"////(Poor old Django - couldn't read a sodding note - and him with just a thumb and two useful fingers as well - goddammit!)///

But he wasn't teaching music theory to people, either, was he?"


Ooof!!!!!


I think - even more than performing whilst disabled - Djangos biggest achievement is that despite his young death he is still teaching aspiring virtuosos to this day.


Having said that, I am curious and very skeptical about the idea that he "couldn't" read music.

He played with Louis Armstrong, with Coleman Hawkins, with Dizzy Gillespie ... to name just three out of a list of great musical innovators.

The stuff they were doing requires a solid grounding in basic chord theory.

So even if its true that he didn't read, his knowledge of theory was comprehensive. Every time he picked up a guitar, he would describe, in his solos, every element of Jazz theory as it stood at that time - solos as harmonically explicit as his do not happen by accident. He was aware of new key centres and he was able to anticipate their arrival in the true tradition of jazz improvisation.

You can hear in his playing that He fully understood II-V-I cadences, and that he understood the notion of superimposing alterations on the V, whether by using the harmonic minor or the diminished scale.

He may not have used these terms, but he was 100% clear in his mind about how the concepts worked.

Any idea that he just played magic notes that came to him from the universe is one that discredits him, just as it discredits geniuses like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

Of course his ear was great - in fact it was awesome - but there is no jazz without some kind of theoretical understanding, whether learned as an apprentice or as a student.

There isn't much info on Django education and I doubt he got his Theoretical knowledge from his early romani mentors - it would have come from the musicians he admired and loved in America.