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Not long ago, I saw an online amateur video of the French guitarists Adrien Moignard (b. 1985) and Sébastien Giniaux (b. 1981), who are two of the leading players of the genre known as "jazz manouche" (or "gypsy jazz") (Moignard and Giniaux 2010). They had been filmed in 2010 at the French village of Samois-sur-Seine during its annual Festival Django Reinhardt. Seated outdoors at sunset, closely encircled by throngs of festival-goers, the two musicians were performing a composition called "Django's Tiger" by the festival's dedicatee, the guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910-53). Midway through a breakneck virtuosic solo, Moignard insistently reiterated several high B-naturals, halfway down his guitar's neck, before launching decisively into a four-bar phrase, high up the fretboard. A more tentative, indistinct arpeggiation followed. And then, for a fleeting instant, he stopped playing, his left hand slack against the instrument. After scrambling through another rapid arpeggiation, his left fingers only grazing the strings, Moignard fully reconnected physically with his guitar and confidently concluded the chorus. I laughed. It seemed to me that this was not merely the sort of everyday stumble that adventuresome, risk-taking improvisers inevitably make from time to time. Moignard was paraphrasing a melodic passage that Reinhardt had improvised on a recording years ago, but it did not work out as deftly as it had for Django. Its harmonic context was different, for reasons that were far from trivial. In fact, it occurred to me that this near-imperceptible musical disruption encapsulated an epistemological contradiction within an entire musical genre inspired by a single musician. It embodied the disjunction between the real historical figure of Django Reinhardt and his own posthumous legacy.
Before proceeding, it's worth mentioning that, ever since I first heard his recordings during the early 1980s, I have always thought of Django Reinhardt as a jazz musician. In the last three decades, however, the world has changed, and with the recent emergence of the jazz manouche genre, many musicians and listeners now see him in an altogether new light. Moignard and Giniaux's videotaped performance motivated me to gingerly begin to explore this new genre, and to try to understand how, and why, many people today think of Reinhardt's place in music and in history quite differently from the way I do-or,...