Before you hear Django, it helps to know what you're listening for. The rhythm in his music is different from American jazz — it has this propulsive, almost galloping feel, driven by the rhythm guitarists in his quintet strumming on the offbeats. It sounds lighter, more elastic. Then Django's lead guitar comes in and it moves so fast, and with such melodic confidence, that it takes a second to believe one person is doing all of it. There are no electric effects, no amplification tricks — just a hollow-body guitar and a completely singular technique he developed around his injury.

The group he's most associated with is the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which he co-led with the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli starting in the mid-1930s. No drums, no piano, no horns — just two rhythm guitars, a bass, violin, and Django's lead guitar. It shouldn't work as well as it does. The interplay between Django and Grappelli on recordings like [Djangology (1935) or Minor Swing (1937) sounds genuinely spontaneous, like two people finishing each other's sentences. Grappelli is elegant and cool; Django is looser, more daring, occasionally a little dangerous-sounding.

His playing absorbed a lot of things at once — American swing, the Romani musical tradition he grew up in, classical influences he picked up listening to records. You can hear all of it without any one element dominating. When he plays a ballad, there's real tenderness in it. When he plays fast, there's humor. He could be showing off and you knew it, but it never felt empty because the melodic ideas behind the speed were always interesting.

The war years are worth knowing about. When Germany occupied Paris, Django stayed. Romani people were being murdered across Europe, and Django was genuinely at risk. He kept performing, kept recording, and at some point the Nazis decided they liked his music enough to leave him alone — a deeply uncomfortable fact that doesn't fit neatly into any simple story. He tried to escape to Switzerland at least once and was turned back. That he survived and kept playing through all of it says something, though it's hard to know exactly what.

He discovered the electric guitar late in life and made a real effort to adapt, with mixed results — the amplified recordings from his final years split opinion, and honestly some of them are a little awkward, like watching someone learn a new language after decades of fluency in another. But the acoustic recordings from the 1930s and early 1940s are the real thing. If you're starting out, put on Minor Swing (1937) and just listen to how happy it sounds. It's music made by someone who clearly loved playing guitar more than almost anything else.