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Well if you take the language analogy, then it's all about how expressive are you, are you sounding like you're a customer service rep reading the script or a gifted public speaker.
I like this definition of a musical legend:
"Legends have to be people who have changed a genre forever, who transformed the shape of music and created a new outlet for expression. Legends have to have the power to influence."
From "The criteria of a legendary musician"
https://crowsneststpete.com/2011/11/28/the-criteria-of-a-legendary-musician/#:~:text=Legends%20have%20to%20be%20people,have%20the%20power%20to%20influence.
To improvise is to see something in a new way. If you take a lick that you’ve played a hundred times and play it the same way, then you are not improvising, if you play it a little different, then you are seeing things a little different. To see the "same old, same old" differently, is to be legendary.
Everyone has very good points on this topic, which includes a lot of nuance of philosophical points on what makes a legend.
In my opinion it is unfair to django to call him a legend of this music. My opinion is that django sits on the greatest of all time seat whilst a legend is someone who is below the greatest of all time.
Since I started getting more into improvising and looking at other peoples solos I personally believe that true improv doesn’t exist (at least not in the world of gypsy jazz anyway). Everyone is transcribing django solos and taking licks from him and some more advanced players (I’m not one of them) know how to change the licks and play them in their own way Joscho is included in this. But even for example stochello, I’ve heard him play the same minor lick so many times with slight differences to the point I usually already know when he’s about to play it. I think in this music everyone is taking ideas from everyone and I don’t see what is wrong with that. As long as you don’t have a solo figured out before you play it isn’t it still improvising even if you throw in a prepared lick here and there ?
I think I heard Christian can hemert say in a video that it is ignorant to think that you can come up with a lick that is as good as a master of that style of music
It is up to you to decide who you think a legend is and not up to others, you like who you like.
Even outside the GJ world players repeat themselves constantly. I know of famous players (legends?) who on a bad night would play solos pretty much verbatim while on other nights when they are feeling it stretch outside those areas.
www.scoredog.tv
I was listening to Grappelli yesterday - the 85th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall. Sure I thought, "Oh yes, I've heard that lick before" on occasion - but no one would dispute his "legend" status. Since his playing has been documented on record over such a long period, it would be fascinating to see a study of how much he repeated himself in performance (often of the same numbers show after show, year after year), how much each rendition differs, and in what respect... or maybe such work already exists, and someone can point me towards it!
Another factor would be that, although he had regular accompanying groups, he also enjoyed performing the same tunes with new backing musicians, who surely stimulated his creativity in different directions on those occasions as well.
Apologies for the thread drift, maybe it should be morphed into a new one for this stuff...
Yes, he repeated things, but he was the inventor of the things which he repeated. That's different from someone else repeating what Grappelli invented.
Point taken - of course Django had his own "bag of licks" (his own inventions again) into which he would dip as needed, to construct a solo... but one might argue that he was at his most creative when constructing completely new melodies over the original tune, and the the "licks" are more of a decoration - hmm, getting into fairly deep stuff here, perhaps.
I think it would depends what you would mean by invent their own licks. Django had influence from people like Louis Armstrong and apparently he would repeat his licks over gypsy tunes (before he played jazz) and experiment this way. So really django did the same thing that we all do the only difference is that django was musically intelligent enough to expand on these licks make them his own and so on.
When you think about it even making a lick from an arpeggio isn’t really making your own lick as you’re probably just using the arpeggio with an enclosure and a few chromatic notes
A few years ago David Grisman released some alternate takes of the songs they recorded with Grappelli on the Hot Dawg album. To me it’s shocking how much he is not repeating himself on multiple takes of the same song. They sound completely different like he is an inexhaustible well of ideas springing up on the fly. That album was released in 1978 so he was 70 years old at the time. Legend!!