Django Reinhardt played his incredibly fast improvised lines using only two functional fingers because his ring and pinky fingers were fused together after a fire.

5:09about Django is that he was in a fire, and he had two of his third and fourth finger, so his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together. He had no use of them. Although he could use them while he was chording, but a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he's just playing with two fingers. And it's amazing. - That... What is that? So that's Gypsy Jazz.

5:48- That's Gypsy Jazz, yeah. Him, Stéphane Grappelli was a violinist that played with him a lot. - How much of this is improvisation? - Everything he's doing there is improvised. - It feels so free. And fun like swing, and then at least you said pre-bebop. So bebop was a kind of jazz that was also influential on you in your own life journey. And it's this complicated, legendary kind of jazz that was very influential on the music that

6:27followed. So what was bebop? - Well, after the big bands were happening in the, you know, from the '20s through the '40s, Small, people would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with. And Charlie Parker, who's really kind of the, one of the main figures of early bebop, really developed the language of it. Usually, the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions-

6:54... that they would use as vehicles to improvise over. A lot of them were AA, BA form. And Charlie Parker created this language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era. You know, think of people like Benny Goodman of that era. They would have really fast tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that, chromatic notes. - Chromatic notes are just notes next to each other on-