Article: `Gypsy legend' was complex, talented - and all that jazz.(ENTERTAINMENT)

Byline: Michael Anthony; Staff Writer

He was Europe's first jazz star. At the peak of his popularity, from 1937 to 1943, movie stars danced to his music and royalty lined up to shake his hand. Young men grew their moustaches in imitation of him.

Django Reinhardt was a bundle of contradictions. He spoke eloquently through his guitar, achieving a unique amalgam of jazz and his own Gypsy heritage, and yet was illiterate for most of his life, unable to read words or music. He was a virtuoso guitarist, even though at 18 he lost the use of two fingers on his left hand because of a fire. He was described as "the idiot savant of jazz" and yet he composed a ...

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