The Caravan Fire
Pittsburgh opens its street festival free this afternoon and runs PIJF After Dark tonight at ten. Today's record is Django Reinhardt in 1928, and Sekou tells the story of the caravan fire.
LioraPittsburgh's free weekend opens this afternoon, and it opens for nothing. Today's record is Django Reinhardt in 1928. And later, a caravan, a candle, and two fingers. It's Saturday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Saturday, September 19th. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: Pittsburgh's street festival opens free this afternoon on Liberty Avenue
LioraToday, Pittsburgh, for free.
The Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival opens its street festival this afternoon. The festival's own page gives it as September 19th and 20th, from one o'clock, at 980 Liberty Avenue, and prints the admission in one word. Free.
The lineup, as the festival lists it, holds Lalah Hathaway, Terri Lyne Carrington, Eric Roberson, Orrin Evans, Lady Blackbird and Sean Jones, under the standing line that the lineup is subject to change.
The festival posts its Saturday and Sunday schedules as pictures, with no set times in text. So I can tell you the gate opens at one. I cannot tell you when your act plays.
LioraThen tonight, the late shift, one night only. PIJF After Dark starts at ten at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, on two floors. On the first, the Imani All Stars Jam Session, led by the pianist Orrin Evans. On the second, DJ Kid Capri, playing a set the page says blends jazz and hip hop.
After Dark is one of the festival's ticketed events, and the page prints no price for it. Orrin Evans works twice today, the street festival this afternoon and the jam session at ten.
Two. Listen to This: Django Reinhardt's 1928 sides with Jean Vaissade's musette orchestra
LioraToday's record is from 1928.
"Django Reinhardt, Intégrale, volume one," subtitled "Presentation Stomp, 1928 to 1934," on the French label Frémeaux and Associés. Two CDs, twenty nine ninety nine in euros.
Start at the top of disc one. The first eight tracks are all 1928 sides, credited to Django Reinhardt and Jean Vaissade's musette orchestra. The liner notes, by Daniel Nevers, call these his first steps in a recording studio, made alongside the kings of the squeezebox.
Here is the tip. The fourth track is called "La caravane." The label dates these sides to 1928 and no closer, and its page says nothing about a fire. So play the eight in order, and hold that fourth title in your head until Sekou gets to it.
LioraNow the release desk. "Synonym," Meshell Ndegeocello, on Blue Note, fifteen tracks and every one a duet. Her label's own post dates it to yesterday, its own store shows an October 2nd digital delivery date, and she plays Monterey next Saturday.
Paris, 1928. A caravan full of celluloid flowers, one candle, and how Django Reinhardt came to play his solos with two fingers. Sekou has the story.
Three. The Bridge: Paris, 1928: a caravan full of celluloid flowers, one candle
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou tells it, I ask the questions. Sekou, where are we?
SekouParis. Early morning, October 26th, 1928. Django Reinhardt is eighteen. He plays banjo in a dance hall, La Java. After it closes, he rides home to his caravan in the Zone, open ground at the foot of the old city walls, where the poor of Paris live in shacks and caravans.
His wife, Bella, is pregnant. The caravan is full of flowers she has made. Celluloid flowers. A candle falls into them. His biographer, Michael Dregni, says the caravan is ablaze almost at once.
LioraDo they get out?
SekouThey do. In Dregni's telling, Django pulls Bella from the bed, and she runs out with her hair burning, shouting to wake the camp. He holds up a blanket with his left hand, falls in the smoke, and drags himself out on fire. The neighbors roll him on the ground to smother the flames.
Two medical writers who studied the case say the hand came up to shield his face, which put the back of it in the fire. One of them notes that no one records a burn to his face.
Bella's father gets them to the Lariboisière hospital. Its register is still in the Paris hospital archives, and it lists them both: admitted October 26th, 1928.
His left hand is badly burned. So is one leg, from the knee up. A surgeon, afraid of gangrene, wants to cut off his leg. Whether that was an order or only an option, no one can now say. Django refuses.
LioraEighteen, and he tells the surgeon no.
SekouAt a second hospital, Saint-Louis, the burns began to close, and he kept his leg. In time, on crutches, he walked as before. No witness ever reported a limp.
The hand was another matter. The back of it was a mass of scar tissue, and the ring and little fingers of his left hand were largely paralyzed. By one account from the 1950s, in those first weeks he barely spoke. When his mother asked what he was thinking about, the answer was always the same. His hand.
A doctor told her to bring him his guitar. His brother Joseph came with a new one and laid it on the bed beside him. Not a banjo. A guitar, lighter and easier to handle, as one hand therapist points out.
He worked out a new way to play. He ran his scales up and down the neck instead of across it, and built chords with few notes. He still used the damaged fingers in some chords, but he played his solos with two fingers.
LioraWhat about Bella?
SekouBy Dregni's account, she gave birth to their son three weeks after the fire. The marriage did not last.
Django left the hospital for good in 1930, and Dregni tells a scene from that day. Naguine, who would become his second wife, had been looking for him. She was waiting outside with tulips. Her words, as Dregni gives them: "Here! These flowers are real. They won't start on fire."
On December 2nd, 1934, the Quintette du Hot Club de France gave its first concert, in Paris. Stéphane Grappelli on violin, Django on lead guitar, two rhythm guitars and a bass. No drums, no piano, no horns. From 1935 to 1939, the Associated Press later wrote, it was the most influential and popular jazz band in Europe.
One more thing. The poster for that first concert names his brother Joseph, the one who laid that guitar on the bed.
LioraHe went home that night a banjo player, and left the hospital a guitarist.
That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: The ticket is a commissioned premiere by the Michael Rodriguez Septet at The Jazz Gallery
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket first.
If I had one ticket tonight, it's New York, The Jazz Gallery. The room bills the Michael Rodriguez Septet under its George Wein Fellowship Commission for 2026, sets at seven and nine, general seating thirty eight fifty. The Gallery says it premieres new music written for this commission and these players. Rodriguez on trumpet, John Ellis on tenor, Marshall Gilkes on trombone. New music, written for the players in the room.
Now the sweep. In Oakland, Yoshi's has the bass guitarist Mohini Dey, at seven thirty, forty to eighty nine dollars, and again at nine thirty for forty.
In New Orleans, Preservation Hall runs the Preservation All-Stars four times, at five, six fifteen, seven thirty and eight forty five, with no price printed.
LioraIn Seattle, Jazz Alley has Lettuce at seven thirty and nine thirty, seventy five dollars.
In Nashville, Rudy's Jazz Room stacks three, from the Jody Nardone Trio at five thirty to a late set at eleven with Don Aliquo and Marc Payne.
Jazz St. Louis lists nothing tonight, and the Regattabar's calendar could not be read.
Five. One More Note: Muhal Richard Abrams was born in Chicago on this date in 1930
LioraSeptember 19th, 1930. Muhal Richard Abrams is born in Chicago.
The National Endowment for the Arts, which made him a Jazz Master in 2010, calls him a pianist, composer and educator. In 1961 he ran an Experimental Band whose players included Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman. Four years later he cofounded the AACM, and the NEA lists Anthony Braxton, Amina Claudine Myers and Henry Threadgill among the members.
Start with "Levels and Degrees of Light," on Delmark, from 1967.
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Saturday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.