THE MANHATTAN HOT CLUB

Jazz manouche—literally “gypsy jazz”—is the name given to a kind of music born in France in the early 1930s.  But for the huge mass of devoted performers and followers throughout the world today, it’s more than a kind of music—it’s a way of life; it’s a religion.  The Lord and Master of jazz manouche was Django Reinhardt, a gypsy born in Belgium in 1910.  He began playing guitar when he was very young, but at the age of eighteen, his left hand was severely burned when his caravan caught on fire.  His third and fourth fingers were deformed and virtually useless.  When he finally began performing again, he emerged a better guitar player than he was before the accident.  The violinist Itzhak Perlman once said, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”?    In 1934 Django began a series of recordings with a group called the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.  These recordings have become the foundation for a massive legacy of Django aficionados throughout the world.   Clarinetist Dan Levinson was bitten by the Django bug while living in Paris in the early 1990s, and since then has been searching for opportunities to play jazz manouche in New York.  In 2004 he met guitarist Tom Landman and the two of them organized the Manhattan Hot Club.  Since then, the group has been making Django’s music accessible to the New York audience through their monthly appearances at Terra Blues in Greenwich Village