This truly makes me happy. It’s John Lewis discussing and then playing his composition Django. It’s a pretty well known jazz standard made most famous by the Modern Jazz Quartet(of which John Lewis was a member). Lewis had a background in classical music which explains the strong influence in this piece. I like two things about it -

1.) You can hear the musical tradition in it from Classical, to all kinds of jazz variants from ultra sophisticated Bill Evans style comping to those old minor key blues notes from New Orleans.

2.) Lewis plays it a new way every time - not just different solos or alternate harmonies like most Jazz musicians, but he really reinvents the song each time he plays it - changes the feel completely in one section or emphasizes different parts of the melody in another. I have maybe ten version of this song and he changes each up enough that I can tell pretty quickly which version I’m hearing if you just “dropped the needle” anywhere on this song.

Kudos to Billy Taylor(himself a legendary jazz pianist) for capturing this interview before Lewis passed.

Django by John Lewis