I have never been a huge fan of jazz guitar, with a couple of exceptions. Django is the big one. Such amazingly melodic playing on the one hand (actually – the hand with only two fingers that could play) and at times he treats the instrument like it is percussion. Such rhythm and drive.

I came to Django Reinhardt through David Grisman. My dad had ‘Hot Dawg’ (an alum cover that for some reason freaked me out as a kid) and there was a version of ‘Minor Swing’ on it with Stephane Grappelli. When I got older, I realized the song was written by Django and tracked him down. As a teenage guitarist, he thrilled me. A little obscure, a really interesting life story, and his playing really can’t be compared to anyone else. He could do with two fingers on his left hand what most guitarists would probably need ten for!

During my first year working at Tower, I hit the motherlode – an import 10 CD box set that covered his whole recording career. I listened to those discs a lot, but there were two tracks that immediately struck me. They were two interpretations of the Bach D Minor concert for two violins… though at the time I didn’t know it. I just knew the track numbers and loved playing them. The interplay between the violinists was so intricate and the mood really swung (as I would figure out later these were called ‘swing interpretation of the Bach D Minor concerto’). I’ll never forget hearing the Bach concerto a year or so later on the radio and thinking ‘huh! It’s that Django Reinhardt song!’. When the announcer said it was Bach, I was quite surprised… got home and found the discs and sure enough it was Bach credited as the author. They had been playing Bach this entire time! So I went to the Tower on Sunrise in Sacramento (which had more classical music then the Roseville store) and I picked up the Bach violin concertos (which would then sit next to my only other Bach CD at the time – an old E. Power Biggs disc of organ work).

I love that listening to David Grisman led me to Django Reinhardt which then led me to Bach. The music world can have such strange connections sometimes, and that is really one of the wonderful parts of music for me. In our own ways, what we do musically is also a historical connection to music. I’ve studied with people who studied with people that studied with Schönberg, another who studied with Ravel. When I work on a piece with a performer, I also get to work with the things that their teachers and their teacher’s teachers taught them. And when I compose, everything I have ever heard is somehow influencing my musical thinking. And somewhere in there is Django, swinging my decisions.