africas Mahgreb, Gambia, and Senegal as well as to Louisiana in
the New World. While Europeans prided themselves on not having Indias social castes,
they did have a place for Gypsiesoutcasts. Chased away from civilization, the Gypsies
became nomadic of necessity rather than desire, a people of the diaspora, without a
homeland or a promised land.18

That Romani such as Django, though born and raised in France, were (and arguably still are) not

perceived as authentically French is not surprising given this rather sordid history. Although

overt legal persecution of Romani in France was, by the 1920s and 30s, not nearly as strong as it

once had been, this exclusion was by no means insignificant. For as Janette Kay Bayles argues,

in the waning years of the Third Republic, the French nation, crippled by institutional crisis and

social upheaval, experienced a major disturbance of the gender, class and racial hierarchies

comprising the existing French socio-symbolic order.19 Herman Lebovics takes a wider view

arguing that the interwar period marked but the end point of a battle over what it meant to be

French that had raged between the Left and Right throughout the life of the Third Republic and

arguably since the first outbreak of revolution in 1789. This divide not only contributed to its

17
Made all the more impressive by his having had his left hand deformed due to a fire in his caravan when he was
18 that forced him to re-learn to play the guitar with only the full use of his index and middle fingers.
18
Michael Dregni, Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7.
19
Janette Kay Bayles, Figuring the Abject: Politics, Aesthetics and the Crisis of National Identity in Interwar
French Literature and Cinema (PhD. diss., the University of Iowa, 1999), 5.

9
defeat and occupation by Germany in 1940, but also provided direct inspiration for the Nazi-

collaborating Rvolution nationale of Vichy France.20

Django fits into these histories as the missing link in Panassis search for a way of

reconciling his love for the hot jazz that for him was so closely associated with the supposed

primitive communalism of African Americans, with his yearning for an authentically French jazz

hot. As a member of an internal other with a long history in France while never being

recognized as fully French, similar to African Americans in the United-States, Djangos stardom

ironically helped to define the understanding of French identity that simultaneously excluded

him and other Romani from full participation in it. Furthermore, their economically marginal

position as entertainers and craft makers linked them to the pre-Industrial Revolution world that

anti-republican legitimist conservatives, such as Panassi, desired to re-create.

This interpretation fits with Bayles use of Julia Kristevas concept of abjection in

explaining movements in literature and cinema in France at this time. For Kristeva, abjection is

the process by which both subjects and human societies come into being through their opposition

to that which is not themselves in response to threats of the loss of, distinction between subject

and object or between self and other.21 Or as Bayles writes, The abject is defined as those

liminal elements that are tentatively excluded through this process of demarcation and

differentiation.22 As Frances Third Republic lurched from crisis to crisis in the late 1930s,

these deeply unsettling and even traumatizing circumstances resulted in a widespread

20
Herman Lebovics,True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1992).
21
Dino Felluga, Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject, Introductory Guide to Critical Theory (last updated Nov.
28, 2003: Purdue University) accessed Dec. 1, 2008,
http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.html.
22
Bayles, 4.

10
resurgence of abjection that manifested itself across a broad variety of cultural productions

the construction of Django as the sine qua non of a jazz franaise being but one such example.23

So while Django had gained significant enough popularity in the Unites States by the

mid-to-late 1930s that guitarist Charlie Christian, living until 1939 in out-of-the-way Oklahoma

City, knew his recordings well enough to reproduce his playing,24 by the late 1940s a similar

process was at work in the U.S. as it faced a new, and with the Soviet Unions explosion of an

atomic bomb in 1949, increasingly existential threat. Although France was nominally on the side

of the U.S. against the Soviet Union during the Cold War,25 the significant strength of the French

Communist Party in the post-war years and the American governments distrust of even the

French right (led to varying degrees by Charles de Gaulle during the same period) made it

suspect in the eyes of many Americans.26 As jazz became an arsenal in the propaganda

campaigns of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. jazz establishment tried its best to affirm the

wholly American origins of jazz by keeping the most famous non-American jazz star of the time,

Django, at arms length in order to justify this very use.27 For if jazz was not uniquely defined by

its ostensible actualization of the understanding of freedom exemplified in the U.S., in

contradistinction to what existed in the Soviet Union and that of its allies, then it hardly made

sense to use it as proof of the superiority of U.S. capitalism over Soviet, or any other variety of,

communism. Billy Taylors 1986 article Jazz: Americas Classical Music, along with the

23
Bayles, 15.
24
Wayne E. Goins and Craig R. McKinney, A Biography of Charlie Christian: Jazz Guitars King of Swing
(Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., 2005), 378.
25
At least until it began to move away from its NATO-based alliance with the U.S. in 1959 that culminated in its
full withdrawal from the NATO military command in 1966. Sean Kay, NATO and the Future of European Security
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 43.
26
Irwin M. Mall, France, the United States and the Algerian War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2001), 4.
27
See Penny Marie Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004). This is one of, if not the, most comprehensive studies of this U.S. State
Department sponsored project.

11
concurrent, and still insistent, polemics of Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis, mark perhaps

the apotheosis of this decades long effort. The very title of Taylors article is indicative enough

of his viewpoint on jazz, but he then goes on to write that, [t]his classical music defines the

national character and the national cultureit is this unique American phenomenon.28

[But] the sort of reading of jazz articulated by Taylor [and others], which emphasizes
individualism rather than collectivism, autonomous statements rather than dialogue and
collaboration, helped enable the use of jazz as propaganda for capitalism by distorting the
nature of the music, by blurring its variety and its debt to the collective struggles of
African Americans, and by effacing the fact that jazz has long flourished outside the
United States.29 [Italics mine]

Unable to see the relations between his understanding of jazz and the historically situated

ideological formations in which jazz, as well as all other cultural expressions, are necessarily

implicated, Taylor privileges certain qualities of jazz to the detriment of other equally valid ones

that, not coincidentally, justify its particularly American-centric understanding.

A more contemporary expression of this denial is found in a biography of Charlie

Christian, undoubtedly the other most influential early jazz guitarist, in which the authors devote

an entire section, entitled with obvious sarcasm The Importance of Being Django, that sets out

to debunk the idea that Django was of any importance to American jazz, and most especially to

American jazz guitar, compared to the profundity of Christians.

Simply put, Djangos importance on American music has been overstated. If you look at

the Metronome and Down Beat polls of each year that Christian was on the scene, he

completely dominated the numbers, with Reinhardt barely making a blip on the screen.

28
William Billy Taylor, Jazz: Americas Classical Music, The Black Perspective in Music 14, no. 1 (Winter
1986), 22.
29
Robert Walser, Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation and the Problem of Miles Davis, in Jazz Among the
Discourses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 170.

12
 That, in essence, says that to over-emphasize Djangos impact on Christian and others is

to re-write history, because it just was not so.30

But this acceptance of the ostensible objectivity of these polls as indisputable arbiters of

Djangos historical importance in America relative to Christians gives no consideration to the

different locations within the discourse of power in which they and the magazines that sponsored

these polls were situated. By 1940 Christian was based in New Yorkthe center of the jazz

industry in the U.S. to this dayand not surprisingly so was Metronome,31 while Down Beat,

though based in Chicago, was then dominated by contributors living in New York.32

Geographical nearness does not, of course, guarantee mutual aggrandizement, but one can hardly

discount its effect in determining which musicians would receive the most coverage in the

magazines and the relation between this and their perceived popularity as determined by its

readers. The polls, after all, were commissioned by the magazineshow could they not be biased

by their own coverage of what the questions of the polls concern?

Tellingly, not long after Goins and McKinney deny the substantiality of Djangos

influence in America they quote various American jazz guitarists as evidence of Christians

primordial importance, inadvertently contradicting their earlier disavowal. Guitarist Jim Hall

stated, [t]aking Charlie Christian and Django together, Ive hardly heard anything better since,

if you want to know the truth.33 And according to guitarist Mary Osborne, [t]he first thing that

Charlie played at the floor show was St. Louis Blues by Django Reinhardt...Later when they

30
Goins and McKinney, 378.
31
Ron Welburn, Jazz Magazines of the 1930s: An Overview of Their Provocative Journalism, American Music 5,
no. 3 (Autumn, 1987), 258
32
Welburn, 262.
33
Goins and McKinney, 388.

13
introduced me to him, I said, I heard you play Djangos chorus on St. Louis Blues. And he said,

all excited, You know that chorus?34

I am not arguing that Django was more important than Christian. Such whos the

best/most influential?-type arguments are juvenile distractions from the real issues at stake in

coming to a more complete understanding of the history of jazz (or of any other subject for that

matter).35 My point is, rather, to show the inadequacies and omissions that the jazz-as-uniquely-

American-phenomenon point of view, argued implicitly by Goins and McKinney and explicitly

by Taylor, is subject to and at least one of the reasons why such an understanding of the musics

history developed in the first place; at the same time pointing out what it has in common with

how it came to be understood in France a decade or so before this process of exclusion began.

Thus, although Django hardly constitutes those powers of horror that serve as the basis

of Kristevas theory of abjectioncorpses, feces, open wounds etc.as a citizen of France at a

time (the late 1940s and 1950s) when the all-Americanness of jazz was of vital importance, he

did threaten the desired sense of distinction between self, i.e. America, and other, i.e. the Old

world (this being for Kristeva what lies at the root of the abject), that dominant cultural forces

within the United States were then determined to propagate in order to make effective the use of

jazz for Cold War propaganda. At the same time, however, Django challenged the cultural

discourse of the post-war U.S. in another way as well. As an urbanized European who, on

account of his gypsy identity, transcended his French citizenship and, for that matter, national

boundaries tout court, he represented a powerfully seductive alternative to the melting-pot

capitalist internationalism that was being promoted by American institutional forces in the post-

war world. Andrew Seth Berish argues for Django as a representative of the Baudelarian flneur:

34
Goins and McKinney, 389.
35
It is telling, however, how often those who are part of the neo-classic jazz movement have a penchant for such
juvenilia. The Great Men approach of Burns Jazz being but one example.

14
[t]he power of [his] musical vision for Western audiences during the 1930s and 1940s rested in

part on this non-Gypsy aspect of his identity, his modeling of a particular contemporary way of

being capable of making sense of the constant fracture and upheaval of the twentieth century,

geographical dislocation being one of its common manifestations.36

Berish goes on to find intriguing parallels between Djangos musical style and those

characteristics of the flneur that Walter Benjamin analyzed as a character particularly apropos

to modernity. But what is most significant for my purposes is how this identity was at odds with

the post-war cultural discourse of the United States in which the flneur, with his (as this identity

was exclusively the privilege of men) simultaneous alienation from and attraction to mass

consumerism and European cosmopolitanism more generally, was, for many, synonymous with

the Marxism that the U.S. was then understood to be at war with. Furthermore, Django reflected

his flneurian/gypsy rootlessness in synthesizing a breadth of musical styles that cannot be easily

reconciled to a purists conception of what jazz supposedly has been, is, and perhaps will always

be.

Djangos relatively widespread fame, especially in Western Europe, gave him access to
people and places that despite their proximity were off limits or inaccessible for
thousands of Europeans. He literally was able to cross class and national boundaries. His
music reflected this as he adeptly borrowed and mixed musical styles with various class
connotationsgypsy melodies (Tears), classical music (Bach, Tchaikovsky), musette,
jazz, and bluesforging a sonic analogue to this freedom of social mobility.37

36
Andrew Seth Berish, Swinging Transcontinental: Modernity, Race and Place in American Dance Band Music,
1930 to 1946 (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2005), 330.
37
Berish, 341-2. Benjamin Givan details two recorded examples of Djangos predilection for classical music in,
The South-Grapelli Recordings of the Bach Double Violin Concerto, Popular Music and Society 29, no. 3 (July
2006), 335-357.

15
As jazz came to be defined increasingly narrowly in post-war America, such musical eclecticism

was yet another reason for Django to be increasingly ignored within its historical narratives.38

Conclusion

Near the beginning of Sweet and Lowdown, Ray once again shows up late for his

performance at a roadhouse near Chicago due to his having been gambling on billiard games and

arguing with two of the girls he manages. Once he makes it to the stage, however, he plays a

solo improvisation for the enraptured audience after which he and the rest of the band start in on

Limehouse Bluesa tune Reinhardt recorded with the Hot Club in 1935. This song was

composed by Philip Braham with lyrics by Douglas Furber, both British, and inspired by the

Limehouse area of London that was its original Chinatown and was notorious for its opium dens

and other assorted vices.39 It was introduced in Andr Charlots 1921 musical revue A to Z

starring Jack Buchanan and Gertrude Lawrence, and soon became a jazz standard.40 That the Hot

Club recorded it while under contract to Decca in the 1930s and that Ray is shown playing it

supposedly around the same time is therefore not at all surprising. But what is surprising is a

group of all-star country and bluegrass-identified musicians deciding to play it to close the

broadcast of a 1985 awards ceremony.41 One must ask, of all the ones to choose, why this

particular tune? And what might its choice suggest about the origins of this variety of music?

38
David Brackett discusses the more extreme example of Bing Crosby who, over the course of the 1940s, is
transformed from being categorized unarguably as jazz to not jazz at allrather merely pop. See his chapter
Family Values in Music? in Interpreting Popular Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 44.
39
John Seed, Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900-40, History Workshop
Journal 62, no. 1 (2006), 59.
40
Stanley Green, Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 140.
41
This was put on by Frets, a magazine published from approximately 1979 till mid-1989, that focused on acoustic
string instruments. The performance includes David Grisman, Tony Rice, Mark OConnor, Chet Atkins, Bela Fleck,
Jerry Douglas and Rob Wasserman and can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrNS54hBTdo
(accessed December 15, 2008).

16
 Although bluegrass is commonly thought of as but a sub-genre of traditional country

musictraditional, in the sense of it having emerged out of a collective folk cultureit most

definitely is not, having been invented by mandolinist Bill Monroe and his band the Blue Grass

Boys only in the mid-1940s. Its connections to jazz in general have been widely acknowledged,

but the specific kinds of jazz from which it derives its greatest influence has been the subject of

some dissimulation.42 This has been, I think, in order to privilege a wholly American, or at least

Anglo-American, narrative of its origins while denying a much more immediate source of

influence than the traditional folk music of Britain and Ireland that is commonly recognized as

having influenced it.43 Perhaps not surprisingly I am speaking of the gypsy jazz that Django and

Grapelli together invented in 1934 only 11 years before banjoist Earl Scruggs joined Monroes

band to add the last piece to what is now the classic 5-person bluegrass line-up of mandolin, 5-

string banjo, violin/fiddle, guitar and upright bass. That the Hot Club was also made up of five

string instruments, albeit with three guitars rather than banjo and mandolin, might be perceived

as significant, but more importantly is the common emphasis on instrumental improvisation, the

rhythmic basis of many of the songs, as well as the timbral similarities between the unusual

Macafferi and Selmer guitars that Django is most known to have played and the mandolinthe

former having a much more similar sound to the latter than American steel-string guitars do.

While somewhat circumstantial these connections are extremely suggestiveespecially

when one considers David Grismans so-called dawg music that is part of the larger newgrass

genre.44 Grisman, one of the performers on the aforementioned awards show, began his musical

42
For one such example see Richard Smith, Cant You Hear Me Callin: The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of
Bluegrass (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2000), xi.
43
The western swing music of Bob Wills and others is another more immediate influence, but its American origins
has ensured its recognition.
44
Newgrass, sometimes referred to as progressive bluegrass, is the wider term used to describe those musicians who
started out playing traditional bluegrass, but in the 1970s began to incorporate electric instruments, extended jazz
style chords, and even more extensive instrumental improvisation than before. Dawg music, though very much

17
career as a bluegrass mandolinist, but by the mid-1970s had begun the David Grisman Quintet

(and sometimes Quartet) that consisted of the same instrumentation as the classic bluegrass line-

up, with the exception of the 5-string banjo, and when a quintet another mandolin.45 It was also

entirely instrumental however. And although the styles of music they reference is somewhat

wider than what Reinhardt did with the Hot Club, or with other groups that he recorded, the

similarities are striking: 4 to 6 performers all on string instruments, virtuosic soloing at often

breakneck speeds and extensive interplay between the violin and fretted, flat-picked guitar and

mandolin. Thus when Stphane Grapelli toured with the David Grisman Quartet in 1981, one

could say that the jazz music that linked the United-States and France from the 1920s onward

had come full circle to create a new, but in some ways, 50 year old musical hybrid.

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45
The lack of a banjo is most likely explained on account of its far too immediate signification of bluegrass.

18
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