I've been a Django fan for atleast 5 years now, and though it has been a while since I've seen "Jazz", I think I was a Django fan before and would remember being completely outraged by him not being included. So that being said, I believe that he was mentioned, though rather briefly. I know that there are a lot of fans of modern Jazz who complained that the series was too focused on the first fifty years, but I have no problem with that, because personally I believe that Bop isn't Jazz at all, but a completely different and new kind of music, that is almost unrelated to the music that was born in New Orleans around the turn of the 20th century. That being said, the music of the Hot Club of France is certainly a brother of the music of the Hot Fives and Sevens and the Red Hot Peppers, and its being the most important and best Jazz ever played by a European, I consider the Hot Club of France to be seminal. Burns and Marsalis perhaps didn't.
Then there is the question of how much time did the Hot Club realisticly deserve considering their greatness? Its a long set, but it covers some 90 years of history. So with each episode being 2 hours long, and there being ten episodes, how much time should Django have gotten? I believe that he rightly desereved atleast 30 minutes, and I do not recall him getting thiry minutes in the set.
So I guess we can feel a little outraged about that, because in my opinion, he ranks alongside Davis and Coltrane and Ellington in greatness, though perhaps a little behind Morton and Armstrong in importance.
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amudad
16 years ago
they tell his story in episode 7
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rmatlan
13 years ago
Agreed. Django and Stephane Grappelli are the ONLY Europeans that are ever mentioned in the series. That said if the emphasis is on Jazz an American music then that's OK. I knew a fair number of the artists, but not a lot about them. Found it interesting and fun. While there may be complaints about who got covered and who didn't I do think that is largely a matter of taste. From what I've seen there have been few complaints about the information being inaccurate and I think that's a good sign.
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activista
8 years ago
The Hot Club of France were important in the sense that they were considered one of the first European jazz groups to develop their own original style, instead of just sounding like a ripoff of an American jazz group. I used to have a CD of their best-known songs and enjoyed the heck out of it. There's a group that's been around since the early '00s called the Hot Club of Detroit (and yeah, they're actually from the D) that's influenced by the original Hot Club's music---here's a little swinging something by them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZULZTruqEI
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