Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008 Oxford University Press, New York. 2008. Hardcover. First Printing by Line Number. Book is tight, square, and unmarked. Book Condition: Near Fine; light bumping to tail; small smudge on textblock fore edge. DJ: Very Good; light wear at tips; light bumping to tail; light rubbing to panels; small closed tear at front gutter. Purple paper over boards with red overlay on the spine with bright blue lettering on the spine. 333 pp 8vo. A vagabond music, Gypsy Jazz is played today in French Gypsy bars, Romany encampments, on religious pilgrimages--and increasingly on the world's greatest concert stages. Yet its story has never been told, in part because much of its history is undocumented, either in written form or often even in recorded music. Beginning with Django Reinhardt, whose dazzling Gypsy Jazz became the toast of 1930s Paris in the heady days of Josephine Baker, Picasso, and Hemingway, Dregni follows the music as it courses through caravans on the edge of Paris, where today's young French Gypsies learn Gypsy Jazz as a rite of passage, along the Gypsy pilgrimage route to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer where the Romany play around their campfires, and finally to the new era of international Gypsy stars such as Bireli Lagrene, Boulou Ferre, Dorado Schmitt, and Django's own grandchildren, David Reinhardt and Dallas Baumgartner. Interspersed with Dregni's vivid narrative are the words of the musicians themselves, many of whom have never been interviewed for the American press before, as they describe what the music means to them. Gypsy Jazz also includes a chapter devoted entirely to American Gypsy musicians who remain largely unknown outside their hidden community.A clean very presentable copy in a Brodart mylar jacket.