Django Reinhardt – Sweet Georgia Brown

Here’s Django Reinhardt performing Sweet Georgia Brown.

The problem is, the audio is indeed SGB, but the film click is from J’attendrai.

Unfortunately, there’s very few video clips of Django actually playing.

For those of you that don’t know, Django was perhaps the best of the Gypsy Jazz style guitarists- certainly one of the most influential players of his time. And with all of the greatness, a handicap of only having 2 fingers on his left hand.

According to a  Django aficionado, the song was recorded in London, 1938 and the video clip came from the ABC Australia DVD set entitled “Jazz.”

Django used a Selmer Maccaferri guitar, which has a very unique sound with low action. The guitar is also very loud and really helps the guitar cut through. You have to consider that before Django recorded this and other songs in the late 30’s, the recording technology was such that a quiet guitar wouldn’t be loud enough and thus, was hardly ever used, especially with jazz and pop bands. In fact, the plectrum instrument of choice over guitar was the tenor banjo, which was a much louder instrument. This may be one of the reasons that early Dixieland jazz used a banjo over the guitar.