MIKE ZWERIN

“In the winter of 1920, a dirty Gypsy child was begging between a horse-meat butcher and a used-shoe stall on the Kremlin-Bicétre market. He was just like any other begging Gypsy child, except that he played a battered banjo. Little Django Reinhardt played his banjo here every Sunday. His younger brother Joseph passed a hat. Already you could hear something, well, bizarre. Passages from 'Au Claire de la Lune' alternated with out-of-tune aleatoric clusters like round-the-bend Stravinsky. He seemed hypnotised by his strings. It was as though someone else was fingering them. If you had ever been to New Orleans you might have recognized a few phrases that sounded like the blues, which was even more bizarre because Django had never been there. He played Romanian folk songs with his uncle in a small cafe on Saturdays.”