After a fairly rotten weekend it
was back to…Monday. I guess that puts things in perspective.
“Anyway, here’s an album from
waaaayyy back!” – I would say if I were an annoying oldies DJ.
Disc 786 is….Jazz Masters 38
Artist: Django
Reinhardt
Year of Release: 1994, but featuring
music from 1938 to 1947 (and one lonely outlier from 1953).
What’s up with the Cover? Django is looking like quite the
smooth dandy, smokin’ a cigarette in his suit while playing one of those chords
that always makes my knuckles hurt.
How I Came To Know It: One night I went to visit my
friend Casey and we sat around and played music. I remember I was trying to get
him hooked on Steve Earle, but was using “Train A-Comin’” to do it. Not because
that is Earle’s best album, but because I had just bought it earlier that week and was still excited about it. He
tried to get me hooked on Django Reinhardt, and succeeded enough for me to buy
this record later that week.
How It Stacks Up: This is a compilation album of
Django’s career, not a true album, so it doesn’t stack up. Even if it did, it
would be the only Django album in my collection.
Ratings: you don’t rate compilations,
folks. It’s not done. Someone tell Rolling Stone this obvious truth, as they
have festooned their “greatest albums list” with greatest hits records. How
idiotic.
When I rolled this album for review my first thought
was, “Ah, Jazz, my old nemesis. Come to torment me again, have you?” Much to my
pleasant surprise the torment never exceeded anything more than the musical equivalent
of a light tickling.
This is jazz I can understand and – more importantly
– enjoy. There’s a discernible melody throughout every song and Django’s chord
changes are sometimes surprising, but the surprise is pleasant.
Sometimes he’ll start a song off with a violin
traipsing about, as he does on the sunny
and cheerful “Daphne.” Regardless, it
isn’t long before Django’s signature guitar sound makes an appearance, trilling
and weaving their way in and out of the tune.
Django is known as one of the great guitar players
of the twentieth century, and while my ear is generally better tuned to rock
and roll, even I can see why. He is a master of spacing and rhythm and the tone
he brings out is bright and precise. There is a joy in every note and more than
a bit of sass when sass is called for.
True to the times, tracks are rarely much over three
minutes in length, and yet Django manages to develop some pretty intricate
themes in those three minutes. They get to the point fast, giving them lots of
time to get to a second or even a third point before they’re done.
The fact that all the songs are so short means that
despite the album being 16 songs long, it is still a tasteful 48 minutes of
total playing time. It left me satisfied with the experience, but not
overstuffed.
These songs are all instrumental so I have no idea
what they’re about beyond the clues in their titles, but this is music to feel
good to. It was regrettable that I was feeling so miserable listening to them
for most of my walk today, but they managed to break through the grey clouds of
my mood near the end despite my best efforts to continue to wallow.
I cheated a little bit when I got home and listened
to the final two songs while doing some basic household stuff. I can see the
allure of jazz for this sort of thing, at least Django Reinhardt. Django’s
guitar made the most ordinary movements – taking off a shirt, putting on a pair
of jeans, petting a passing cat (yes, Vizzini, I will feed you) – all feel like
I was part of some kind of Broadway musical or a Chaplin silent movie.
This music is seventy-plus years old now, and there
are times when it feels its age, particularly on the dreamy “Nuages” which is just not edgy enough to
be as sexy as it wants to be. But even on the tracks I didn’t love, I still
admired the ground they broke and the influence they had on everything that
came after. It is like the frontal lobe equivalent of listening to Robert
Johnson hit you in the hippocampus.
This album isn’t one I’ll put on very often, but it
also isn’t one I can part with now that it lightened my heart on a day when I
desperately needed that.
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