European Jazz

While jazz is one of a handful of musical forms that can claim a mostly American lineage, jazz has also spawned distinctive variants in other parts of the world.  One of the first was the influential and unmistakably European approach of Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt.  Reinhardt devised a new fingering style after he lost the use of two if his fingers in a fire, and unveiled his fluid, exuberant “gypsy jazz” style in Paris in the mid-1930s, while leading the Quintette du Hot Club de France.  Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli’s pioneering work helped to lay the foundation for a relatively small but nonetheless notable body of European jazz, which incorporated continental influences as well as American ones.