Is Eddie Lang better than Django Reinhardt?

[kris]

transcribe Django solos!...all of them are fantastic!

[mr. beaumont]

This is pretty much what happened to me. I got really tired of the modern GJ players very quickly and then couldn't really get back in to Django. It wasn't until recently I started listening to Django again and that was because I kind of rediscovered him after transcribing some Rex Stewart lines off of the All Star Sessions. It made me remember how tasteful Django could be and that he really used dynamics unlike most of the current GJ players who seem to have two dynamic levels...forte and fortissimo. Eddie Lang was a phenomenal technician too and I really appreciate his playing but I haven't ever listened to it as much as Django. However, that could be because there is a lot less of his playing to listen to. Didn't Eddie Lang die in his twenties?

I'm always amazed when I hear current players (mostly amateur hotshots, but some pros too) who supposedly worship Django and have devoured every one of his solos who have some how not gleaned one iota of Django's sense of space, style, nuance, and dynamics.

Django Reinhardt was one of the best pure improvisers that ever lived--on any instrument.

[KirkP]

Eddie Lang died in 1933 at age 30. Django's Hot Club Quartet formed in 1934. Eddie was paving the way, showing what the guitar was capable of in virtuoso hands and interpreting popular tunes with a folk/blues voice.

[jasonc]

I'm always amazed when I hear current players (mostly amateur hotshots, but some pros too) who supposedly worship Django and have devoured every one of his solos who have some how not gleaned one iota of Django's sense of space, style, nuance, and dynamics.

Django Reinhardt was one of the best pure improvisers that ever lived--on any instrument.

This. His solo on Finesse is a case study in the use of space and the importance of dynamics. If there are modern GJ players that play like that I'd buy their album.

[mr. beaumont]

I dunno how "modern" he is, but Boulou Ferre is one of the few that "get it," imho. And he really gets it

[christianm77]

but seriously, I went through a big Django phase about 35 yrs ago and used to play w/a violinist.
but w/all the gypsy players that have since emerged and the huge revival of the idiom I almost can't listen to the HCOF and it's disciples anymore. really got burned out on it.

TBH I don't listen much to the modern GJ guys, and I've avoided things like Samois, all seems a bit much. But there's a lot more to Django than the fetishisation of the HCOF. His playing has this ability to stop me in my tracks.

I can easily see how people get a bit burned out on Django. I don't think it's his fault though :-)

Often it's people who have gone a bit down the GJ rabbit hole who later on turn away from Django... Too much of a good thing?

[monk]

Lang's recording career began almost a decade before Reinhardt's during the Hot Jazz era, before Louis Armstrong brought the twin concepts of a jazz soloist and swing rhythm to the fore. If we use Armstrong's emergence as a line of demarcation, Lang and Reinhardt stand on different sides of the divide with Reinhardt being the beneficiary of Armstrong's innovations.

Differences in rhythm and execution aside, it should be pointed out that Lang played a guitar with high action and super-heavy strings (.075 sixth and a wound second string) while Django played a lightweight guitar with light strings (.048-.010) which definitely would have an impact on the facility with which each man demonstrated on record. Lang's followers had the advantage of electric recording over mechanical recording, which he didn't have, and were thus able to employ lower action and lighter strings.

As Marty Grosz once pointed out, Lang's importance rests on the fact that he had to blaze the trail for himself. He was the first "real" Jazz Guitarist and he had to figure it all out as he went along. By the time Reinhardt began making records, jazz had made a large leap in both concept and execution and Lang's disciples, Kress, McDonough, Van Eps, et al had refined and codified what Lang had begun.

Given what Lang accomplished with the barest of precedents, we can surmise that he would have assimilated the "Gospel According to Louis" just as Reinhardt started absorbing the language of bebop after his trip to the U.S. in 1946.

For myself, I like both and appreciate each for their individual contributions.

[sgcim]

I dunno how "modern" he is, but Boulou Ferre is one of the few that "get it," imho. And he really gets it

I just heard this new guy Adrien Moignard on Cyrille Aimee's new CD, and he sounds llike he gets it, too.

[destinytot]

For me, this guy combined the best of both:

[mr. beaumont]

I just heard this new guy Adrien Moignard on Cyrille Aimee's new CD, and he sounds llike he gets it, too.

Oh, I'd agree.

[AndyV]

Okay. First, the Eddie Lang vs Django Reinhardt is a bit of unfair comparison.

Here's the thing. Lang was an exceptional musician and an important early voice on the guitar and there is much to learn from what he accomplished in his too short life, but it doesn't come close to what Django achieved.

Django was a musician on the order of a Mozart or Bach; he had just amazing, natural genetic ability. The technique that he fashioned to play jazz on the guitar was something he practically conjured from the ether. Django's music fused two traditions: the French Musette (itself an evolution of medieval dance forms) and the jazz pulse of Armstrong.

There is a poetry in Django's music, a pathos, that speaks to the whole of the human condition in a profound way. The current crop of Gypsy jazzers has surpassed him technically yet there is a magic to Django's playing that eludes them. I believe it's this quality of universality and poetry that still moves and inspires people more than 60 years after his death.

[Hep To The Jive]

A lot of good thoughts here! I also feel the comparison is not fair, those two players belong to different times.

One thing I noticed though, and before I say it, I admit I'm a big fan of Django and inspired a lot by him... But, I've heard a few recordings of Django when he performed in America with Ellington (?) musicians, and to me, his style of playing didn't really fit with American jazz style. It sounded awkward, not natural. Again, it maybe just my impression, but GJ is not a versatile school of jazz, it mostly just a thing in itself. Which is not bad.

The conclusion? Django, Lang, they are both great... BUt Charlie Christian is the one who really rules!

[neatomic]

but oscar aleman danced better than both of them

aleman always thought himself to be a better guitarist too-

”I knew Django Reinhardt well. He used to say jazz was gipsy – we often argued over that. I agree with many Americans I met in France who said he played very well but with too many gipsy tricks. He had very good technique for both hands, or rather one hand and a pick, because he always played with a pick. Not me, I play with my fingers. There are things you can’t do with a pick – you can’t strike the treble with two fingers and play something else on the bass string. – But I admired him and he was my friend. He was my greatest friend in France. We played together many times, just for ourselves. I used to go to his wagon, where he lived. I’ve slept and eaten there – and also played! He had three or four guitars. Django never asked anyone to go to his wagon, but he made an exception with me. I appreciated him, and I believe the feeling was mutual”. (OA in an interview, quoted from article by Tómas Mooney: Oscar Alemán: Swing Guitarist, Jazz Journal International, Vol. 35, No. 4 + 5 (1982))


cheers

[Stringswinger]

Django stood on Lang's shoulders. As did CC. Wes, Pass and all of our other heroes stand on the shoulders of Django and CC. The rest of us? We stand in all of their shadows....

I like Django and Lang equally. When it comes to jazz guitar playing, guys often forget that this is not the Olympics. ;-)

[christianm77]

A lot of good thoughts here! I also feel the comparison is not fair, those two players belong to different times.

One thing I noticed though, and before I say it, I admit I'm a big fan of Django and inspired a lot by him... But, I've heard a few recordings of Django when he performed in America with Ellington (?) musicians, and to me, his style of playing didn't really fit with American jazz style. It sounded awkward, not natural. Again, it maybe just my impression, but GJ is not a versatile school of jazz, it mostly just a thing in itself. Which is not bad.

The conclusion? Django, Lang, they are both great... BUt Charlie Christian is the one who really rules!

I agree about Charlie Christian. Out of the big three of pre war jazz guitar (Lang, Django, Charlie C) Charlie is the only one I would say who has a true American post-Louis (also post-Lester) jazz time feel which makes him most interesting to me, given that's what I care the most about. Django was capable of swinging but his feel was always essentially different than the US musicians.

A clear example is in the rhythm style which owes a lot to Polka to my ears, a very different feel to the swing guitar of the American players.

OK, so I'm going to appear to be enthusiastically splitting hairs here, but to me this is a big deal. For me the music of the Hot Club of France is not in fact Gypsy Jazz.

This might seem an absurd thing to say because he invented it, but I don't think the genre of Hot Club music itself was that unusual or specifically connected with gypsy culture. There were many swing bands in jazz and jazz related music since the early days with the Lang/Venuti line ups being but one example, and there were other bands like this in Paris atm AFAIK.

Django was simply a musician playing cafe band/jazz music who happened to be ethnically gypsy. I mean Grapelli wasn't a gypsy. His dad was a marquess. I'm not sure about Louis Vola or Roger Chaput. While there were other gypsy single note lead players at the time - such as Baro Ferret (Boulou is his nephew), there were also single note virtuosos with no gypsy heritage such as Oscar Aleman.

Gypsy Jazz is something that happened afterwards - when the Django's time with the HCOF became the model for a modern folk tradition within the Manouche and Sinti communities. That to me is true Gypsy jazz or Jazz Manouche.

Anyway Django frequently recorded in different line ups, especially in the '40s. I happen to like the stuff he did with the Americans, but I agree they were speaking different dialects rhythmically.

In practice, Gypsy Jazz is understood to be a term covering '1930s style string band music' to the average music lover, although I think calling Django a GJ guitarist is somehow, not quite fitting. It's possible to be hugely influenced by Django and have no involvement with GJ at all (Wes, Benson etc.)

[goldenwave77]

Gypsy Jazz is something that happened afterwards - when the Django's time with the HCOF became the model for a modern folk tradition within the Manouche and Sinti communities. That to me is true Gypsy jazz or Jazz Manouche.

I read a biography of Django which said he started, at an early age (4), like many gypsy kids on violin and/or banjo. He never read a single note of music in his life. In fact, he never read anything in his life---not French, not Spanish, not German, not English. So, this music he grew up learning...what was it ?, if it wasn't unwritten folk music played by gypsies. I suppose we could quibble about when improvised folk music, played freely, turns into "jazz".

As far as Django and Ellington when Django got to NYC, he was literally a fish out of water. He expected everyone to fall all over him--the greatest guitarist in the world, and when they didn't, he was perplexed. Many people had never heard of him. I think he was literally homesick. I think it was like that movie where Tarzan comes to Manhattan and is driven to distraction...no trees to swing from, though he finds some skyscrapers, ....point being he was a stranger in a strange land. Also, Ellington gave him little playing space-- a few choruses here and there, and Django didn't like, or at least wasn't used to the sound of an electrified instrument.

Ellington, unlike Artie Shaw, didn't have much use for guitarists. (There's another post about a guy who played in Duke's band for a while, who is barely or not heard on recordings, who later left or was drummed out of Duke's band, who ended up a janitor and then committed suicide...forget his name.)

[christianm77]

Gypsy Jazz is something that happened afterwards - when the Django's time with the HCOF became the model for a modern folk tradition within the Manouche and Sinti communities. That to me is true Gypsy jazz or Jazz Manouche.

I read a biography of Django which said he started, at an early age (4), like many gypsy kids on violin and/or banjo. He never read a single note of music in his life. In fact, he never read anything in his life---not French, not Spanish, not German, not English. So, this music he grew up learning...what was it ?, if it wasn't unwritten folk music played by gypsies. I suppose we could quibble about when improvised folk music, played freely, turns into "jazz".

My understanding is that Django's interest in jazz was inspired by sparked by hearing Louis Armstrong.

Improvised folk music - that's an interesting one. I would need to know more about traditional gypsy folk music to talk about this with authority, but the little bit I've played doesn't involve any GJ style blowing.

This type of stuff:

It's pure rhythm guitar, although the rhythm style is pretty similar to GJ as with Klezmer. The violinist was playing the tune, with liberal stylistic embellishments, ornaments and effects, again similar to Klezmer, don't think there was any blowing on the changes.

So you play Dark Eyes or Two Guitars with lots of dramatic use of rubato and speeding up, bits of kind of recitative (declaiming the text/melody in free time), and the violin is playing the melody in various ways.

Of course jazz started as a rhythmic embellishment of straight melodies, so there is a similarity here. In the case of jazz there's a specific rhythmic way of 'jazzing' the melody which I think is fundamentally different from the way this is done in European folk music traditions. That's your historical, 1910s-20s definition of jazz.

Later on Louis invented blowing on changes the way we understand it today, but I still feel the rhythm thing and the way it is used in phrasing is the unique fingerprint not the blowing on changes bit.

Of course, 100 years later, everything ever has been influenced by jazz, so it's hard to step back.

But for me, it's hardly a quibble - there is a clear and absolute difference as far as I can see between jazz and bal musette, polka, gypsy folk music and all the other styles of music knocking around in 1920s Paris that you might have heard... Django fused these two things together into something new. Actually I think Django was trying to play American jazz, first swing and later on bop, but the fusion happened naturally and without artifice.

Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but GJ wasn't the music of Django's community. That happened later.

[goldenwave77]

Of course jazz started as a rhythmic embellishment of straight melodies, so there is a similarity here. In the case of jazz there's a specific rhythmic way of 'jazzing' the melody which I think is fundamentally different from the way this is done in European folk music traditions. That's your historical, 1910s-20s definition of jazz.
.....
Later on Louis invented blowing on changes the way we understand it today, but I still feel the rhythm thing and the way it is used in phrasing is the unique fingerprint not the blowing on changes bit.

So wait you're saying that a hot polka band, or clarinet in a kletzmer band, or a hot fiddler in a bluegrass band...doesn't ever just blow on changes?! Maybe that's true, although it would surprise me...

I'm not really militant about this, but I do think there can be artificial divides, for lots of reasons (marketing, social, image-seeking) between lots of styles of music. For e.g., people will deride American country as "too white bread" but Hank Williams learned music from a black street musician, and Jimmy Rogers (the "Singing Brakeman") had a father who was a railroad overseer, supervising black work crews. Hard to listen to either of them sing, with their vocal swoops, and not hear some bluesy-ness there. Same with a lot of honky tonk stuff, and western swing. Elvis Presley to me, had a really good voice, and was steeped in a lot of musical traditions, gospel, blues, tin pan alley, country, some jazz, and could sound pretty convincing in most of them.

Maybe Louis A. was the first to say "tune....be gone"....just give me the chords, and let me do my thing, and he was better at it, and more prolific....able to play chorus after chorus of interesting stuff if he wanted to. Plus, I think he sought out top dog status...though he didn't invent it. Other hot players like Joe Oliver, his semi-mentor, were all self-consciously top dog types.


I agree rhythmic sense is very different between jazz and other music. (Chopin is famous for his rubato...and he listened to a lot of folk music...mazurkas, polonaises, and other folk dance forms....I think Chopin would have been a primo jazz musician...great chops, really understood form, advanced harmonic sense, and succinct.)

[christianm77]

Of course jazz started as a rhythmic embellishment of straight melodies, so there is a similarity here. In the case of jazz there's a specific rhythmic way of 'jazzing' the melody which I think is fundamentally different from the way this is done in European folk music traditions. That's your historical, 1910s-20s definition of jazz.
.....
Later on Louis invented blowing on changes the way we understand it today, but I still feel the rhythm thing and the way it is used in phrasing is the unique fingerprint not the blowing on changes bit.

So wait you're saying that a hot polka band, or clarinet in a kletzmer band, or a hot fiddler in a bluegrass band...doesn't ever just blow on changes?! Maybe that's true, although it would surprise me...

People solo like crazy in Bluegrass of course, but it is not in fact a traditional style and is in fact influenced by Jazz and definitely by Django in this regard. Oldtime music/'mountain music', AFAIK, doesn't involve blowing is more like Irish music, but I might be wrong in this - anyone?

I've never done any blowing in a Klezmer band or stuff like that. I'm sure some people take solos, but as I say Jazz has influenced EVERYTHING, so it's very hard to say what it was like in the early 20th century. My understanding is that improvisation in these fields are based on embellishing and ornamenting melody.

Bear in mind there was no improvised soloing in Jazz until Louis came on the scene. Improvisation was based around everyone blowing together, with the trumpet syncopating the melody. Take a listen to this King Oliver track:

The solo you hear from Johnny Dodds is, as is typical with jazz of this era a composed one. If I was to play this tune in a traditional jazz band, the clarinettist would be sure to nail that solo as recorded.

The classic example of this is the Alphonse Picout solo on High Society, which everyone had to learn. This is such a famous solo it shows up as a basic motif of Bird's playing to the point of ignorant modernists thinking 'it's a Charlie Parker lick!' In a way it doesn't matter - it's remained part of the fabric of jazz to this day for 100 years, a wonderful thing.

A New Orleans clarinettist might vary or ornament Picout's solo, but they would use it as a starting point. Here's the King Oliver recording:

Early jazz compositions were usually multi-part affairs more similar to march forms than the AABA forms on tin pan alley - another practice that Louis pioneered was blowing on the choruses of popular songs.

I'm not really militant about this, but I do think there can be artificial divides, for lots of reasons (marketing, social, image-seeking) between lots of styles of music. For e.g., people will deride American country as "too white bread" but Hank Williams learned music from a black street musician, and Jimmy Rogers (the "Singing Brakeman") had a father who was a railroad overseer, supervising black work crews. Hard to listen to either of them sing, with their vocal swoops, and not hear some bluesy-ness there. Same with a lot of honky tonk stuff, and western swing. Elvis Presley to me, had a really good voice, and was steeped in a lot of musical traditions, gospel, blues, tin pan alley, country, some jazz, and could sound pretty convincing in most of them.

One of the things I love most about American music is the way it's all mixed up. The Banjo comes from the West African Ngoni, yet it is the instrument of the hillbillies. I love that!

Maybe Louis A. was the first to say "tune....be gone"....just give me the chords, and let me do my thing, and he was better at it, and more prolific....able to play chorus after chorus of interesting stuff if he wanted to. Plus, I think he sought out top dog status...though he didn't invent it. Other hot players like Joe Oliver, his semi-mentor, were all self-consciously top dog types.

See above

I agree rhythmic sense is very different between jazz and other music. (Chopin is famous for his rubato...and he listened to a lot of folk music...mazurkas, polonaises, and other folk dance forms....I think Chopin would have been a primo jazz musician...great chops, really understood form, advanced harmonic sense, and succinct.)

I'm sure he would have been killer at jazz. It's a shame we can't hear how Chopin etc played. My hunch is there would be more rhythmic fire in there and perhaps less technical perfection than in modern concert performances.

[EarlBrother]

Please!!! Please stop the insanity.You know ThatsEarlBrother is the best!And anyone that wants to play like me well i got a long list of mental health professionals to recommend.There i go trying to be the comedian.Oh by the did you hear about the Roman that walked into a bar held up 2 finger and said"I have 5 beers please".Please dont ban me ill never get this loose again on the forum promise!

[rob taft]

Django had two fingers (and a half) on his left hand and Lang had five. Seriously, comparing the two is like someone said earlier. Hank Marvin vs Jimmy Hendrix, Segovia vs Sabicas, etc.

[TH]

Django had two fingers (and a half) on his left hand and Lang had five. Seriously, comparing the two is like someone said earlier. Hank Marvin vs Jimmy Hendrix, Segovia vs Sabicas, etc.

Prince vs Bowie? Both equals in this world anyway.

David

[Roscoe T. Claude]

Hey Christian, I'm not familiar with Lang, I guess I need to check him out, but I was recently introduced to Django and I think he is a unique, notable player and I want to learn his style. I have very little experience in jazz, but I Know I dig Wes Montgomery and this Barney Kessel fella: they can both polish off licks fast and slick, but when you slow the notes down in your head the phrasing is incredible. Now that I've been playing jazz I still on occasion enjoy other styles, but they seem small in comparison. I'm working on Autumn Leaves and after listening to Barney do it I have something new to process: enjoy this:

[grahambop]

Bert Weedon is much better than all those annoying jazz pluckers.

[Roscoe T. Claude]

And he gets all the women too!