Genre, Ethnoracial Alterity, and the Genesis of Jazz Manouche
Genre, Ethnoracial Alterity, and the Genesis of jazz manouche SIV B. LIE It’s French jazz. Why suggest that it’s jazz manouche? Django obviously started it, the whole movement, on account of him being a superstar, being a Gypsy, and then afterwards the Gyp- sies copied him, and it evolved into that. It’s a category that doesn’t correspond to reality. People should say “Django style.” For me, jazz manouche doesn’t exist, in fact. It’s a fiction. [Jazz manouche] must exist because everyone talks about it.1 n the above quotations, speakers address the ontology of “jazz ma- nouche,” a genre originally grounded in the recordings of guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910–53) and invented several decades after his I 2 death. They represent only a fraction of the musings on the subject that I recorded while interviewing musicians and others involved in the jazz ma- nouche scene in France. Centered on the reproduction of Reinhardt’s musical style, the genre is commonly associated with the Manouche subgroup of I am deeply grateful to Patrick Andresz, Alain Antonietto, Stella Funaro, Gérard Gerber, Engé Helmstetter, Michel Lefort, Gigi Loeffler, Marcel Loeffler, Mandino Reinhardt, and numerous others in France for sharing their stories and lives with me. I would like to thank Michael Beckerman, J. Martin Daughtry, Maureen Mahon, Will Robin, David Samuels, Davin- dar Singh, and especially Benjamin Givan for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this Journal for the helpful feedback they have provided.
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