Django Reinhardt

Django Reinhardt invented an entire guitar vocabulary with two functioning fretting fingers. After a caravan fire in 1928 severely burned his left hand, the 18-year-old Belgian-Romani guitarist spent months in a hospital bed relearning the instrument, developing a technique that used his index and middle fingers for single-note runs while the paralyzed ring and pinky fingers contributed to chord voicings. This limitation became the foundation of Gypsy jazz guitar. Reinhardt's primary instrument was a Selmer Maccaferri guitar — a steel-string acoustic designed by Italian luthier Mario Maccaferri and manufactured by Selmer Paris beginning in 1932. The early D-hole models had a brighter, more cutting tone; Reinhardt later preferred the oval-hole Selmer Modèle Jazz, which offered more warmth and projection. The Selmer's construction — a bent spruce top, rosewood back and sides, and a distinctive internal resonator — produced a volume and tonal clarity that allowed Reinhardt to be heard over an ensemble without amplification. With violinist Stéphane Grappelli in the Quintette du Hot Club de France, Reinhardt recorded hundreds of sides between 1934 and 1939 that established the Gypsy jazz idiom: rapid-fire arpeggios, chromatic runs played at extraordinary speed with just two fingers, octave passages that anticipated Wes Montgomery by two decades, and a rhythmic drive rooted in the "la pompe" strumming style of Romani guitar tradition. His playing on recordings like "Minor Swing" (1937) and "Nuages" (1940) demonstrated a harmonic sophistication that drew from both American jazz and European classical music. After the war, Reinhardt briefly experimented with an amplified Selmer and recorded with an electric guitar — likely a Selmer-Maccaferri fitted with a pickup — but his finest work remained acoustic.