Django Reinhardt on the iPad and YouTube

I didn’t watch the iPad keynote, but the WSJ reports that the music cho­sen was by none other than Django Rein­hardt, the Gypsy jazz gui­tarist. Django was an amaz­ing player, even moreso when you real­ize that he could only use two fin­gers of his left (fret­ting) hand, the result of a fire in his car­a­van years ear­lier. But other than still pho­tos, there wasn’t really any known movie footage of his play­ing until recently, when a snip­pet of him play­ing J’attendrai was included on a DVD ded­i­cated to Stéphane Grap­pelli, the vio­lin­ist in the Quin­tette of the Hot Club of France. That snip­pet is on YouTube. If you thought Django’s play­ing was hard to emu­late, see­ing how he played should just make it worse.

Thanks to Gar­ret at dan­ger­ous­meta! for find­ing this.

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