Django in Manchester 1938

QHCF Tour of the UK

2nd - 4th July: 1938 - Ardwick Hippodrome, Manchester

with Scandinavian entertainer 'Carola Merrild' a Danish Film Star compering and singing for all or just part of the tour including the London Palladium. Django missed the first couple of concerts because he did not bother to take his passport as he thought he was so famous he could enter the UK without one. He was turned back at Folkestone and had to return to Paris to get it.

A Django Reinhardt Concert

In the December 1976 edition of Guitar Magazine Charlie Scott shared this story with the readers:

There Django Reinhardt sits, against the contrasting background of the elegant, slim, white-jacketed standing figure of the violinist Stephane Grappelli,  Django's dress trousers hoisted carelessly up to reveal a bare calf above the top of a sock; feet clad in what looks like his street boots. The legend has come to life.

The first number finishes in a roar of adulation. You think: Applaud, clap until your hands are sore. He MUST play again, before we wake up and the dream dissolves. Nonchalantly Django acknowledges the plaudit with a wry, half-smile, and sweeps into another number - Limehouse Blues this time, lifted along by the solid four-in-a-bar of the two other guitars and the deep rubbery thump of the plucked bass. The violin plays the first chorus 'straight', with a cool and dispassionate, almost Oriental, tone, followed by an incredible Grappelli virtuoso improvisation - and then it's Django again! Chromatic runs bubble up from the base and stream up, unbroken, through three octaves. Still we can't believe it. Rumour has it that two fingers of his left hand were paralysed and distorted by fire yet with the two remaining fingers he produces music which would defy the efforts of a many-handed maestro.

A slow number now - Moonglow - with an introduction of falling cadences of augmented chords. Remember! Up to this time the guitar enthusiasts of the 1930's - a rather misunderstood and oppressed minority - had received the records of Django with near disbelief, accompanied as they were by fragmentary and conflicting rumours about the elusive genius: 'Only TWO fingers? -The records are speeded up in recording' . . .

Chorus follows chorus in a rising tide of excitement and at the end of their act, curtain after curtain, and repeated encores until finally the elated crowd pour out into the dusk of a summer evening.

A few of us went backstage one morning after rehearsals to meet Django Reinhardt in person (I recall the faces of Terry Usher, John (then) - Jack Duarte, Peter Sloan and other Manchester early guitar stalwarts). Django spoke no English and we but a little, bad schoolboy French. Stephane Grappelli did the honours and conveyed our congratulations, enthusiasms and questions.

'How did he do that long chromatic run in his record of Some of these days? His left hand did something between the nut and the 15th fret - and the faultless, smooth, scale rippled from his guitar. We looked puzzled. Again he obliged - but sadly we realised we were none the wiser - we never would be!

Could we have an autograph? Laboriously (and proudly) he scrawled 'D. Reinhardt' (sic) THREE times on my programme.

In a corner of the room the plump, swarthy and jovial figure of Madame Reinhardt sat, measuring us up with a slight sardonic smile, as if secretly amused that these mad English boys should so obviously worship her Django. Out on stage, in the theatre, an act had just finished a band call rehearsal and the orchestra played a few desultory bars of the National Anthem. An impish smile flitted across the round swarthy face as Django's fingers danced over the strings in a deliberately corny little syncopated caricature of the staid tune.

I don't remember how, or when, we left, but I shall always have with me the memory of when I saw Django, and his innate sense of fun shining out in that little intimate musical joke.

Charlie Scott