Up until the spring of 1991, things were going on as per the previous year. I was enjoying myself with blues/rock, and Dark Horse was still the gigging vehicle for the expression of that. My playing might have become tad more jazzy flavoured in parts, but it was really from listening to people who had been influenced by jazz to a degree, rather than actual jazz players, as such. People like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Alvin Lee, and Brian Setzer, were amongst those influences at that stage.
As was Johnny Winter who released ‘Let Me In’ that year; which turned out to be the last blues/rock album that I bought, as I was just as on the cusp of being swept away by something completely unexpected.
In the meantime, my old friend Martin Brown had acquired a video copy of a famous concert called ‘Meeting of the Spirits’, featuring three guitar greats in the form of John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia, and Larry Coryell performing superb jazz/flamenco fusion on acoustic guitars. This was impressive enough to behold in itself, but sandwiched on the end of the tape, almost as an aside; was a performance from a 1982 jazz festival of someone who would become a supremely important figure in my musical affections and influences in the years to come.
This unexpected bonus was literally startling. Here was (as it turned out) this 15 year old kid in shorts playing this incredible music; the like of which I’d never seen or heard before. This young lad turned out to be Bireli Lagrene, and he was playing the music of Django Reinhardt.
By pure coincidence, Channel 4 had begun a series of music related documentaries called ‘Sound Stuff’. When I picked up the latest Radio Times, it turned out that the documentary to be featured the following week, was called Django Legacy, and it was all about the music of Django Reinhardt and the top contemporary guitarists who played the music that I soon found out was a sub-genre of its own, called ‘Gypsy/Jazz’. The documentary featured players such as Stochelo Rosenberg, Gary Potter, Django’s own son Babik Reinhardt, and Bireli Lagrene; (now 23 years old) amongst others. And of course, it was a window into the world and music of Django Reinhardt himself.
This music had a profound and monumental effect on me. I began immediately to seek out music by Django Reinhardt and Bireli Lagrene, and any other music that could be defined as ‘Gypsy/Jazz’.
Whilst it’s fair to say that my interest in all the other music that I liked wasn’t immediately extinguished; I began to explore learning and playing this music; and whilst playing the music that I was already playing was still enjoyable; I knew that I had a new calling, and I very soon quit Dark Horse in order to pursue it. In another coincidence, I was to meet my next future band mate at a party, purely by chance, soon afterwards. This was a young guitarist called John Buzza, who was a fan of many styles of music from rock guitar to classical. I explained that I had just discovered the music of Django Reinhardt, and was looking for another guitarist with which to play that style of music. John was already aware of Django Reinhardt, and had a couple of Django LPs in his collection. We had a long conversation and John was intrigued with the idea of playing this music. I had already been doing some work on it, and had bought myself a Yamaha APX electric/acoustic guitar with a cutaway, in order to get closer to the sound of this largely acoustic music; and John Buzza and I got together to form a Django styled guitar duo; which I christened with the name Swing ’91.
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