[Dixielandjazz] electrifying Django

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Many thanks to Steve for ANOUMAN, which I had not before heard though I do have a fair number of recordings of Django being electrifying both acoustic and with amp.
If anybody supposes Django didn't take
 the electric guitar seriously they have to assume that he didn't need to, and recorded hours of greatly admired music regardless. 


The Austrian Roma guitarist Harri Stojka was surprised when I mentioned Les Paul in connection with his -- Harri's -- own first CD. He said he had a Les Paul guitar but had never listened much to Les, who remarkably was still around at the time. Not so many years back. 

But of course the two of them had decades apart taken off from Django's playing. 

And it might be argued that the early Les Paul stuff, and Harri's stuff, had a little more of the acoustic Django than Django himself among all his recordings on electric or amplified guitar. 
It would have been nice to have had more of Django on acoustic, but he took up electric guitar in a big way. 
As regards influence, Slim Gaillard seems to have had a considerable influence, not from having been comparable with Charlie Christian, but as a down to earth model for guitarists of initially more humble ambitions. 


Unless one is of the asaxual go home dirty bopper confusion, trumpettromboneclarinet or nothing, there is these days a lot of interesting stuff on a Djangoish frame. Some time ago I reviewed the     wonderful CD  GREEN ROOM by Hot Club Sandwich of Seattle, and if other notes on that band are right and they have local competition there is some very good stuff out there. I would also recommend a CD issued on Bob Koester's Delmark label, which combined a short playing time CD on one of the small labels Bob bought with a fresh recording with the tuba/ clarinet front line and a rhythm section equally compatible though more on lines of current music on the present-day fringes of OKOM -- and not so far from either the Harlem Hamfats or the Bill Broonzy recordings which included Punch Miller. 
If anybody wants younger listeners there are various opportunities to do things which aren't so easily written off as old stuff people think they've heard before. Norman Mason the veteran St. Louis clarinetist complained to Paul Oliver fifty years ago that he was sick of playing a stock version of "Dixieland" which involved him playing mechanically against style. Some dullish recordings exist which bear this out. When Bob Koester recorded Mason it was with a current band of guitarists who weren't doing anything folky, but unfortunately there seems never to have been the funding to let people hear that OKOMish jazz 

Hell is pure Nostalgia (certainly according to Dante)

Robert R. Calder