Skip to main content

Watch Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli Play Masterfully Together in Vivid Color (1938)

Few jazz guitarists today could claim to be entirely free of the influence of Django Reinhardt. This despite the fact that he lost the use of two fingers — which ultimately encouraged him to develop a distinctive playing style — and that he died 68 years ago. The unfortunate abbreviation of Reinhardt’s life means that he never built a substantial body of solo work, though he did play on many recorded dates that include performances alongside Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. It also means that he left even less in the way of footage, though we do get a crisp and illuminating view of him and his guitar in the 1938 documentary short “Jazz ‘Hot,'” previously featured here on Open Culture.

“Jazz ‘Hot'” also features violin-playing from Stéphane Grappelli, who founded the group Quintette du Hot Club de France with Reinhardt in 1934. As they deepened their knowledge of jazz, the two influenced each other so thoroughly as to develop their own style of music.

Grappelli lived long enough to play with the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty, Paul Simon, Yo Yo Ma, and even Pink Floyd. Still, more than a few jazz fans would surely claim that none of his professional collaborators was more important to his musical formation than Reinhardt. Now you can see them playing together in color, and fairly realistic color at that, in the clip at the top of the post.

The original black-and-white footage (which appears just above) was colorized with DeOldify, a deep learning-based application developed to restore photographs and motion pictures from bygone times. Perhaps you’ve seen the previous DeOldify colorization projects we’ve featured here, which run the gamut from musical numbers in Stormy Weather and Hellzapoppin’ to scenes of 1920s Berlin and even an 1896 snowball fight in Lyon. Granted access to a time machine, more than a few jazz-lovers would no doubt choose to go back to the Paris of the 1930s to see the Quintette du Hot Club de France in action. Technology has yet to make that a viable proposition, but it’s given us a next-best-thing that no appreciator of jazz guitar — or jazz violin — could fail to enjoy.

Related Content:

Jazz ‘Hot’: The Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt

How Django Reinhardt, After Losing Two Fingers, Developed An Innovative Style & Inspired Black Sabbath Guitarist Toni Iommi to Do the Same

Django Reinhardt Demonstrates His Guitar Genius in Rare Footage From the 1930s, 40s & 50s

Hear Lost Recording of Pink Floyd Playing with Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli on “Wish You Were Here”

One of the Greatest Dances Sequences Ever Captured on Film Gets Restored in Color by AI: Watch the Classic Scene from Stormy Weather

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Watch Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli Play Masterfully Together in Vivid Color (1938) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3EnZXWa
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more