Okay, so it’s not more bondage-from-old-movies footage. But the named ‘Django’ and the word ‘Unchained’ actually do belong with each other thanks to a repulsive Quentin Tarantino film called ‘Django Unchained.’ Thus my excuse for moving from chained women to Django Reinhardt. Above is a remarkable short film of the great gypsy jazz guitarist with violinist Stéphane Grappelli and their band the Quintette du Hot Club de France performing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hastily organized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade (sometimes known as ‘Low Greed’ for reasons I can’t get into right now) as a way to introduce the band’s unique style of guitar- and violin-based jazz to the British public before their first UK tour. As Michael Dregni writes in Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing:

The Quintette was unknown to the British public, and there was no telling how their new music would resonate. So, Grade sought to educate his audience. He hired a movie crew to film a six-minute-plus promotional short entitled Jazz “Hot” to be shown in British theaters providing a lesson in jazz appreciation to warm up the crowds.

That would explain the didactic tone of the first two and a half minutes of the film, which plods along as a remedial lesson on the nature of jazz.  Although the sequences of Reinhardt and the band playing were obviously synchronized to a previously recorded track, Jazz “Hot” is the best surviving visual document of the legendary guitarist’s two-fingered fretting technique, which he developed after losing the use of most of his left hand in a fire. And on that unchained note…