Jean Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953), known by his Romani nickname Django (French: [dʒãŋɡo ʁɛjnaʁt] or [dʒɑ̃ɡo ʁenɑʁt]), was a Belgian-French Manouche or Sinti jazz guitarist and composer.

[7][8] With violinist Stéphane Grappelli,[2] Reinhardt formed the Paris-based Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934.

[9] Reinhardt recorded in France with many visiting American musicians, including Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter, and briefly toured the United States with Duke Ellington's orchestra in 1946.

[14] A number of authors have repeated the suggestion that Reinhardt's nickname, Django, is Romani for "I awake";[7]: 4–5  it may also simply have been a diminutive, or local Walloon version, of "Jean".

[15] Reinhardt spent most of his youth in Romani encampments close to Paris, where he started playing the violin, banjo and guitar.

[16]: 66 From 1934 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Reinhardt and Grappelli worked together as the principal soloists of their newly formed quintet, the Quintette du Hot Club de France, in Paris.

[26] Reinhardt also played and recorded with many American jazz musicians, such as Adelaide Hall, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and Rex Stewart (who later stayed in Paris).

[28] While he tried to continue with his music, war with the Nazis presented Reinhardt with a potentially catastrophic obstacle, as he was a Romani jazz musician.

Reinhardt was the most famous jazz musician in Europe at the time, working steadily during the early war years and earning a great deal of money, yet always under threat.

[31] Reinhardt made a second attempt a few days later, but was stopped in the middle of the night by Swiss border guards, who forced him to return to Paris again.

In the autumn of 1946, he made his first tour in the United States, debuting at Cleveland Music Hall[34] as a special guest soloist with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra.

After the tour, Reinhardt secured an engagement at Café Society Uptown, where he played four solos a day, backed by the resident band.

[16]: 138–139  Having failed to bring his usual Selmer Modèle Jazz, he played on a borrowed electric guitar, which he felt hampered the delicacy of his style.

In his final recordings, made with his Nouvelle Quintette in the last few months of his life, he had begun moving in a new musical direction, in which he assimilated the vocabulary of bebop and fused it with his own melodic style.

Reinhardt developed his initial musical approach via tutoring by relatives and exposure to other gypsy guitar players of the day, then playing the banjo-guitar alongside accordionists in the world of the Paris bal musette.

Despite his left hand handicap, Reinhardt was able to recapture (in modified form) and then surpass his previous level of proficiency on the guitar (by now his main instrument), not only as a lead instrumental voice but also as a driving and harmonically interesting rhythm player; his virtuosity, incorporating many gypsy-derived influences, was also matched with a superb sense of melodic invention as well as general musicality in terms of choice of notes, timing, dynamics, and utilizing the maximum tonal range from an instrument previously thought of by many critics as potentially limited in expression.

His hugely innovative technique included, on a grand scale, such unheard of devices as melodies played in octaves, tremolo chords with shifting notes that sounded like whole horn sections, a complete array of natural and artificial harmonics, highly charged dissonances, super-fast chromatic runs from the open bass strings to the highest notes on the 1st string, an unbelievably flexible and driving right-hand, two and three octave arpeggios, advanced and unconventional chords and a use of the flattened fifth that predated be-bop by a decade.

Add to all this Django's staggering harmonic and melodic concept, huge sound, pulsating swing, sense of humour and sheer speed of execution, and it is little wonder that guitar players were knocked sideways upon their first encounter with this full-blown genius.

[39]Because of his damaged left hand (his ring and pinky fingers helped little in his playing) Reinhardt had to modify both his chordal and melodic approach extensively.

Django's ability to bend his guitar to the most fantastic audacities, combined with his expressive inflections and vibrato, is no less wonderful; one feels an extraordinary flame burning through every note.Writing in 1945, Billy Neil and E. Gates stated that Reinhardt set new standards by an almost incredible and hitherto unthought-of technique ... His ideas have a freshness and spontaneity that are at once fascinating and alluring ... [Nevertheless] The characteristics of Reinhardt's music are primarily emotional.

[41]Django-style enthusiast John Jorgenson has been quoted as saying: Django's guitar playing always has so much personality in it, and seems to contain such joy and feeling that it is infectious.

Django's seemingly never-ending bag of licks, tricks and colors always keep the song interesting, and his intensity level is rarely met by any guitarist.

[42]In his later style (c. 1946 onwards) Reinhardt began to incorporate more bebop influences in his compositions and improvisations, also fitting a Stimer electric pickup to his acoustic guitar.

With the addition of amplification, his playing became more linear and "horn like", with the greater facility of the amplified instrument for longer sustain and to be heard in quiet passages, and in general less reliance on his gypsy "bag of tricks" as developed for his acoustic guitar style (also, in some of his late recordings, with a very different supporting group context from his "classic", pre-war Quintette sound).

These "electric period" Reinhardt recordings have in general received less popular re-release and critical analysis than his pre-war releases (the latter also extending to the period from 1940 to 1945 when Grappelli was absent, which included some of his most famous compositions such as "Nuages"), but are also a fascinating area of Reinhardt's work to study,[43] and have begun to be revived by players such as the Rosenberg Trio (with their 2010 release "Djangologists") and Biréli Lagrène.

Wayne Jefferies, in his article "Django's Forgotten Era", writes: Early in 1951, armed with his amplified Maccaferri – which he used to the very end – he put together a new band of the best young modern musicians in Paris; including Hubert Fol, an altoist in the Charlie Parker mould.

His infallible technique, his daring, 'on the edge' improvisations coupled with his vastly advanced harmonic sense, took him to musical heights that Christian and many other Bop musicians never came near.

Django is on top form; full of new ideas that are executed with amazing fluidity, cutting angular lines that always retain that ferocious swing.

In the fifties, bebop superseded swing in jazz, rock and roll took off, and electric instruments became dominant in popular music.

Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, both of whom lost fingers in accidents, were inspired by Reinhardt's example of becoming an accomplished guitar player despite his injuries.