The guitarist Jerry Garcia couldn’t ignore: “the model”
Some of the best guitarists often seem like they’re channelling their genius from somewhere else entirely. The band might be in fine form, but the idea of taking the listener on a journey every time you take a guitar solo is reserved only for the best musicians in the world.
Jerry Garcia may have been in that guitar club, but he knew that the art of speaking through one’s instrument came back to Django Reinhardt.
When looking at how Garcia worked within the Grateful Dead, it was never out of the question for him to have influences outside of rock and roll. The band were always looking to expand their craft, which usually meant going through millions of different styles, either turning towards country and bluegrass at one moment and making down-and-dirty blues at the next.
While a lot of people tend to get swept up in the sounds of Garcia’s guitar and the influence of a certain substance whenever they listen to any Grateful Dead song, the musician actually has a lot more in common with Reinhardt than many realised, down to him having certain parts of his fingers not working.
Even though Garcia could squeeze raw emotion out of his instrument, he ended up getting there through pain due to an accident where the tips of two of his fingers were cut off. The idea of playing with fingers that are barely hanging on is one thing, but Reinhardt had the ultimate uphill battle when two of his fingers were left completely paralysed when he began his career as a jazz guitarist.
What makes that parallel even more striking is how both players turned limitation into identity. Rather than trying to play like everyone else, Reinhardt developed an entirely new fingering technique that became central to his sound. Garcia, in his own way, adopted a similarly fluid approach, favouring phrasing and feel over rigid technical perfection.
It’s that sense of adaptability that ties the two together more than any specific style. Both guitarists approached the instrument as something to be explored rather than mastered in a conventional sense, finding ways to express themselves despite physical setbacks. In doing so, they proved that great playing isn’t about having every advantage, but about making the most of whatever you have.
No artist was going to let such a setback slow them down, and Reinhardt’s finest music ended up coming from making the best of what he still had. Listening back to his records, Reinhardt does with two fingers what most people can’t do if they had seven, showboating when he wanted but never taking away from making a great song.
For Garcia, this was how all music should be made, saying, “Well, Django Reinhardt is like the model guitarist for me. There is so much passion in his playing, both in terms of invention and expressiveness, and you can feel his attitude, his emotion, in his playing.” It’s one thing to deliver emotion on just one song, but both Reinhardt and Garcia left their best playing on the stage.
Throughout his time in the Dead, Garcia steered the ship with his instrument half the time, taking time to flesh out the arrangements live by extending the piece into sweeping solos that usually went on for as long as the group wanted. While many would call this the beginning of the jam band and blame it for inspiring hackey-sack-kicking jokers around the world, Reinhardt had the same mojo when he improvised, going off on tangents that only looked to serve the music rather than grandstand.
Garcia even pulled a little bit from how Reinhardt played with his clean tone, having the same kind of rounded tone when playing the solo on later classics like ‘Alabama Getaway’. Rock music may still be a pop-themed animal, but for both Garcia and Reinhardt, music wasn’t meant to be confined to just three minutes. It was about expressing oneself, and sometimes, it takes a few solos for a song to turn into a living musical being.
