Django's Hand and Genius: Gypsy Jazz

Django Reinhardt - I'll See You In My Dreams - Paris, 30.06.1939 

There are many videos of the great Django Reinhardt to be found on YouTube. Django was the guitarist who reinvented guitar. Not only was the guitar the passion of his life, but he was its son; sustained, nourished, and schooled by it - and eventually he gave back to it, repaying it by ensuring its continued respect and admiration.  Born in 1910, an itinerant Gypsy whose father was a musician and mother a dancer, he gravitated to the sorts of inexpensive stringed instruments that were commonly played around Gypsy caravan campfires, becoming, at first a banjo and then guitar prodigy.While his name is well known only among the kind of guitar aficionados whose affection for the instrument moves them to study the history of the instrument, in fact he was associated with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who were among the many great jazz musicians he played with.

The video "Django Reinhardt - I'll See You In My Dreams - Paris, 30.06.1939" moves me in ways I wouldn't expect. Yes, like many others I find the music of the '30s interesting and charming. Some of it has great complexity, yet it is played and recorded with instrumentation and technology that by today's standards would be considered remarkably simple and lacking things that many of today's star musicians rely on to amplify the impact of their performance. Still, in this one, Django seems to be sitting in the same room, winking at us as he demonstrates his prowess in producing sounds and rhythms of remarkable inventiveness and elegance out of what amounts to a very simple, very old fashioned guitar.

One night the 19 year old Django was caught inside his caravan in an intense fire probably caused by his carelessness with a cigarette near the extremely flammable materials that his young wife made artificial flowers from. While he escaped with his life, his left hand, a guitarist's principal interface with his instrument, was profoundly damaged for the rest of his life. Much has been made over the years about Django's resolve to overcome this handicap and continue as a professional musician. But there's much more to the story than that.

Recently I stumbled across a series of videos titled "Django's Hand" which are a video recording (2009) of a talk given by Dr. David Williams - Consultant Anaesthetist (Burns & Plastic Surgery) -  Morriston Hospital - Swansea, UK. The opening titles also state (get this) "Soundtrack & Images from Presentation at the European Club for Burns conference." Dr. Morrison delivered the talk, explaining to his small audience that he is both a medical practitioner and a guitarist... and of course, a fan of Django's. What resulted are the unique insights into Django's music he came to by virtue of having studied both his playing and his hand injury, and piecing together how the later shaped the first and vice versa. It turns out that Django not only had to struggle to regain sufficient use of his hand to play again, but he had to totally re-conceive how one plays the guitar. He invented new techniques for himself which resulted in his playing scales and chords in ways that were, when he invented them, unique. Dr. Morrison also explains that because of the state of his hand, commonly used chords were impossible for Django to play so he substituted others, introducing variations to the harmonic structure of the music of the day that hadn't been used previously. And in that way, his playing changed the music itself. This was so successful, so full of those qualities that make music beguiling and uplifting, that its reverberations are still being felt nearly a century later. So profound is his influence on guitarists and so deep the affection for him by jazz purists that many festivals are held in his name (SEE: Django100th Birthday Gypsy Swing Guitar festival @ Le QuecumBa)

Overcoming Adversity = Yellow INSPIRATION

Making Tracks Jamaica - Yellowman

Nothing inspires me more than a fellow human overcoming the bad cards life's dealt him to achieve greatness. I especially love examples of those who've gotten past the adversity in their lives and have outdone the achievements of peers and competitors who had no such handicaps or impediments. I can think of no greater example of this than the great Reggae star, Yellowman. In 1982 my friend Red shared with me an album with the simple title of Mister Yellowman and I LOVED it! The best and most infectious Reggae I'd ever heard, I got my own copy and soon wore it out, replacing it with fresh copies down the road. All the while, I had no idea who Yellowman was and why he was given that name.

It turned out that Yellowman is a black Jamaican who was born an albino (hence, what others describe as his 'yellow' appearance). I've come to understand that at the time of his early childhood this rendered him disdainful in the eyes of his peers. As I understand it, Yellowman was rejected by his own parents and grew up in an orphanage in Jamaica where he was scorned, mocked, and abused for his condition. Somehow Yellowman (his real name is Winston Foster) managed not only to survive, but decided that if nature hadn't made him the object of desire and admiration, he would re-make himself to be so. He assumed and flaunted the identity of a "yellowman", transforming what was intended to shame and defeat him into an alternate persona, one designed to win acceptance and admiration... and he succeeded tremendously. Not only did he discover his own musical genius and appeal as a personality and performer, but he convinced millions of fans of it, as well. At one point, Yellowman was so popular an entertainer that he rivaled even the great Bob Marley.

I can think of other stories similar to that of Yellowman. There's the great Gypsy Jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, for instance, who not only reinvented guitar music as part of his ascent to status as contender for greatest guitar player of all time, but did so after having suffered an accident in which his left hand was so badly burned that for his entire career he had the use of only 3 of his 5 fingers. A similar thing happened  more recently to Tony Iommi, master guitarist for the metal group Black Sabbath, one of the band's originators and bandmate of Ozzie Osbourne. Tony, before quitting conventional employment at the age of 17 to try his luck at becoming a full time musician, severely injured his left hand. A sheet metal worker, he cut off the tips of the fingers on his left hand, rendering him incapable of playing guitar, the passion of his life. After pulling himself together, he invented his own prosthetic fingertips from items he found in his mother's kitchen. That, in conjunction with the adaptive innovation of stringing his guitar with banjo strings, enabled him to go on and create music that has thrilled tens of millions of fans over the years.

In the case of Yellowman, though, the story becomes even more amazing as not only did he overcome the extreme social stigma of Albinism to become a beloved star, but after he had achieved super stardom, he was diagnosed with such bad jaw cancer that he had to have radical facial surgery, leaving him severely disfigured and with a great impediment to his speech and singing. Even this turn of events, something that even Job might have let destroy him, didn't defeat Yellowman who apparently has soldiered on to become an even more beloved public figure in his homeland of Jamaica. This is clearly evident in the video above.

As I was growing up, much was made of the story of Helen Keller, born deaf, dumb, and blind, and who managed to overcome these severe disabilities to  go on to live a relatively normal life and who became famous through her sharing of that experience. An amazing accomplishment - true, but I get particular inspiration from the stories of Yellowman and Django and Tony, as they not only overcame their disabilities, but surpassed their peers by far, creating music that has uplifted countless people who for the most part are totally unaware of the 'special' nature of their feats.

To boldly go...

Star Trek Original Series Intro (HQ)

Damn, they made some great TV shows when I was a kid! Star Trek not only entertained us, it educated, inspired, and supported and guided us in forming our understandings and attitudes about life and what we should do in and with it! No small feat for a low budget science fiction space drama! ...
WIKIPEDIA: "Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry and owned by CBS and Paramount PicturesThe first series, now referred to as The Original Series, debuted in 1966 and ran for three seasons on NBC. It followed the interstellar adventures of James T. Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise, an exploration vessel of a 23rd-century interstellar "United Federation of Planets".... While its contemporaries,  show offerings like Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, and The Fugitive affected us and reinforced mainstream beliefs and values, Star Trek laid some new ground, as well. Hey, after all, as the voice over in this Intro clip states, it's mission was "... to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!" and ironically, not only was that the writer's stated mission of the Starship Enterprise, the vessel carrying Kirk and Spock and Uhuru and the other very appealing players in this space drama, but it turned out to be the de facto mission of this series of shows, as well.

There was so much to love about this show, Spock's Vulcan logic-driven way of being, Kirk's resolve to face the unknown fearlessly, and Dr. McCoy's (Bones') resourcefulness in curing unknown and unthinkable threats to the crew's health, for instance. One thing that Impressed me (and I was still in high school when this show came out) was that in the other popular shows of the day, Mannix or Daniel Boone, for instance, it was always easy to tell the bad guys from the good guys and what the good guys should do about what the bad guys did. Watching Star Trek, though, one often had to wrestle with more challenging, loftier questions like "What is a Good Guy?" and "Who, in this episode, is the Good Guy and why?" Actually, it called on you to go even deeper, sometimes having to ponder "What is Good?and What is Bad?"


Hah, THAT was the apex of the show's plot trajectory; neither Kirk nor Spock nor McCoy was always sure of what to do, because life isn't that simple, not that black and white,  and one sometimes has to 'excruciate' over what the smart thing, the right thing to do is. Often these space heroes didn't have the wisdom to puzzle this out on their own, although they did have the courage to admit that to themselves and one another. Instead, they had to refer to their moral compass, which in this case was "The Prime Directive" the guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets, which prohibits Starfleet personnel from interfering with the internal development of alien civilizations. In referring to this instead of simply reaching for their phasers (23rd Century handguns) and simply bulldozing their way through a conflict to a quick and easy resolution of whatever the situation of the moment was, we kids had modeled for us a truly rare phenomenon, something called CIVILIZED BEHAVIOR... and Kirk and Spock were engaging in and relying on this in between News shows playing footage of the Vietnam War. Those were some interesting days to come of age in.  

Froggy the Gremlin WAS Joeseph Campbell's Trickster Incarnate!

1/3/2016 - Andy's Gang - Pasta Fazooli vs. Froggy the Gremlin - Tuba
Saturday morning and it was time for our souls to come back to life again. Since Monday at an early hour, in those tomb quiet classrooms of PS 187, our teachers had us memorize lists of spelling words, times tables, and state capitals. Wonder, creativity, fancy, and playfulness had been wrung out of our beings as basic academic skills and the rituals of social conformity were injected into them. But Saturday morning offered kids' TV and before mom was up and trying her best to be as perfect a housewife as Beaver Cleaver's mom, before we had our first bowl of Frosted Flakes, there were things coming through that single cathode ray tube that my family had in the family room; wonderful things that stirred the spirit and the soul. There was Sky King, who with his niece Penny had great adventures flying around The West in his small plane. There was Circus Boy, and Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, and Rin Tin Tin, and Fury... and there was (drum roll, please...) Andy's Gang, my favorite. And part of Andy's Gang was the character Froggy the Gremlin - my favorite of favorites! :) :) :)

Andy's Gang was a popular show in its day although it had clearly been produced on a very thin shoestring. Fronted by a former movie star whose career was certainly in the toilet by then. It had the poorest production values of any show I can recall. No cartoons; instead it offered moldering file footage and a cheaply bought up adventure serial and it had some Hollywood character actors interact with commercially sold toys that had been re-purposed as puppets for the camera. Magic!

As I look back on it now through the filter of experience,  I can see that Froggy the Gremlin ( a puppet crafted from a cheap rubber squeeze toy) enchanted me so, because he conformed to the (Jungian based) Trickster character archetype talked about extensively by Joseph Campbell in his work. The Trickster can be seen as a variety of hero or associated with a hero story.

Basically, Froggy liked to mess with teachers, something we well-behaved, middle class, suburban children of the '50s would never dare to even imagine, let alone do in real life. But Froggy did it... every Saturday morning. In this clip we see that wonderful character actor Vito Scotti give a goofy rendition of a teacher, but one that embodies the accepted ideal of a teacher at the time. A teacher was an expert. He (or more often she) knew important things and her job was to impart that knowledge to students who didn't know them (Education Theorists recognize this approach and call it the "Knowledge Transfer" approach to Education). The teacher was the not-to-be-questioned authority, both on bodies of fact and in enforcing the rules and values of the classroom. Alas, in the hands and heads of my teachers, mostly married women from Long Island hired on the basis of having a bachelor's degree and having passed a written test at the Board of Education, this power of authority all too often resulted in producing a petty tyrant. And so, Monday through Friday may have been something of an Auschwitz of the mind and spirit for us kids, but blissfully, Saturday morning before mom was up and at work, was liberation and restoration time.

Wherever you are now, buddy, forever, please "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!" as Andy would say. And Thank you for saving my mind and soul NBC!

In Retrospect Maynard G. Krebs Was... Cool!

1/3/2016 - DG - MAYNARD - LINE OF WORK
 

Why did my friends and I LOVE Bob Denver's Maynard G. Krebs character so much? (WIKIPEDIA: Maynard G. Krebs is the "beatnik" sidekick of the title character in the U.S. television sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963.)

In this snippet  we see Maynard interacting with his high school teacher, engaged in a short exchange about Maynard's "future" (the central concern of all of us at that age) - In my day (high school class of '66) American kids still believed that great things were possible for them, that is IF they studied hard, got into a good college, and then got a good job :) I know, I know, how naive we all were back then, but these ideas were implanted in our heads from an early age through the medium of oft-chanted mantras spoken with great authority by our parents, teachers, and any adult who cared to share some life wisdom with us... In this bit of a conversation Maynard explains to his sport coat and tie wearing, humorless teacher that he won't become a professional bongo player until June (presumably when he graduates).

Maynard wasn't even a minimally passing student (in another episode titled "I'm like doomed" he explains that he got a minus two as a grade on a test by incorrectly answering 2 questions that his teacher didn't even ask :) - He wasn't a jock. He didn't have a girl friend (he like preferred Jazz to chicks) and although he had no idea about what he wanted to do with his life, he was kind hearted and charming in his own gauche, confused way. Why did we love him so? For one thing, many of us, who for lack of the extraordinary insight and courage it would have taken to extricate ourselves from the track laid down by society for us to follow, had, at least,  a bit of a Maynard side to our lives. Some may have hidden it; but even while taking  SAT cram courses,  we knew - or at least suspected - that 'cracking the books' in order to become a successful  accountant or sport coat and tie wearing high school teacher was to do something other than to follow the call of our higher selves. Maynard was like cool and that mattered somehow. 

G. E. Smith Shows Us Michael Bloomfield's Telecaster

1/2/2016 - G.E. Smith Jams on the Guitar That Killed Folk!
Wow! Talk about a sacred object. As Mike Myers put it in the film Wayne's World, Hendrix's white Stratocaster was Excaliber to his generation, comparing Jimi's guitar to the legendary sword of King Arthur.  Here's another contender for a musical instrument imbued with extraordinary spiritual power. We all know Clapton's Blackie Stratocaster and B.B. King's Lucille Gibson ES335. There was John Lennon's Richenbacher 325, Paul McCartney's Hofner Violin Bass, Les Paul's Gibson Les Paul, Bernie Marsden's Beast Les Paul... the list of iconic guitars stretches on. Here's one though that was forgotten; owned and played by Mike Bloomfield, a sideman guitarist whose style and commitment was so strong that for a while he went on to become a star himself. I first became aware of the re-emergence of this instrument 6 months ago when some YouTube surfing turned up the video Mike Bloomfield’s Telecaster. G.E. Smith (former guitarist with the Saturday Night Live Band) does a great job in the video above of explaining the significance and demonstrating the character of this guitar. The reverence he shows for this Telecaster is palpable. The Fender Telecaster was/is a fascinating phenomenon. It's often considered the first practical electric guitar. A tremendous departure from instruments that came before it; it was small and relatively inexpensive, so much so that it found its way into the deserving hands of enthusiastic and talented musicians who likely never would have been able to acquire a finely crafted, more expensive instrument like the Gibson Les Paul. Somehow, in calculating how to produce a no nonsense, inexpensive guitar, Leo Fender got it very, very right and the overwhelmingly direct tone and simplicity and the ingenuity of design proved to be something transcendent in the hands of the right player.  Videos like this seem to me like found puzzle pieces that help illuminate the complexity of our culture and history. I'll visit this one again and again.

Greeting 2016: Walking the Beach, Wiping the Chalkboard Clean...

I'm going to select one YouTube video each day and pass it along to everyone who'll notice or care... 
 






(Start the video first...) Greetings from beautiful Jupiter, Florida... my home. Here's wishing us a happy 2016, which will see its first sunrise here in Jupiter in about an hour, launching the first day of the new year. Today is an opportunity to wipe some of the accumulation of life's build up of history and ingrained patterns from the old chalkboard, so to speak... and ponder what new chalk lines to lay down in the year to come. I'm fortunate, there are miles and miles of beautiful beach to walk while I do that... just a couple of miles from my desk.