Django Reinhardt

Django Reinhardt is the great exception – the one major early-jazz voice who came from Europe, not America, and who sounded like no one before or since. Born into a Romani family that traveled the roads of Belgium and France, he learned guitar and banjo in the caravans and was a prodigy by his teens.

Then a caravan fire badly burned his left hand, leaving two fingers paralyzed. Most guitarists would have been finished. Django reinvented his whole technique around the two fingers he had left, and somehow played faster, cleaner, and more inventively than guitarists with all ten. The limitation became a signature.

In 1934 he formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France with violinist Stéphane Grappelli, an all-string group with no drums and no horns that swung as hard as any band in the world. The music – later called gypsy jazz – was joyous, fleet, and romantic, and it made Django the first European to truly shape the music rather than just import it.

He died young, at 43, but the sound never faded. Every gypsy-jazz guitarist alive is playing in his shadow, and players far outside that world still marvel at what two fingers managed to do.