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Charles Delaunay knew Django Reinhardt and interviewed friends, family, and fellow musicians for his book. The portrait that emerges of this jazz guitar giant is stranger than much of the fiction that has swirled around him. Reinhardt lived his young life as a gypsy, traveling in a caravan as the Romanies had done since medieval times. His rise to prominence in the jazz world of the mid-20th century never erased the gypsy in him, and at the end of his life he returned to caravan life. He was by all accounts a musical genius with a perfect ear, brilliant improvisational abilities, and phenomenal technique despite the loss of the use of two fingers in a fire. Delaunay supplements the book with an extensive discography arranged chronologically.
Frenchman Charles Delaunay is an author, artist, and jazz scholar, and is credited with assembling the Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli group, “Quintette du Hot Club De France.” With Hugues Panassie in 1935 he edited Le Jazz Hot, one of the oldest jazz magazines. In 1948 Delaunay founded the Vogue record label. He is author of the 1936 Hot Discography, the first jazz discography, and Delaunay’s Dilemma, his autobiography.
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