The Hot Club of San Francisco The Hot Club of Detroit: Django Reinhardt’s 100th Birthday Celebration October 29, 2010

The Hot Club of San Francisco is an ensemble of accomplished and versatile musicians celebrating the music of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli’s pioneering Quintette du Hot Club de France. Continuing this early French tradition, a similar scene plays out as the Hot Clubs of San Francisco and Detroit present Silent Surrealism, an evening of live Gypsy jazz with short silent films from the 1930s by Charlie Bowers, James Sibley Watson, and Harold Shaw, courtesy of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Django Reinhardt is rightly hailed as one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived, but many people praising his accomplishments as a guitarist tend to overlook his roots in Gypsy culture and the fertile, polyglot Paris of the 1920s. Reinhardt and his companions used all these elements, along with American jazz, to create this new music, but the Gypsy heritage seems to be the most important ingredient. The Hot Club of San Francisco and the Hot Club of Detroit join together for this celebration of Django Reinhardt’s 100th birthday.

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