Django Reinhardt's Gypsy Jazz Guitar Solos Arranged for 5-String Banjo

By Steve Brauer

Twelve classic gypsy jazz guitar solos arranged for 5-string banjo in the original keys in which Django Reinhardt recorded them. The solos featured in this collection span a range of eight different keys, all of which are performed in standard G tuning and without the use of a capo. This book is recommended for intermediate and advanced players looking to expand their knowledge of the banjo fingerboard outside the bluegrass norm. Presented in tab and standard notation, with left hand fingering suggestions and ideas for right hand solutions, all songs contain detailed performance notes as well as various suggestions and recommendations for adapting Django's guitar techniques to the particular tendencies of each individual banjo student. Includes a selected discography and bibliography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781682220979

Book preview

Author

Introduction

I started teaching myself to play the banjo during the summer of 2000, working with the Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo book and vinyl LP record. Once I began researching other banjo instructional material, I found that much of it was out-of-print (as were the vinyl recordings from which they were taken) and therefore difficult to find. As a result, I started collecting rare, 5-string banjo books, magazines and LP recordings which led me to many forgotten virtuosos and innovators. Tab sources for many of the banjo players mentioned in this book can be found in the bibliography and on the Banjo Newsletter website. There are now countless videos online and many of the vinyl recordings of the older and more obscure players have now been re-released on CD. Tony Trischka wrote about several of these players in his books Melodic Banjo and Masters of the 5-String Banjo (co-written with Pete Wernick). One of the most important lost masters of innovation and creativity Trischka mentions in both of these publications is Don Reno.

Somewhere in the course of my banjo research I read that Don Reno had once been called the Django Reinhardt of the 5-string banjo. I remember thinking how cool Django's jazz lines would sound on the banjo, but that was as far as I went with that line of thought at the time. It just didn't seem humanly possible to play his solos on the banjo (sometimes it still doesn't). Surely someone would have done it long before now if it were - and if they had, I would have bought THAT book instead of writing this one. So as it turned out, I found myself forced to write the book I wanted to purchase - since it didn't exist. I never really wanted to do all the work required to put Django under a banjo microscope, (so to speak) but I was left to my own devices and in the end, I really just wanted to see if it was a mountain I could climb, given the tools at my disposal and my will to move forward as a musician. I have learned a lot and am a better player and teacher for it. Interestingly enough, Reno worked up his own version of the jazz standard Limehouse Blues, which is considered a classic banjo arrangement to this day, but he did not play it the way Django did. Still, up to that point in banjo history, when comparing