PAUL
VERNON CHESTER
Manouche Maestro
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Manouche Maestro |
Django in Switzerland
The
troubled atmosphere of the time was beginning to weigh on Django.
Jazz-lovers and musicians, incessantly vilified by the Vichy
authorities, found their position becoming increasingly difficult,
even dangerous: censorship, harassment, denunciations, arrests;
Some, like the violinist Georges Effrosse, vanished never to return.
Django, too well-known to be seriously at risk, had never needed to compromise with the Occupation Authorities in order to keep working, but now he, too, was beginning to feel the pressure. The music he had written for an avant-garde production of Andromaque had earned him the condemnation of the collaborationist press and threats of violence from the dreaded Milice, and pressure of another kind was coming from the Germans who were becoming insistent in their demands that the Quintet should appear in the Reich itself. Django felt it would be prudent to leave Paris; he made two attempts to get into neutral Switzerland but was turned back both times as Suing “neither black nor Jewish”. Then began a period of wandering the length and breadth of France, sometimes with the Quintet, sometimes on the roads with his nomadic “cousins”, and once even returning to Paris to open his own club “La Roulotte” (not far from the place where his son Babik was born”). Late summer 1943 Django attempted to cross the Border twice in to Switzerland with disastrous results. The first time he was arrested but was released by a sympathetic Commandant who had a collection of Swing records. On the second occasion he got as far as the Swiss border but was turned back by Customs Officials who had never heard of him or cared for Jazz - he was merely treated as Gypsy.
Francois Vermeille, André Ekyan, Django, Christian Garros, Jean Bouchety, at Le Touquet during 1949
October 25, 1949 ~ Radio Geneve Once again a series of recordings, this time for Radio Geneve, remained forgotten for 30 years and contained a version of NUAGES. With Ekyan on clarinet and Django on electric guitar the contrast between this and the previous recording could not be greater. Django seemed very comfortable with the electric instrument at this time and displayed none of the distortion evident on later recordings. The pattern is the same and Django both starts and finishes his solo in harmonics. The feeling of the whole recording is one of subtlety and the impression given is that the musicians could have been playing after hours in a deserted club to wind down after a hard set....... Michele de Villiers - Baritone Sax After a Swiss tour with Michel de Villers he took up painting to make up for the lack of regular work. Finally Django signed up for a U.S. tour with Duke Ellington. It was at best half a success. Django’s “two-fingered style” certainly drew the crowds and the applause. But his inability to submit to the necessary discipline of a touring big--band was a fatal impediment which even the best-disposed of critics couldn’t overlook. Despite a successful appearance at the “Café Society” in New-York, the miraculous hoped-for California contract never materialised and in February 1947 he returned from the States disillusioned by a country “where the guitars sound like saucepans”. The Last Gig
Mid April 1953 Django plays concerts in Geneva and The Grande Casino in
Basel, Switzerland (Above), He complains to Naguine of headaches and numbness of
the fingers.
This Electric Guitar has 'RIO' on the Headstock so what source was that? The guitar with RIO on the headstock is from 1953 in Switzerland with Challain Ferret and is clearly not an Epiphone. He was playing his Selmer with Stimer pick-up then and that guitar was probably one he borrowed for a gig/jam with Challain. - Roger S Baxter Challain was a southpaw
and therefore if it was his guitar it would have been re-strung to suit
Django but would he have played it upside down with a fingerboard in place?.
This is the last picture taken of Django in 1953
Last Picture - Django in Switzerland 1953Switzerland's anti-Gypsy policiesAn independent Commission showed that whilst Switzerland
admitted 27,000 Jewish refugees during the period of Nazi rule in Germany, it
had also excluded a similar number. Between 1942 and 1943 the borders were shut
completely to Jewish refugees. Discrimination against Gypsies in Switzerland has
a long history. Official policy was to try and prevent entry to all foreign,
stateless and even Swiss-born Gypsies. Already in 1850 the federal government
had a policy of forcefully settling Gypsies in their place of birth and
deporting foreign Gypsies. The different Swiss cantons began to bar Gypsies
entry in the last third of the nineteenth century. Finally in 1906 the Swiss
authorities decided to ban Gypsies from entering Switzerland altogether and to
exclude those already resident from travelling on public transport. In
several ways, Switzerland's Gypsy policies acted as a model for the rest of
Europe and especially for Germany. Not only was Switzerland the first country to
bar entry to Gypsies, it was also in the forefront of developing policies aimed
at systematically destroying their itinerant way of life and actively sought
international co-operation for this task. These policies were nourished by
pseudo-scientific racist theories and eugenics, in which Gypsies were described
as "hereditary criminals". The commission reports that the policies of the Swiss
authorities towards the Gypsies differed from that of Germany's Nazi regime only
in that the latter was prepared to carry the logic of its racial policies
through to mass murder and genocide. “rejected by Swiss guards who turned him back, stating the country gave refuge to Jews and political prisoners, but not Gypsies.” Reinhardt survived the war dying in 1953. |
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