Gypsy Jazz

It must be an Eastern European thing, the threat that one's heritage isn't Magyar, Jewish, or Cossack, but in fact Gypsy. In today's PC society, telling a child that he's adopted is shockingly tasteless, but apparently that wasn't the case in decades past. Back then, an accusation of Gypsy genetics was some sort of punishment for bad behavior. Hey, if it was good enough for the generation that conquered the moon, it's good enough for me.

Like my troublemaking father before me, I was occasionally informed throughout my youth that I am actually a Gypsy. Furthermore, I hadn't been adopted, so much as traded. My parents had bartered me for the price of a loaf of bread... depending on the severity of my most recent misbehavior, that cost ranged from just right to too expensive.

Since this took place in the 1980s in New Jersey, the effect was probably not as profound as it had been in Cold War-era Romania or wherever. In retrospect, I'm not even certain that I knew what a Gypsy was.

Now, though, I'm beginning to wonder if I might not be part Gypsy. It's not that I have a restless spirit, or that I sympathize (empathize? I always forget the difference) with the Pikeys in Snatch. Mostly it's Django Reinhardt.

Here's a rather long cover of a famous Django song. Let it play in the background as you finish reading.


This guy was amazing. Even ignoring the fact that he lost the use of two fingers in a fire, which makes everything about his career exponentially cooler, Django is the big mack daddy of Gypsy Jazz. Rumor has it that he coined the term itself.

Gypsy Jazz has captured my imagination. As soon as I first listened to it, I started trying to find chord progressions on the interwebs so that I might try to play it myself (another story for another time... spoiler alert: I list ways in which a guitar is like a bicycle). For the most part, though, it's the music itself that grips me. I could listen to it all day.

What is it about this style that so moves me? Unfortunately, I just don't think I have the vocabulary to describe this sort of emotional connection between sound and spirit. The Gypsy-ness of it is certainly key - that darkly minor key, the frantic lead guitar, the way the melody isn't so much a melody as an exploration of some chromatic scale that evokes images of campfires and caravans and drunken dancing. It's intoxicating, it's flamenco without the castanets.

You can't ignore the swing, though. It's been said that it doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't have that swing... or something like that. The rhythm guitar is unlike anything else I've ever heard - done well, it makes the drummer obsolete. The style is called "la pompe", and it has gotten under my skin. Listening to the rhythm guitar begs the question, what would Glenn Miller's Band have sounded like if he'd had anger issues and an absinthe habit?

I guess it all comes down to romance. Listening to Gypsy Jazz makes me feel like a beret wearing, chain smoking, thinly mustached pre-war Parisian sitting in a packed, dimly lit bar with a quintet in the corner. Whether that's because of the nature of the music or because of what the media has taught me to associate with the music, I don't care.