 After the war, the French jazz world divided against itself. The argument centered on bebop, the fast, harmonically daring music arriving from America through Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the young musicians gathering around them. To Charles Delaunay, bebop was the next bold development in jazz. Hugues Panassié, his former colleague at the Hot Club de France, insisted that it was not jazz at all. Their disagreement became bitter. Musicians, critics and followers were expected to choose a side: the older jazz that had grown from Louis Armstrong and the swing era, or this strange new music that seemed to move at the speed of the postwar world. Django had never cared for other people’s definitions. Now the men who had helped create the Hot Club de France were quarrelling over what jazz was permitted to become. He rejected not only the argument but, for a time, the world conducting it. He put aside his guitar and turned increasingly to painting. (A photograph from Nice catches Mezz Mezzrow, Django, Louis Armstrong, and Stéphane Grappelli laughing together over drinks—a small reminder that, even as critics divided jazz into opposing camps, the musicians themselves continued to meet in the music.)  (Mezz Mezzrow, Django Reinhardt, Louis Armstrong, and Stéphane Grappelli at the first International Jazz Festival, Nice, February 1948. Photographer unknown.) Painting had long interested Django. Like his music, it offered him a means of expression that did not depend upon written language. He painted landscapes, people, religious subjects and scenes from the world around him. The work was direct and intensely personal. Painting allowed him to observe quietly, away from audiences, managers and critics—and away from those continually trying to define what “Django Reinhardt” ought to be. He did not cease playing altogether. He traveled, performed occasionally and made recordings in Rome. But he had withdrawn from the center of Parisian jazz life. The guitar that had once seemed inseparable from him could remain untouched. Then a young alto saxophonist named Hubert Fol came looking for him. Fol belonged to the new generation. He and his brother Raymond had immersed themselves in bebop and formed a group called the Be-Bop Minstrels. Hubert had listened closely to Charlie Parker and played with the speed, energy and new harmonic language that were transforming jazz. He did not approach Django as a figure from the past. He heard in him a musician who could belong to the future. Boris Vian understood this too. Vian was a writer, trumpeter, critic and one of the central spirits of postwar Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He moved easily among musicians, writers, intellectuals and the young people filling the neighborhood’s newly opened caves. In those cellars, jazz was not preserved behind glass. It was alive, crowded and unsettled. Vian and Fol wanted Django to play at the Club Saint-Germain when it reopened after renovation in 1951. Django agreed—but on the condition that the club also exhibit his paintings. They accepted. This detail changes the meaning of his return. Fol and Vian did not ask Django to abandon painting and become “the guitarist” again. They welcomed the whole man: the painter he had become and the musician he might still become. While Django played the new music below, his paintings were displayed in the club. The opposing sides of his life were permitted to meet. Perhaps that was what Django needed. He cleaned his guitar and came back. The old Quintette sound was not simply recreated. Grappelli’s violin and the acoustic rhythm guitars gave way to Hubert Fol’s alto saxophone, piano, bass and drums. Django played an amplified guitar and entered the rapid currents of bebop. He did not imitate the young Americans. He listened to what they had discovered and absorbed it into his own musical language. The phrasing was still unmistakably Django, but the setting had changed. The music was leaner, stranger and more angular. At times it seemed as though the older master and the young saxophonist were urging each other forward. The surviving recordings from the Club Saint-Germain preserve the excitement of that encounter. Alongside familiar pieces such as “Nuages” and “Manoir de mes rêves” are extended performances, announcements and even a spoken consideration of Django’s painting. The recording does not present a monument receiving ceremonial homage. It captures a working musician taking risks in a crowded Paris club. That club stood at 13 rue Saint-Benoît. Years later, when I began visiting Paris, it had become Le Bilboquet. I first entered Bilboquet to dine. From the restaurant above, I discovered the jazz below. After that evening I returned night after night, no longer for dinner but simply to listen. It became my Parisian haunt. During a month in Paris in the winter of 2004, my evenings developed their own rhythm. I would have dinner elsewhere and then walk through the freezing streets until it was time for the jazz sets. Wrapped in my long black wool coat, gloves and earmuffs, I apparently looked so thoroughly prepared for the cold that the elegant staff was amused when I arrived. Once seated on one of the low red velvet stools in the intimate club, I quickly became warm. The pianist Ahmet Gulbay played there regularly with his trio. I returned for his music, his radiant smile and the community that formed around him. Visiting musicians dropped in. Strangers began conversations. One evening Ahmet invited an adolescent jazz pianist from the Berkeley High band to sit in—a gesture of generosity that the boy and his family surely never forgot. I knew when I wrote about Ahmet that Django had once played at the Club Saint-Germain during his bebop years. What I did not yet know was the fuller story: that Hubert Fol and Boris Vian had drawn him back by making room for his painting as well as his music. Nor had I fully considered the Hôtel Montana directly across rue Saint-Benoît, where Django and Naguine stayed. He could leave the hotel, cross the narrow street and descend into the club where his paintings and his new electric music awaited him. The geography is almost impossibly intimate. When I later returned to find Bilboquet closed forever, I wrote that a fire went out in my heart. I found Ahmet playing elsewhere, but the loss of the club changed Paris for me. It had not merely been a place where music was performed. It had become one of those rare rooms in which music gathers people into a temporary world. It had done something similar for Django. After the engagement at the Club Saint-Germain, Django and Naguine began moving away from hotel life. They lived for a time in a village south of Paris before finally settling in Samois-sur-Seine in the autumn of 1951. Django already knew Samois. He had fished there in earlier years and was drawn to the village, the river and the nearby forest. At Samois he painted, played billiards and spent long hours fishing. He could sit by the Seine without needing to be the great Django Reinhardt. Naguine would later say that he was learning to become a new man. But the new man had not left music behind. From Samois, Django continued returning to Paris to play and record with Hubert Fol and other younger musicians. “Nuits de Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” “Flèche d’Or,” “Anouman” and the recordings made during the first months of 1953 reveal an artist still moving forward. His electric guitar did not have the familiar warmth of the old acoustic Quintette, but it possessed a different freedom. He was discovering how much space the new music offered him. The apparent quiet of Samois and the energy of Saint-Germain were not opposites. He needed both: the river where he could fish and the cellar where he could test himself against young musicians; the solitude of painting and the immediate exchange of jazz. During the months before his death, there was a new flurry of activity. He made some of the most modern recordings of his career, continued performing in Paris and had an important tour planned for October 1953. The tour never happened. In May, after returning from a Paris engagement, Django collapsed near his home in Samois. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died on May 16, 1953, at the age of forty-three. His death is sometimes made to seem like the predictable end of a man who had withdrawn from the world. But that is not the Django we find in his final music. The recordings do not document a decline. They document an awakening interrupted. At Saint-Germain, Hubert Fol had not rescued an old style. He had recognized an inexhaustibly curious musician. Django responded to the young man’s energy because he too was still curious—still capable of hearing an unfamiliar musical language and asking what he might say within it. Years later, I sat in that same address listening to another generous musician invite a young Berkeley pianist to join him. I had gone to Bilboquet for the musicians of my own time, yet beneath them was an earlier evening: Hubert Fol, Boris Vian, Django’s paintings and an electric guitar newly cleaned. The rooms had changed. The music had changed. But one generation was still calling another into the circle Click here to continue to next chapter: The World That Reached Me
 And this is what they heard at Club Saint Germain des Pres:
Nuits de Saint Germain des Pres Anouman Troublant Bolero Comments are closed.
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