PAUL VERNON CHESTER

Manouche Maestro
 

Django in the USA - & Canada?
29th Oct - 21st Dec 1946

Caption from Down Beat: The serious countenance of Django Reinhardt, cover subject by Bill Gottlieb for this issue, is in deference to the great French guitarist's current concert tour with Duke Ellington. Django, who has built a tremendous American reputation through his waxings with the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, was brought from Europe last month by the William Morris Agency, and one of his first concerts in this country was the Beat's Chicago Civic Opera House Concert earlier this month. He will appear with Ellington Nov. 23-24 at Carnegie Hall.

The Itinerary

Dukes Concert Dates
While Django was in America - he travelled in the Band's Exclusive Train Carriage but did he play all the venues with his 60 day Visa?  Did he also have a Visa for the Canadian Dates?

October 1946
29 New York, NY         Aquarium Restaurant C Django's arrival in NYC
30 New York, NY         Aquarium Restaurant C
31 Atlantic City, NJ

November 1946
Date Location Venue Type Verification
1 Harrisburg, PA D

3 Buffalo, NY                 Memorial Auditorium C
4 Cleveland, OH             Music Hall C (Plain Dealer's Article[ Django's first show?])
5 Kitchener, Ontario,      Canada Auditorium Gardens
6 Toronto,                     Canada Mutual Arena
7 Toledo, OH                 Auditorium
8 Cincinnati, OH
9 Indianapolis, IN           Murat Th. T Billboard 23 Nov 46,p 43
10 Chicago, IL               Civic Opera House C Variety 20 Nov 46,p 58

12 Rochester, MN         Auditorium
13 Minneapolis, MN       Variety 8 Oct 45,p 65
14 Des Moines, IA         Kant Auditorium Billboard 30 Nov 46,p 36
15 Lincoln, NB               Pla Mor Ballroom
16 Omaha, NB                 Auditorium
17 Kansas City, MO         Municipal Auditorium
18 Kansas City, MO
19 Cedar Rapids, IA
20 Cedar Rapids, IA

23 New York, NY             Carnegie Hall C Down Beat 16 Dec 46,p 2
24 New York, NY             Carnegie Hall C Down Beat 16 Dec 46,p 2

26 Baltimore, MD
27 Lynchburg, VA
28 Petersburg, VA
29 Philadelphia, PA         Academy Of Music C
30 Syracuse, NYC            Photo exists with Django Front Centre Stage of the Orchestra:

Dave Salmon Inc Presenter was a promoter of fine arts performances in Syracuse, NY. programs and tickets for plays, operas, concerts, lectures, and variety performances in the 1940s and 1950s.

December 1946
1 Boston, MA
2 Cranston, RI                 Rhodes-On-The-Pawtuxet
7 Detroit, MI                    Masonic Temple Auditorium C Billboard 21 Dec 46,p 14

This last date should have been Django's last concert with Duke Ellington. After the tour Django worked at "Cafe Society" with Edmond Halls Band before returning to France on the 21st December 46 taking the Epiphone with him.  Was it the Billiard Game, the lack of offers, or Christmas in France that induced Django to leave.  New York can be very cold at that time of Year. (The above dates don't support this claim.) Dregni claims Django returned by Liner on 6th February 1947

After the war, in 1946, Django made the long-awaited trip to America. By legend, the trip was a disaster: he arrived without his Selmer, never found a guitar he liked, was booed by audiences, and was criticized by an American jazz press that had already moved on to the rockier shores of bebop. It has even been said that he showed up shamefully late for a Carnegie Hall concert with the Duke. He returned to Paris, desolate, and never quite recovered.

Django knew he couldn't play in the States without a special authorisation from the Union and without a contract (his one was with the William Morris Agency for the Duke Ellington tour and for the Café Society Uptown) , he confirmed that in an interview saying he met Benny Goodman at the 400 Club in NYC but added they couldn't play together because he was not allowed to do it.

In his letter of those days to clarinettist Gérard Lévecque he confirmed that those rules on foreign musicians were very strict

Dates 'included' Cleveland, Ohio, Civic Opera House Chicago Music Hall (Nov 10th 1946), St Louis, Detroit Temple, Kansas City, Pittsburgh?, Aquarium NYC, and closed at Carnegie Hall NYC with two nights (November 23rd and 24th).  After the tour Django worked at "Cafe Society" before returning to France taking the Epiphone with him.

Django's tour in the States was absolutely not a "debacle" but a true success and also an excellent occasion for Django to meet a lot of musicians, hear music every night (see John Lewis interviews on Django for example) and to check almost all the important guitarists of the States in a couple of months Johnny Smith, Harry Volpe, Les Paul etc. Django decided in those days to change his way of playing jazz and immediately as he returned to France he begun to play and record a lot and to explore new horizons.

Delaunay had some responsibilities on the "debacle" statement as he simply ignored Django had only a 60 days visa and he wrote that Django "Tired of waiting (for an gig) and disappointed, one fine day Django decided to pack his bags and return to France" [See Delaunay's book on Django page 141 "Reunion and America at last"]. Django simply had to leave the States as his visa expired...

Was he really disappointed? I don't think so, I think he understood that Ellington was excellent but was not the avant-garde of jazz was changing fast (even commercially) in the States and he decided to play bebop (his own bebop - Ref to Les Paul interview)

Dregni establishes that the trip was, by most standards, a success. Django toured with Ellington. (Ellington’s sponsorship may seem puzzling, until one recalls that, as Whitney Balliett has explained, Ellington’s genius had always been for identifying instinctive, mostly New Orleans musicians, whose plaintive vocal style he integrated into his own self-made sophistications.) Though Ellington wasn’t able to incorporate Django into his band—probably because he couldn’t read music—he used him regularly, and most of the reviews were good. (“French guitar artist steals Duke’s concert” read a headline in Cleveland.) It’s true that he was late for Carnegie Hall, because he was drinking with the French middleweight Marcel Cerdan, but he played—and since when has a jazz musician’s reputation suffered from lateness? (“Tardy: The Complete Boxed Set of the Late Starters.”) He liked travelling with Ellington’s band; he liked the loud flowered boxer shorts the musicians wore to sleep in on the train. The new bebop, to the degree that Django absorbed it, was, in its breakneck speeds and riffy, nervous agitation, a welcome music to him.

The trouble wasn’t that he didn’t have his own guitar; it was that the new guitars he had to use to play American concert halls were a problem for him. The guitar-volume problem had been solved, directly, by the electric guitar, which Benny Goodman’s guitarist Charlie Christian had instantly turned into a singing, hornlike, bending instrument. Django, more or less compelled to play one, got his hands on an early Gibson electric and played it throughout his American stay. This may explain both the general enthusiasm for his playing — Django once borrowed a clown’s metal toy guitar and played it; he couldn’t play badly — and a certain hollowness to that enthusiasm. Django on electric guitar is still virtuosic (listen to “Blues Riff,” one of the few surviving records of his stay with Ellington), but oddly generic and un-Django-ish. He can’t punctuate his solos; he stops to make the last note of a phrase ring out and it just glides back into the amplified stream of echoing, fluid notes. He can play his instrument, but he can’t make his points. One sees, or hears, why listeners would have been impressed by him without being much moved. An unemotional Django is no Django at all.

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Last modified: 27/02/2010