Paris, France – Recently, the Musée de la Musique in Paris received a rare gift – Django Reinhardt’s last Selmer guitar – and promptly relegated it to a storeroom, the academic’s version of a broom closet.
Pity this treasured instrument of jazz icon Django Reinhardt, that put Paris’s Le Hot Club on the world map of European jazz, now gathers dust in some dark corner unseen and unloved. It’s a bit like propping up B.B. King’s lovely Lucille against a stall in a bus station bathroom.
Granted, the guitar isn’t a dab of earwax from Eminem or a ball of belly button lint from Britney Spears, but it deserves better. Django’s musical life shouldn’t be assigned a number and placed in a locker somewhere.Reinhardt’s gypsy Manouche people want to see a symbol of their contribution to music and culture on display and they are asking for your help. Please contact Frédéric Dassas, the directeur du musée de la musique, at musee@cite-musique.fr and gently request that the Reinhardt guitar be placed on display.
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
