Nile Rodgers on his love for Django Reinhardt
Great guitarists know that to be a great player is to be a great student. The best rock players don’t just listen to rock music: they listen to jazz, blues, funk, and pop to get ideas they wouldn’t hear in their comfort zone. That goes for any musician who takes themselves seriously, especially when it comes to musicians who lead bands or produce other artists. It should come as no surprise that one of the best music students is Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers.
Across his illustrious career, Rodgers pioneered the chicken scratch guitar style that became emblematic of disco and funk music. After turning his focus to behind the mixing board in the 1980s, Rodgers brought his encyclopedic knowledge of music to help realise projects by everyone from Diana Ross to David Bowie to Daft Punk. Whatever genre he finds himself working in, Rodgers knows how to find the tones and melodies that are just right.
With that in mind, Rodgers has followed the throughline of music back to some of the oldest Black genres in America: jazz and blues. While learning his chops as a teenager, jazz was an integral building block in Rodgers’ style, so much so that he briefly entertained the idea of being a professional jazz musician. One of the artists that inspired Rodgers to go down that path was Django Reinhardt.
“I started out really, really loving Wes Montgomery and then for a bit, I started to go into the Django Reinhardt school – I really got into the Gypsy jazz thing,” Rodgers told Guitar World back in 2021. “But then practical life tends to take over, and I realised that my life was going to be, for a certain amount of time, playing other people’s music.”
“That was going to be my job: I was not going to play my own music, I was going to play other people’s music,” Rodgers said. “I needed to have a guitar that satisfied composers and producers and artists, so I started playing different styles of hollowbody guitar. Eventually, I worked my way to a 335, and then that just didn’t quite feel right to me, and so I went back to the other big box guitars.”
Eventually, Rodgers got his hands on a 1940 Selmer-Maccaferri, the same brand of guitar that Reinhardt himself favoured throughout his career. When Rodgers began auctioning off some of his guitars to assist the We Are Family Foundation, the Maccaferri was among the lot to go on the block. “I really do have guitars with fabulous pedigree,” Rodgers told Rolling Stone at the time of the auction. “I have a Django Reinhardt that even Django Reinhardt didn’t have!”
Check out Nile Rodgers playing Django Reinhardt’s ‘Limehouse Blues’ down below.
