The Music of Django Reinhardt by Benjamin Givan (review)

Music analysis books are . . . difficult: hard to read, hard to publish, challenging to review. They put off people who blanch at music notation and overwhelm academics with page after page of intense close reading. With jazz, the difficulty is doubled. There are no scores—just sound recordings. If you want music, you have to create it yourself. (Imagine a book on Stravinsky or Beethoven that had to reproduce all the scores in the text!) Yet the work gets done. It demands to be done. If you want to understand how jazz improvisation works—really understand it—you need to lift the hood, get out the wrench, and get your hands dirty.

With this in mind, I declare The Music of Django Reinhardt, by Skidmore professor Ben Givan, one of the most satisfying analytical overviews of a musician ever written. He takes as his subject Django Reinhardt (1910–53), a Roma guitarist from Belgium who was the first European to contribute a startlingly new style, “gypsy jazz,” to the American idiom. The numerous musical examples in this book (over fifty transcriptions and charts) correspond to a wide range of Reinhardt recordings, some readily accessible, others less so. It’s not an easy collection to assemble, just as it’s not an easy book to get through; yet those who put in the effort to do so will have been rewarded with a thought-provoking tour of Reinhardt’s music.

Givan is imaginative, thorough, and remarkably patient. He approaches the guitarist from many angles, each requiring its own distinct analytical framework. Some of these approaches are familiar. He relies on a modified version of Schenkerian analysis, for example, to show how Reinhardt solos derive unity from long-range voice-leading (e.g., chapter 5). In another chapter, he boils down Reinhardt’s improvising vocabulary into a compact list of formulas (even this condensed list fills twenty pages). All this is by now standard for jazz, and these thoroughly professional examples show how conventional theory skills can be applied fruitfully to improvised music.

Yet other methods are new. In the opening chapter, we are reminded that, at age eighteen, Reinhardt was seriously injured in a fire. As he recovered, two of the fingers on his left hand remained bent back at impossible, claw-like angles. It’s extraordinary that Reinhardt should have been able to play guitar at all, let alone become a jazz virtuoso. To explain how this happened, Givan takes a turn into medical terminology. He explains precisely how a burn of this magnitude would have been handled in the 1930s and shows (using oral history and reference to a few film clips) how Reinhardt reconstructed his technique despite his semi-crippled fingers. To connect this with music theory, he walks us through several lengthy transcriptions, showing the fingerings Reinhardt used to negotiate these difficult passages. (There are no pictures, but those seeking visual corroboration can consult a previously published version of this chapter, “Django Reinhardt’s Left Hand,” in the anthology Jazz Planet, ed. E. Taylor Atkins [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003].) This chapter is no stunt: by focusing on the physical reality of performing rather than the dry notes on the page, Givan is staking out territory for a music theorist that is unusual.

Even more unusual is his championing of what he calls “discontinuous improvisation.” As anyone familiar with music theory knows, the point of analysis is to demonstrate, over and over again, a piece’s organic unity. (This ties together such divergent ideologies as Schenkerian theory and motivic analysis, and Givan himself is hardly immune to this impulse.) Yet he can’t help but notice that Reinhardt’s music is often characterized by sharp contrasts in texture, timbre, and performing style. This pushes us away from the text toward the role of the performer: is he improvising on the chords, or projecting a pre-existing melody? Does he play solo or accompaniment patterns? Does...