A New Perspective on Django Reinhardt

Guitarist Rez Abbasi (photograph by John Rogers, courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz)

This Friday Whirlwind Recordings will release the latest album of guitarist Rez Abbasi. To call Abbasi a “jazz guitarist” would be to sell him short. While he has made a name for himself in the New York acoustic jazz scene, his approaches to making music are wide, with the Qawwali and Indian Classical traditions of South Asia on the one hand and the heady fusion sounds of the Seventies on the other. The title of the new album is Django-shift; and, as one might expect, Abbasi has turned his attention to another jazz guitarist, the iconic Django Reinhardt. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders of this new album.

The tracks on this album resulted from a project that began in 2019, when The Freight and Salvage, based in Berkeley, commissioned Abbasi to develop and present a Reinhardt project. Those familiar with Reinhardt know that the lion’s share of his repertoire, particularly when he performed with the Quintette du Hot Club de France in Paris, were the tunes of others.  When his name is listed as a composer, it usually in partnership with his Quintette colleague, the violinist Stephane Grappelli. However, Abbasi was able to listen to the full catalog of Reinhardt originals, seven of which were selected for recording on Django-shift, along with two familiar standards, Iosif Ivanovici’s “Waves of the Danube” (better known as “The Anniversary Song,” the title given by Al Jolson when he added words to the tune) and Kurt Weill’s “September Song.” Abbasi recorded these nine tracks with a trio that included Michael Sarin on drums and keyboardist Neil Alexander playing organ, electronics, and synthesizers.

Those that spend a lot of time listening to Quintette tracks are likely to find any of Abbasi’s references to Reinhardt to be purely coincidental. Where Reinhardt was “hot,” Abbasi plays it cool, with the “temperature” modulated primarily by Sarin’s drumming. Also Abbasi’s eclecticism leads him quite some distance from the Parisian club scene of the Thirties. The listener is more likely to encounter “prime number rhythms,” rather than a good old fashioned back-beat. Also, in preparing background material for the press, Abbasi confessed that, while he was preparing his material for The Freight, he was deeply immersed in Robin D. G. Kelley’s comprehensive biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

As a result, Django-shift is far from a retrospective examination of Reinhardt’s style and repertoire. Rather, it thrusts seven of the originals from that repertoire joyously into the immediate present. If I want to listen to “traditional Reinhardt,” I have plenty of tracks to satisfy my cravings. Abbasi was commissioned to contribute to the Django Festival that the Freight was planning to host, and he decided that a 21st-century gig should distinguish itself from nostalgia for the Thirties. For my part, I am more than satisfied with the way in which Abbasi chose to put a personal stamp on retrospective inspiration.