Django "Rorschach test" for guitarists...

Lango-Django

You know those "Rorschach test" ink splotches that psychiatrists used to show their patients?

Well, here's a Django Rorschach test that will take about ten minutes of your life...

1) Three minutes to listen to this recording:

2) Seven minutes to post your response.

Will

PS In the interest of keeping responses unbiased as possible, I'll save my own response for later.

Matteo

Hm, what was the question?

Lango-Django

Ah, it looks like I expressed myself rather poorly! sorry, everyone that looked at my posting and wondered WTF I was talking about.. :scratch:

Ok--- listening to the whole tune for context, but specifically listening to Django's solo, from about 2:21 to 3:09- what do you think?

Thanks,

Will

dennis

besides the strange sound of the recording , what is there to say? it s a beautiful solo and certainly in the style of django

Lango-Django

OK, thanks, Dennis! I was afraid there'd be no response at all.

Well, I promised to keep quiet until everybody had a chance to say something, so now that that's the case, I'd like to talk about that solo. It's one that I've listened to and thought about a lot.

Django takes the first 24 bars of a 32 bar chorus, and his first eight bars, mostly eighth notes and quarter notes, are very sweet and melodic, though they include a couple of "outside" notes. He even does a bluesy little string bend that reminds me of Eddie Lang.

Then suddenly, he abandons the relaxed, melodic feel and launches into a hyper-busy flurry of sixteenth and 32nd notes with little or no melody.

To me, it's almost as if a kid has started to draw a picture, and then suddenly decides to scribble all over it!

So I started to think, why would Django do that?

Several possiblities sprang to mind...

1) He felt that his first eight bars were too corny and old fashioned. Maybe hearing that Eddie Lang blues lick pop out kind of made him think, "WTF am I doing?"

2) Or maybe the producer or musicians on the session had specifically requested that he play in a more traditional Lang-like style, and he did that just enough to be able to say, "Voila! Ok, been there, done that!"

3) I know Django often liked to start his solos slowly as a kind of "teaser"... maybe he just let the "teasing" continue a little longer than he intended, and then felt the sudden need to jump right into something faster ... which in turn ratcheted the solo into warp speed, but, alas, minus the kind of superlative phrasing that we usually hear from the master?

Django usually speaks to us in phrases that form sentences and paragraphs, with little rests to divide them, but the last 16 bars of this solo are like a run-on sentence ....thatjustgoesonandonwithoutexpressinganythingmuchexcepthyperactivity.

***************

Conclusions.

To me, this solo starts out being one of Django's best, but ends up being one of his worst.

And frankly, with a master musician like Django it's kind of reassuring to hear him play something that shows that he's just a human being like me! (The other example of this being Django's mediocre finger picking in his solo version of "Tea for Two")

This solo, to me, is a short distillation of the best and worst of gypsy jazz and raises the existential question: just what is being expressed by this kind of virtuoso guitar playing, musicality or speed?

The first eight bars of this solo are so musical!

But the last sixteen bars just bring to mind what Fapy once said about his GJ colleagues: "Most of them are just playing a lot of notes."

******

Well, that's one idiot's opinion, anyway. And I'm open to argument on all these points, so feel free to disagree at length.

The great thing about discussions about art is that there's really no right or wrong.


Will

dennis

he certainly starts to play more notes but i still find it quite melodic, but ya there s definitely a strong contrast between the beginning and the fast parts...

Matteo

Maybe he thought it would be a good idea to start slowly but felt for himself, as he was playing, that this didn't really get him where he wanted. Then he launches into a double-tempo run, for a contrast, and this suddenly feels like a relief to him ("ah, now we're on to something"). So what to do next? Given the results so far, the faster, longer phrases seem to bring him closer to his vision, so he sticks with them? I don't really hear an endless stream of notes, though. The phrases are pretty well-defined. But there's not very much of breathing between them. And perhaps not the most inspired playing from him.

Well, that's how I hear it. What does it reveal about my psychological status?

Anyway, here's one of my absolute favourites, lot's of space between notes and phrases, contrasts between slow and fast passages, very carefully constructed melodic ideas, tension and release and that dissonant note that he lands on very heavily and, surprisingly, it works! To me, this is one of the most beautiful solos by Django.

Bones

I like it. Did you tab it out Will?

Lango-Django

Yes, I've always enjoyed that one, too, Matteo. One of Django's best compositions and a lovely solo too. But at the end when he plays that kind of "tango" chord tremolo, it's always sounded to me like one of those card shuffling machines... I guess I've failed another Rorschach test!

Mike, no I haven't tried tabbing Petite Lili out. Lately my philosophy has been to forget about playing like Django and just try to play like me! More fun and less frustrating.

Most of my playing these days is in a trio led by a virtuoso clarinet/sax guy who plays mostly pop tunes from the twenties and thirties, so we actually don't play much Django-style stuff anyway, just Nuages and a couple of others.

For some reason my clt/sax guy really likes the sound of a reso guitar, so I finally went along and bought an Asian knockoff, which I'm enjoying playing.

The combination of his unusual repertoire and the unusual guitar seems to be leading me a bit away from the Django stuff, though of course he, Eddie Lang and banjoist Sleepy Hall will always be my inspirations.

Unfortunately, there's no fan website for Sleepy Hall, but there's actually a fairly good one for Eddie Lang (eddielang.com) although it lacks the great online community that we enjoy here...

Bones

What kind of Asian reso did you get? How do you like it?

Lango-Django

Sorry for the long response time, Mike, we've been on holidays in Cuba for the past two weeks, and Internet service down there is so crappy that I didn't even bother trying to get online.

My reso guitar is an Aiersi single cone with cutaway.

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/181591913863

I went up to their dealership in Toronto (a couple of hours from where I live) because they said on the phone that they had a tricone cutaway in stock, but alas it was just sold when I got there.

I like mine just fine but I'll probably buy a tricone one of these days.

I don't know if you've ever bought one of these beasts but they are typically set up for slide playing, which means the action is set so high that chords are just barely playable with your fingers in the lower frets!

So I put a nicer aluminum cone in mine and spent a bit of time messing around with the bridge to get the action the right height for plectrum style playing.

And the good news was that my Ischell pickup works really well with this guitar, I just stuck it right on the metal bar covering the bridge and it sounds great.