History of Gypsy jazz and the Sinti

Linguistic and genetic research points to an origin in northwestern India more than a thousand years ago. Groups moved slowly westward through Persia, Armenia, and the Byzantine world, reaching the Balkans by the late Middle Ages. From the early fifteenth century, written records appear in Western Europe. In 1417 a group is mentioned in Hildesheim. In 1420 they are recorded in the Netherlands and Belgium. In 1427 a larger party arrives near Paris. These travellers were often called “Egyptians” in the chronicles. Among themselves they later became known as Sinti in the German-speaking lands and Manouche in France.

Over the centuries the Sinti established a continuous presence in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Many remained mobile, working as craftsmen, horse traders, and musicians. Others settled while keeping strong family networks that crossed borders. Music was central. Small string ensembles — violins, later guitars, and double bass — played for dances, fairs, and private gatherings. The repertoire absorbed local colours: Hungarian-influenced scales, French musette waltzes, German and Dutch folk tunes. Yet the core style remained recognisably Sinti, passed from parent to child by ear.

Some Sinti families also took the restaurant job: csárdás, hora, Russian romances — the same café book Hungarian and Romanian Roma were hired to play. Tata Mirando in the Netherlands is that Sinti road, not the Hot Club road. The Roma and Sinti chapter explains why the setlist can match while the family does not.

By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these musical families were firmly rooted in the countries that would become the heartland of Gypsy jazz. In Germany the name Sinti had become the preferred self-designation. In France the related Manouche families lived around Paris and in the east. In the Netherlands and Belgium smaller but continuous groups maintained the same traditions of travel, craft, and music. The sound that later became known as Gypsy jazz already existed in embryo: strong rhythm, emotional melody, and an oral way of learning.

The families did not wait for a critic to name the music. Records later said gypsy jazz, or jazz manouche. Gypsy is the outside word. Sinti, in the German-speaking lands, and Manouche, in France, are the words many of the families use for themselves. This is a Sinti and Manouche music, built in the 1930s on older family playing, and still lived in. The same hands may also play Balkan brass, flamenco or Hungarian restaurant numbers. Those remain other styles.

Siv B. Lie, RomArchive Jazz: Gypsy jazz began to emerge as a genre in the 1950s, when musicians who had worked with Reinhardt kept playing his music. The term Gypsy jazz, and the names in other languages, did not come into usage until the 1970s, after a Sinti revival in the German collective Musik Deutscher Zigeuner.

Lie also writes that the style is not necessarily representative of all Manouche and Sinti performing and listening. Reinhardt’s own records, she writes, are jazz. The genre name came later.

Marcel Loeffler, Manouche accordionist from Alsace, told Lie on 8 November 2013 that the word jazz manouche did not exist in Django’s time. He said it came much later, beginning in the 1990s. Before that, people called it French jazz. Two dates for the public name: Lie’s 1970s, Loeffler’s 1990s. Both stay on the page.

In the 1930s one of those musicians changed everything. Jean “Django” Reinhardt, born into a Manouche family with roots linking Belgium, France, and the wider Sinti world, fused the old family style with the new American jazz he heard in Paris. With the Quintette du Hot Club de France he created a sound that was both modern and deeply rooted: the driving “la pompe” rhythm, the fiery single-note lines, the emotional depth that came from generations of oral tradition. Django did not invent Sinti music. He carried it into a new century and gave it a name the wider world would recognise.

In the summer of 1934 Django and Grappelli were already in Louis Vola’s band at the Hôtel Claridge on the Champs-Élysées. After the paid set they kept playing in a side room. Pierre Nourry and Charles Delaunay, from the Hot Club de France — a listeners’ society around Hugues Panassié — heard it and pushed them to become a group. The first sides that winter sometimes went out as “Delaunay’s Jazz.” The musicians made the music. The Club gave it a door and, later, the Swing label that carried the records.

The style has a body you can hold. In the early 1930s Mario Maccaferri drew a steel-string guitar for the Selmer shop in Paris: a cutaway, an internal resonator, first a wide D-shaped soundhole, later a smaller oval. Maccaferri left the firm in 1933. Selmer kept the oval-hole model. Django played it. The guitar was loud enough for a dance room with no pickup. Players of this music still look for that shape, or an honest copy of it.

The rhythm guitar’s right hand is la pompe. A down-stroke that lands like a bass drum, a light catch like a snare, no drummer required. Nobody learns it from a page. You watch an uncle until the room locks, then the violin and the lead guitar can leave the ground.

The music did not pass through the 1940s unharmed. Across German-speaking Europe the Nazi state hunted Sinti and Roma. Families were registered, deported, and murdered. At Auschwitz-Birkenau a family camp held about twenty-three thousand; almost none of them came home. The total killed across Europe is counted in the hundreds of thousands. This is not a side note to the records. It is why so many German Sinti players of the next generation treated Django’s tunes as survival, not nostalgia.

Django remained in occupied France. Fame, patrons, and luck kept him alive in a country that was sending Romani people to their deaths. Grappelli was in London. The Quintette as it had been was over.

Franz “Schnuckenack” Reinhardt, a German Sinti violinist and a relative of Django’s line, never met him. In 1938 his family was driven east. They lived in Częstochowa under a false paper, always moving. He escaped shooting more than once. A younger brother did not: Auschwitz. After the war Schnuckenack put the music on German stages so a public that had tried to erase it would have to hear it.

After his death the music did not disappear. In the 1960s and 1970s a new generation of German Sinti musicians — Schnuckenack Reinhardt, Häns’che Weiss, Titi Winterstein and others — revived and strengthened the style, treating Django’s legacy as part of their own living heritage. The same pattern held in France and the Low Countries: fathers teaching sons, uncles teaching nephews, the repertoire expanding while the core feeling remained.

Today the music still travels the same roads. The jam sessions in Paris, the camps in the Netherlands, the festivals in Germany, the family gatherings that keep the old tunes alive — all sit on a foundation older than any recording. For many Sinti families, Gypsy jazz is not only a style. It is also a way of remembering where they have been and who they are.

In the Netherlands a small association took the old Paris name. Stichting Hot Club de France Nederland was founded in 1983 to keep Django and Grappelli’s style heard when almost nobody was playing it live. Their first concert was the WASO Quartet. Forty years on they still list the jams and count about a hundred Hot Club bands in the country. That is the amateur and professional circle around the Rosenberg, Schäfer and Basily families — not a replacement for them.

In Alsace, APPONA’s papers in Strasbourg show how jazz manouche became a named community practice in the 1970s–2000s, not only a Paris 1930s story. Siv B. Lie’s Django Generations uses that fonds. Lie also co-curated RomArchive Music. The living circuit of jams sits on Gypsy Jazz Hub. The paper of how the family became public sits here.

Musik Deutscher Zigeuner, Da Camera Song, Heidelberg. Schnuckenack Reinhardt Quintett: volume 1, February 1969; volume 4, April 1972. Wikipedia: volume 3, 1970, a live record with singer Lida Goulesco. The first concert of that quintet, Wikipedia: November 1967, Heidelberg.

Häns’che Weiss played lead guitar on volumes 3 and 4. English Wikipedia: he left in September 1972 and formed his own quintet. German Wikipedia, citing Da Camera Song: the old quintet dissolved in May 1972. Both months stay filed. The chairs are not merged into one family.

Marcel Loeffler, interviewed by Lie on 8 November 2013: in the 1980s he toured Europe with guitarist Mandino Reinhardt. Festivals in Italy, England, Norway, Russia, Poland. Accordion, not only guitar. Mandino is named as a playing partner, not as a new Reinhardt kinship.

Most of this music never saw a microphone. Waso Grünholz is the famous case. There were others: an uncle on rhythm, a cousin who knew a waltz that never got a title, a singer who never left the family circle. The archive is the family. The records are what leaked out.

This history does not end in the past. It continues every time a young player picks up a guitar or a violin and learns the rhythm the way it has always been learned: by ear, by heart, and from the people who came before. The names of tonight’s gigs, and the rooms where the pompe still locks, are kept on Gypsy Jazz Hub.

Paris — Django’s public city: the Claridge, the Hot Club, the records. The Ferret guitar family — Baro, Sarane, Matelo — is named there, a different family from Lafertin. Forbach and the east — Manouche guitar on the German border. Germany — Schnuckenack, Häns’che Weiss, Titi Winterstein after the war. The Low Countries — Rosenberg, Schäfer, Basily, Limberger. Midi and Alsace — the southern French school, and the Alsatian Manouche guitar of Biréli Lagrène.

The same Dutch cities hired another family line: Hungarian and Romanian restaurant violin — Veres, Tata Mirando, Serban — csárdás and hora in the Kurhaus. La pompe is another right hand. That story is the Holland–Hungary chapter. These are kinship and teaching, not brand names.

Before 1934: musette, caravans, and the banjo. 1928: the caravan fire that damaged Django’s left hand and forced the two-finger technique the world later imitated. 1934: the Quintette. 1939–45: war, Nuages, survival. 1946–53: America, return, Samois-sur-Seine. After 1953 the records outlive the man. 1968 onward: the festival at Samois, then the world. 1983: Hot Club de France Nederland. Now: a circle, not a museum — and a sister site for the people who still show up.