Biréli Lagröne was long seen as the most important steward of Django Reinhardt’s legacy.
Celebrated as a child prodigy who recorded his first album at the age of twelve, it naturally took some time for the guitarist to emancipate himself from his great role model and the music of Manouche.
Biréli Lagröne sought experience with international stars, especially from jazz, such as Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius, Elvin Jones and his guitar colleagues Di Meola and Mclaughlin. He also switched to the electric guitar for a while. With these diverse experiences behind him, in the early 2000s he returned to the legacy of Sinti music. His two albums entitled “Gypsy Project” from 2001 and 2002 and the recording “Djangology/To Bi Or Not To Bi”, partly recorded with the WDR Big Band, are considered milestones not only of Sinti jazz, but of European jazz in general.
Note: This interview originally took place in 2018 and is being published here on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Gypsy Jazz Festival. The statements and references made in the interview refer to this point in time.
What I think has not been sufficiently appreciated to this day is that Gypsy Jazz is the first independent form of jazz to emerge outside the USA.
BL: That is indeed the case. And what is particularly exciting is that this first generation of musicians, which of course included Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, had very little knowledge of what was happening in the USA. Indirectly, this makes them, at least for us European musicians, co-founders of jazz. Although Django Reinhardt certainly didn’t think in such terms or in such terms back then.
You yourself played with Grappelli.
BL: That’s right, once or twice. I was thirteen or fourteen at the most and unfortunately still too young to ask him the questions I would like to ask him today. The performances were also rather unofficial. It just happened that we performed several times at the same festival on the same evening. We already knew each other casually at the time. So he invited me after each of these meetings and we played a bit together.
Jazz has become very academic these days, at least as far as education is concerned. The roots of your music still have a lot to do with values such as family, privacy, trust, oral history.
BL: Our music is still not part of music school. You can’t learn it officially anywhere. But at least there are now significantly more seminars and master classes that deal with our music. But I am at least not aware of the existence of something like a permanent teaching position or even a professorship for jazz guitar with a focus on gypsy jazz.
Can this type of music be taught at all, according to your understanding?
BL: That is actually difficult. Today, people like me of course always go beyond the traditional language of form. But the old Sinti guitarists played and still play this music every day. Because it is part of their culture. So it is more than just music. But unfortunately there are fewer and fewer people who live this culture according to tradition. As a result, this pure form of our musical heritage is increasingly being lost, perhaps also because it is not academically preserved. Today everything is more or less done under the aspect of marketability. I don’t dare to judge whether that is good or bad. The world is changing. Of course, some things fall by the wayside.
You yourself have made a significant contribution to the opening up of Sinti jazz by going to America and trying out new forms and contexts. During this time you also discovered the electric guitar. Your sound arsenal has changed forever as a result of all these experiences.
BL: I simply needed that at the time. I had to somehow get out of this one type of music that was absolutely set for me at the time. Even at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I wanted to go somewhere else musically. I listened to other things back then. Things that were more modern. That took me away from my roots for almost 20 years. But from 2001 onwards I turned back to this old musical home and love, now of course with a broader background.
The records after this return were very successful.
BL: Let’s put it this way: I had collected enough ideas. I never wanted to be a copy of the old. And I was and am lucky that the audience was generous enough to forgive me for that. That is not a given. People obviously understood that I had grown older and did not want to be tied to the role of a successor to Django Reinhardt.
We are sitting together here not far from Heidelberg. Heidelberg is a focus of antiziganism research. Is your music political?
BL: Not necessarily, no. Of course I hear a lot and have also had the experience of not always being the most welcome and often not fitting into society’s expectations. For me, this feeling of exclusion has of course faded a little through the many concerts all over the world. But – and I’d like to leave it at that: it remains difficult.
I want to be completely frank. I have the feeling that your achievement is not sufficiently understood and appreciated.
BL: Then I will answer you with the same frankness: you can indeed see it that way. It is a problem of adaptation and demarcation. But one thing is clear: if such music is well received, if people talk about it, if people try to understand and name its meaning, then that reflects on all of us as a Sinti community and is good for us. Because that means recognition. And maybe better times will actually come at some point. There have been approaches to this for a long time. But as I said, it remains difficult.
In half an hour you will be on stage at the Europe festival. How would you explain your music to someone who is standing outside the door undecided?
BL: I don’t know. Without prior knowledge it is difficult to put into words. But there is no substitute for music anyway. That means they just have to listen to the music to understand it. Let it sink in. And if they have reservations, perhaps you should take them by the sleeve in a friendly and well-meaning way and gently draw them into the hall. Everything else will then explain itself in the music.
