Lulo Reinhardt defines an original and impassioned sound
The grand-nephew of the great Django Reinhardt hosts International Guitar Night
Lulo Reinhardt.
Massey Theatre presents International Guitar Night on February 1
WE’LL SPARE YOU the guitar chatter, the technical details of his signature instrument, and the discussion around flatpicks (super-heavy for him, none for me). But something came up during the less formal portion of our interview that says a lot about Lulo Reinhardt, who’ll host the 2025 edition of International Guitar Night at New Westminster’s Massey Theatre on February 1.
We were talking about hand care, and the accident that had temporarily reduced me to only two working fingers on my fretting paw. Almost as annoying as the injury was the typical response from non-musicians, who’d try to cheer me up by pointing out that the great jazz manouche guitarist Django Reinhardt was somehow able to work his magic with only half the full complement of digits. “That’s all very well,” I’d say. “But I am not Django!”
“Me too, me too,” Lulo reassures me, laughing. “I am not Django, either!”
Lulo is related to the great man, however: he’s Django’s grand-nephew and grew up in a similar environment of family music-making and cross-cultural exploration. And, like his immortal ancestor, he’s used those factors to define an original and impassioned sound.
His beginnings might not have been entirely inspired, however.
“You knew, all of my cousins, we grew up with Django Reinhardt’s music in the ’60s,” he explains in a telephone call from Anchorage, Alaska shortly before International Guitar Night’s tour was due to kick off in nearby Kodiak. “I was born in ’61, and I started playing guitar in ’66, because my father was a musician. And his brother was an amazing guitar player, so of course there was only Django Reinhardt in this time. I started as a rhythm guitar player; I played rhythm guitar for more than 20 years with the family band, which was called the Mike Reinhardt Sextet. Mike was like a superstar at the age of 10; he played like Django, exactly like Django, so of course he needed a rhythm guitar player.
“Later on I played bass also, for more than 15 years, and besides Django Reinhardt we also had an Elvis cover band,” Lulo continues. “One of my cousins, whose name is also Django Reinhardt, he sang exactly like Elvis, so we started this band in 1975, when Elvis was still alive, and there I played also rhythm guitar and bass. And the funny thing is that my cousin couldn’t speak any English, not one word, but he was singing all the Elvis songs. Sometimes people didn’t understand what he was singing, but his voice was amazing! Just like Elvis.”
Even before that, Reinhardt was acclimatizing himself to the stage, and to public scrutiny too. “The Gypsies, they’re really critical,” he says, laughing. “They look at your fingers and say ‘Ah, what are you playing? You need to practise!’ But we always had an audience, ever since I was a kid. That’s why I like the stage, I like the audience. But not everyone is made for the stage, you know. We have many musicians in the family, but not everyone is good on-stage. In private it is different: playing in the living room for family, it’s easy. But if you see a hundred people looking at you, it’s a different world, even when you come from this family and you’ve played at thousands of parties!”
Extroverted yet easy-going, Lulo Reinhardt is a great choice to host International Guitar Night, which this year will also feature the British classical-guitar virtuoso and composer Alexandra Whittingham, the Congolese-born innovator and Rhiannon Giddens collaborator Niwel Tsumbu, and the German tapping-and-fingerstyle specialist Sönke Meinen. It helps that he is essentially a fusion musician, rooted in family tradition, but also deeply influenced by Spanish flamenco, Brazilian bossa nova, contemporary jazz, and by his globe-trotting travels, which have included extended visits to North Africa and South Asia, both areas where he feels an ancestral connection.
And at this point it seems a good time to explore the “Gypsy” issue. Gypsy is how Reinhardt describes himself, and he says that his musical approach is rooted in Gypsy jazz. The preference in many parts of the English-speaking world is to use the term “Roma”, but the guitarist says that’s somewhat less than accurate.
“Gypsies are two tribes,” Reinhardt contends. “I’m a Sinti; Django Reinhardt was a Sinti. The Gypsies left India 1,100 years ago, and the Roma are those Gypsies who went to the Balkans. They are Roma and we are Sinti, but we all came from this area of Rajasthan, Punjab, and the land called Sindh. That’s why ‘Sinti’.
“It’s a long story,” he adds. “There are still thousands of Gypsies in India, but the name ‘Gypsy’ came from Egypt, because when they left India they went to Persia, Egypt, and Armenia. And then in Armenia the Sinti and Roma split: the Sintis went to Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany, and the Roma went straight to the Balkans.”
Members of both groups eventually migrated through the Middle East and North Africa to Spain. Along the way they enriched every culture they met, while also borrowing liberally from other groups, creating many vibrant schools of music and drawing on everything from classical violin virtuosity to, well, the singing of Tupelo, Mississippi’s most famous son. However you want to brand it, Gypsy music is multiculturalism in action, and Lulo Reinhardt is one of Django’s most accomplished heirs. 
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