Gypsy jazz is the only major jazz style that was invented in Europe, and one of very few that can be traced almost entirely to a single musician. This is a guide to the essential recordings, old and new.
A note on the name first, because it matters. The style is widely known in English as gypsy jazz, but many of the musicians who play it — most of them from Manouche and Sinti Romani families — prefer jazz manouche, and a good number find “gypsy” objectionable.
Both terms are in common use and you will meet both. Where the musicians have stated a preference, it is worth following it.
Start Here: Top 5 Gypsy Jazz Albums
Djangology — Django Reinhardt (the standard compilation of the classic sides)
Quintette du Hot Club de France — the 1930s recordings (where it all begins)
Routes to Django — Biréli Lagrène (the teenage record that revived the style)
Seresta — Rosenberg Trio (the modern benchmark)
Gypsy Swing — Tchavolo Schmitt (the most characterful of the current players)
1. Quintette du Hot Club de France — the 1930s recordings
The Hot Club recordings are the foundation of the entire style, made by a band with no drums and no horns.
Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stéphane Grappelli on violin, with two rhythm guitars and a double bass. That instrumentation was partly a practical accident and became the template.
“Minor Swing”, “Djangology”, “Nuages” and the group’s reading of “Sweet Georgia Brown” all date from this period. The recordings are scattered across many compilations, which is why a good single-disc collection is the sensible purchase.
2. Django Reinhardt — Djangology
Djangology is the compilation most people start with, and it gathers the best-known Hot Club sides in decent sound.
Reinhardt had lost the use of two fingers on his left hand in a caravan fire at 18, and rebuilt his technique around the remaining ones. The resulting approach — octaves, fast chromatic runs, a particular way of voicing chords — is audible in every player who followed.
Various editions exist under this title. Buy on the strength of the transfer rather than the cover.
3. Django Reinhardt — the post-war recordings (1946–53)
Reinhardt’s later work is much less known and considerably stranger, including his experiments with electric guitar and bebop.
He toured America with Duke Ellington in 1946, took up an amplified guitar, and by the early 1950s was absorbing Charlie Parker.
The recordings from his final years — sometimes called the Rome sessions — are the ones to hear once the Hot Club material is familiar. He died in 1953, aged 43.
4. Biréli Lagrène — Routes to Django (1980)
Routes to Django was recorded when Lagrène was 13 and effectively restarted the style as a living tradition.
The playing is astonishing for a player of that age, and the album brought international
attention back to a music that had become a period curiosity.
Lagrène has since moved between manouche, straight-ahead jazz and fusion, and his later work has little to do with Django. This record is where he began.
5. Rosenberg Trio — Seresta (1990)
Seresta is the album that established the modern manouche sound and made Stochelo Rosenberg the most imitated guitarist in the style.
The Rosenberg family, from the Netherlands, are among the best-known Sinti musicians in Europe. The trio format — lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass — is the standard working unit for the style today.
Cleaner and more virtuosic than the 1930s recordings, and the benchmark most contemporary players are measured against.
6. Tchavolo Schmitt — Alors?… Voilà! (2000)
Tchavolo Schmitt plays with more swing and less polish than most of his contemporaries, and it is the most characterful playing in the modern style.
Schmitt came to wider attention through the film Latcho Drom and through Tony Gatlif’s films generally, and he plays with a rhythmic looseness that is much harder to imitate than the fast runs.
7. Angelo Debarre — Gipsy Guitar
Debarre is the player to hear for pure tone, and the closest of the modern generation to Django’s own phrasing.
His playing is more lyrical and less relentlessly fast than much contemporary manouche, and the ballads are where he is strongest.
8. Stéphane Grappelli — the later recordings
Grappelli outlived Django by more than forty years and spent them demonstrating what the violin could do in this music.
He recorded with everyone from Yehudi Menuhin to Oscar Peterson to Jean-Luc Ponty, and continued performing into his late eighties.
His albums with guitarist Joe Pass and with Martin Taylor are the ones to look for.
9. Jimmy Rosenberg — The Gipsy Summer
Jimmy Rosenberg was the most prodigiously gifted player of his generation, and his story is the most difficult one in the style.
A cousin of Stochelo, he was recording internationally as a teenager, and his career was later derailed by addiction and ill health — a story told in the documentary Jon & Jimmy.
The recordings from his best period are extraordinary.
10. Romane — Ombre
Romane is the most harmonically adventurous of the French players, and the one who has pushed the style furthest towards modern jazz.
He has also written extensively on manouche technique, and his instructional material is how a good many players outside the tradition learned it.
11. Hot Club of Detroit / Hot Club of San Francisco
The American hot club bands show how completely the style has travelled, and several of them are excellent.
Hot Club of Detroit in particular brought in influences from contemporary jazz and original writing, rather than working only through the Django repertoire.
12. Latcho Drom (1993) — soundtrack
The Latcho Drom soundtrack places manouche guitar in the wider context of Romani music across Europe and India.
Tony Gatlif‘s film has no dialogue and follows Romani musical traditions from Rajasthan to Spain. It is the best available argument that jazz manouche is one branch of something much larger.
What to listen for
The rhythm is the thing most listeners miss. That relentless chugging pulse from the rhythm guitars is called la pompe, and it does the work that a drummer would do in any other jazz style. Good pompe playing is much harder than it sounds and it is what separates a competent manouche band from a great one.
Then listen for the arpeggios. Django built his solos largely from arpeggiated chord shapes
rather than scales, partly because of his injured hand, and that vocabulary has been passed down almost intact for ninety years.
Where to go next
The living tradition is easier to find than it has been in decades. Samois-sur-Seine, where Django spent his last years, hosts an annual festival, and there are manouche festivals across France, the Netherlands and Germany through the summer.
For recordings, follow the family names — Rosenberg, Schmitt, Debarre, Ferré, Lagrène — since a great deal of this music has been handed down within a small number of families, and the recordings tend to cluster the same way.
Which gypsy jazz record would you recommend to a newcomer? Let us know in the comments below.
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