Jimmy Rosenberg: Phase Two

When I first encountered Jimmy Rosenberg, he was a child.
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Not simply a child who played the guitar well, but one of those bewildering prodigies who make ordinary ideas about learning seem inadequate. He began playing at seven. At nine he was leading the Gypsy Kids. At twelve he had made an album. Before long he was traveling internationally, playing festivals and eventually Carnegie Hall, admired by musicians whose names belonged to an entirely different world from the Sinti community in which he had grown up.

Everyone wanted to hear Jimmy.

Apparently, some people even wanted a piece of his T-shirt.

There is a moment in the story of the young Jimmy when admirers begin tearing pieces from his shirt as souvenirs. What stays with me is not the fame of the scene but Jimmy’s reaction to it. He seems bewildered. Why would anybody want a piece of his shirt?
Years later, after the crowds had largely disappeared, he made another remark that has stayed with me.

When you aren’t famous anymore, nobody likes you.
I keep putting those two moments together.

I don’t want to put words into Jimmy’s mouth or explain feelings that belong to him alone. But I find myself listening to the child still audible in the grown man’s observation.

What did all those people want from him?

And what happens to a child when everyone wants something he possesses before he is old enough to understand what possessing it means?

The boy everyone wanted

Jimmy’s first success came almost before he was old enough to choose it. He was the extraordinary child everyone wanted to hear.

His talent carried him rapidly beyond the world of childhood. Hotels, airplanes, festivals, recordings and adult musicians became ordinary parts of his life. James Brown and Stevie Wonder admired him. Michael Jackson reportedly did too—an intriguing detail, although we cannot know what Jackson knew of Jimmy’s circumstances or what drew him to his playing. Perhaps it was simply one extraordinary musician recognizing another.

But it is difficult not to notice the echo: another phenomenally gifted boy whose talent became a public possession long before he could determine what place it should have in his private life.

Jimmy’s story eventually became very dark.

Drugs entered it. So did fear, violence, illness, broken engagements and broken relationships. His son died. There were overdoses, a suicide attempt and a brain hemorrhage. The young man who had seemed capable of doing anything with a guitar became increasingly incapable of managing the ordinary demands of living.

The documentary The Father, the Son & the Talent was so painful for me that at first I couldn’t finish watching it.

I thought I knew what story I was seeing.

A prodigy. Fame. Drugs. Collapse.

Poor little Jimmy.

But I had stopped reading too soon.

Jon and Jimmy

One of the people who knew Jimmy through some of the most difficult years was the Norwegian guitarist and producer Jon Larsen.

Larsen had already been deeply involved in this musical world before Jimmy entered his life. He had been the first producer of the Rosenberg Trio—Stochelo, Nous’che and Nonnie—and decades later still speaks warmly of that association.

But Jimmy became something different.
Larsen later described their long, turbulent relationship by saying that they had been like brothers.

“Like brothers” is important because this was no sentimental friendship.

At one point Jimmy’s behavior and threats became frightening enough that Larsen felt he had to protect himself and his family from him. Yet Larsen eventually set out toward Jimmy again. He searched for him. He tried to reconnect. He helped create another opportunity for him, arranging a tour.

Jimmy failed to show up.

That detail matters.

Love did not cure Jimmy. Friendship could not make him well. An opportunity could be placed before him, but nobody could make him capable of accepting it.

Community can sustain us. It can also place unbearable pressures upon us. And sometimes the people who love someone most must move away from him in order to protect themselves.
Then, sometimes, they try again.

There is something painfully familiar in that rhythm, and it isn’t peculiar to famous musicians or Sinti families.

Families everywhere know versions of it.

Love. Hope. Fear. Boundaries. Another chance. Disappointment. Sometimes another return.

From Jimmy’s side, people disappeared.

From the other side, some of those people had very good reasons to leave.
Both things can be true.

That is why I don’t want villains or saints in Jimmy’s story. And increasingly I don’t want to explain Jimmy.

I want to listen to him.

Nobody likes you when you’re not famous

Jimmy seems remarkably inclined to blame himself for what happened to him.

Perhaps he should not carry all that blame.

The boy in those early films does not look to me like a bad boy headed inevitably toward destruction. He looks like a sensitive, extraordinarily gifted child placed very early inside circumstances that would have challenged a far more mature person.

And through the later Jimmy, that child occasionally seems to speak.

The T-shirt.

The bewilderment at fame.

The terrible simplicity of nobody likes you when you’re not famous.

There is a question I hear underneath those moments, although Jimmy himself does not ask it:

Did they love me, or did they love what I could do?

Perhaps no one who has been a child prodigy ever completely escapes that question.
And perhaps that is why the people who remain—or return—matter so much.

Not because they can save you.
Because their presence can tell you that you still exist when you are no longer performing for them.

2020

And then, according to the account Jimmy and the people around him now give, something happened.

In 2020 Jimmy was asking himself whether he wanted to continue at all and whether music still had meaning for him.

He asked for a sign.

A car horn sounded.

At the door was Johan Peeters.

Jimmy took that as his answer.
There are many ways to understand such a moment. What matters to me is how Jimmy understood it.
He wanted to return.

That sentence is important.

Someone could appear at the door. Someone could offer help. Someone could manage concerts, make telephone calls, organize recordings or create opportunities.
But Jimmy had to want to return.

With Johan Peeters and David, he eventually helped create the Jimmy Rosenberg Academy. The organization speaks of teaching, masterclasses, recordings and performances. It speaks of healing and connection.

And it uses a phrase that startled me when I first encountered it:

“a second musical life of Jimmy Rosenberg.”

We had already begun calling it Phase Two.
Apparently Jimmy and those around him feel the division too.
Phase Two

Phase Two need not mean reclaiming what was lost.

I hope it doesn’t.

Jimmy does not have to become the miraculous boy again. He does not have to prove that every astonishing thing once said about his talent remains true. He doesn’t have to fulfill the promise other people saw in him when he was nine or twelve or twenty.
His first success came almost before he was old enough to choose it.

Phase Two can be different: success on his own terms, at an age when he can understand what the music means to him rather than simply carrying the burden of what his gift meant to everyone else.
Perhaps the music can finally belong to Jimmy instead of Jimmy belonging to the music.
And there is another kind of return taking place quietly around the edges. Family appears again. Brothers, a sister, grandchildren. Some contact may be limited; some relationships undoubtedly carry histories we know nothing about and have no right to simplify.

But Jimmy once spoke of how desperately important it was to him to be able to see his grandchildren.

So these connections matter.

The spectacular return is the guitarist walking onto a stage.

The harder return may simply be a man finding his way back to people.

Spacious time

All of this has unexpectedly made me think again about Django Reinhardt.

Near the end of Django’s life, after he and Naguine settled at Samois-sur-Seine, Naguine noticed a change in him. The restless Django who had spent so much of his life moving—between cafés, musicians, cities, cars, trains, danger, escape and applause—had become something else.

She said he had become a poet.

He had time to notice the world around him. He could remain beside the Seine until three in the morning, listening to the water and the trees—to what Django himself called the “true music.”

Django had found spacious time.

Not merely hours with nothing scheduled in them. Something much rarer: time in which attention itself could expand.

He did not have to perform.

He could listen.
And perhaps that is another way of thinking about what I wish for Jimmy Rosenberg in Phase Two.

Not another Carnegie Hall.

Not another crowd trying to take pieces of his shirt.

Not even another demonstration that Jimmy Rosenberg remains one of the great guitar talents of his generation.
I wish him spacious time.

Time to be with brothers and sisters and grandchildren. Time to play when playing gives him pleasure. Time not to play. Time to discover what music sounds like when nobody is demanding anything from it.

Time, perhaps, to hear the water and the trees.
Jimmy Rosenberg was born in 1980. I suddenly realized that he is the age of my daughter.
That changed something for me.

He is not an old man whose life can be summed up.
He still has time.

Perhaps success now means playing because he wants to play. Finding pleasure in music again. Being surrounded by people who value Jimmy when Jimmy is not performing. Discovering that he does not have to earn belonging by being extraordinary.
Because underneath everything—the fame, the drugs, the missed concerts, the frightening episodes, the broken relationships and the dazzling guitar playing—I still remember the little boy wondering why strangers wanted pieces of his T-shirt.

And I hear the grown man saying that nobody likes you when you’re not famous.

Perhaps Phase Two can give him another answer.

Some people stayed. Some had to leave. Some found their way back. Others may yet do so. New listeners are discovering him. Old listeners are listening again.

And Jimmy is still here.

Still playing.

Still becoming.

The child prodigy had very little choice about becoming Jimmy Rosenberg.

The man may finally have the time—and the space—to decide what being Jimmy Rosenberg means.

Click here for an fairly recent interview with Jimmy:
Jimmy interview

In the third part of the film Jon & Jimmy, Stochelo Rosenberg recalls that opportunities came to him when he was thirteen or fifteen. His father told him no: he must take his time and choose. Stochelo had a life before beginning his career, finally making that choice at about eighteen. Jimmy’s path was very different. His astonishing gift carried him forward before he could possibly have understood all that would be asked of him.

Near the end of the film, Jon Larsen remembers how Django overcame what might have ended another musician’s life, and expresses the hope that Jimmy, too, will find his way back to music. Jimmy’s answer is simple: if you really want something, you will make it happen.

Years later, that possibility remains. The recent interview does not show a man without hope. It shows someone who knows the value of his gift and wants the freedom to decide how it will be used. Fingers crossed—not for Jimmy to return to the life others once designed for him, but to the music and the future he chooses for himself.
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The hope and the music live on.