Guthrie Govan Discussion

[bill®]

If jazz has ever had a guitar equivalent of Jimi Hendrix it was Django Reinhardt. Anyone not familiar with him should REALLY check him out. So far ahead of his time in every concievable sense. Django played a huge part in INVENTING guitar chops (as far as playing with a pick goes). Until John McLaughlin however many years later, no-one in jazz had matched what Django had done with 2 fingers many years prior (this is not counting several little known jazz players that never achieved much notoriety, but I will talk about some of them another time). Not that that's even important, but it serves to drive home just what a clever chap he was.

Django (in his later years particularly) was extremely harmonically and rhythmically inventive. Effortlessly integrating things into his playing that even today are considered 'hip'. Furthermore he was almost completely uneducated. A total natural in every sense (that's why I likened him to Hendrix )

[bill®]

There's some Django videos over here, some suck some there is one that is excellent. There's lots of other cool guitar playing too.

http://www.about-django.com/news/videos/videos.php