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Django Reinhardt's gypsy rhythms live on

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The Edinburgh Jazz Festival celebrates the guitarist a century after his birth.

If there's a gig at any jazz festival which is guaranteed to attract and delight punters who ordinarily wouldn't touch jazz with a five-foot pole, it's the one with the Django Reinhardt-inspired band. Thanks to the fact that, over the last 25 years, the genius gypsy jazz guitarist's extremely accessible style of music has been heard on everything from Renault Clio adverts to movie soundtracks (Belleville Rendez-Vous, Chocolat), it's familiar beyond the jazz world--and popular in its own right.

The Edinburgh Jazz Festival, in one of its smarter moves, has picked up on this year's centenary of the guitar legend and has even more Reinhardt-style bands in its programme than usual. Reinhardt--actually, I'm going to call him Django, because nobody ever calls him by his surname--may have been dead for over five decades but his pioneering gypsy jazz guitar playing and legacy of recordings have undoubtedly inspired more imitators and tribute bands than any other jazz musician's.

Why? Well, there are various reasons. One is that he was the greatest and the first; a true original who fused his native gypsy music with the swinging jazz that he heard on American records in the early 1930s. You only need to watch Woody Allen's Sweet And Lowdown--the fictional story of “the world's second-greatest guitarist"--to see how a musician could become obsessed with mastering the Django style. There are, unsurprisingly, an awful lot of Django anoraks out there.

If you're a natural-born show-off who's a gifted guitarist, imitating Django's digital gymnastics is a sure-fire way of grabbing attention--while cashing in on the Reinhardt name. Similarly, a band with a variation on the classic Django/Hot Club line-up of three guitars, bass and violin (or clarinet) can also exploit the listening public's love affair with Django's gypsy jazz.

Another reason for the proliferation of Djangly bands is that the best-loved part of his output--the recordings he made as a member of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France in the 1930s and 1940s--is simply some of the happiest, most uplifting jazz there is. It's sophisticated but easy to appreciate, and Django's colourful and flamboyant flights of fancy--all the more impressive when you realise he was limited to the use of only two fingers on his left hand as the result of burns sustained in a fire when he was 18--have been credited with paving the way for such great rock guitarists as Jimi Hendrix.

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