33,333

In a few moments, the blog counter will hit 33,333...what that actually represents is rather nebulous, but after 3 yeas of thebrainpolice, I think I have to celebrate.

So here is Django Reinhardt and his Hot Band back in 1936 performiong a little song named Nagasaki. Reinhardt was one of the greatest jazz guitar players of all time, still able to drop jaws with his amazingly light facile brilliant improvisation.

He is still influencing players today who can only dream of playing as brilliantly as this three fingered gypsy genius.

Of course the Hot Band was all the more hotter with Stephan Grapelli, the violinist who stremlined the sound and complimented Djangos genius with his own!

Paris was a hot bed of Jazz with clubs springing up in every basement cubbyhole available in the 1930's. The Artist, Poet and Writer, Jean Cocteau was a more than passable jazz drummer. The writer Georges Simenon was seduced by Josephine Baker. Much of this action occurred in the little Boit de Nuit, Le Hot Club, where Reinhart and Grappelli held court for years!

I am posting this for a fellow who goes by the tag TLGK. Colonel, if you stop by here...this is a very good place to begin to appreciate the real cross fertilization of jazz as it became a genre of world music very early on.

What happened in the cosmopolitan centers all over the world influenced what was happening everywhere else and music and visual art were always the avant garde of style. They led and we followed, joyfully!