Django Jazz

DJANGO JAZZ is a feature-length documentary celebrating the life, music and enduring influence of Django Reinhardt, one of the most original musicians in the history of jazz. It is also a journey through Paris, the city where Django came of age and where jazz found an extraordinary second home. The film traces Django’s Romani roots and early career alongside the arrival of jazz in Paris, brought in part by African American musicians who found enthusiastic audiences in France. After a devastating fire permanently damaged his left hand, Django reinvented his guitar technique and went on to help form the Quintette du Hot Club de France with violinist Stéphane Grappelli, creating a distinctive European jazz sound that brought him international fame.

The film follows Django through the dramatic upheavals of the 1930s and ’40s: the flowering of Paris jazz culture, the dangers and contradictions of life as a Romani musician during the German Occupation, and his remarkable postwar journey to America as a featured soloist with Duke Ellington. Rather than remaining tied to the celebrated Hot Club sound, Django continued to evolve. His encounter with American jazz and bebop drew him toward electric guitar and a more modern musical language, heard in his postwar recordings in Paris and Rome and in the strikingly contemporary music of his final years. Along the way, DJANGO JAZZ explores the colorful mythology surrounding Django while revealing a more complex artist—curious, restless and continually searching for the next sound.

Moving between archival history and present-day Paris, DJANGO JAZZ brings Django’s world to life through photographs, films, recordings and the streets and neighborhoods where the story unfolded. Leading writers and scholars provide historical context, while contemporary musicians—including Duved Dunayevsky and the New Quintette du Hot Club de France, Brad Brose, Shola Adisa-Farrar, Tatiana Eva-Marie, Opus Quatre and Django’s great-grandson, guitarist Simba Baumgartner—show how vibrantly his music lives on. Part musical biography, part cultural history and part affectionate visit to Paris, DJANGO JAZZ celebrates an artist who transformed the music he inherited and created a sound that continues to travel around the world.