Story Behind The Song

I saw this Broadjam listing and thought I could probably write some Gypsy Jazz. I remember seeing the movie Chocolat with Johnny Depp about Gypsys and I thought, how tough can that be? Anyhow I wrote a piece but it came out with more of a Merengue feel. You know Carmen Miranda with the fruit hat. I actually like Bugs Bunny's version. Not a bad piece, but not Gypsy Jazz. I'll send it to you later. So I went on You Tube and punched up Gypsy Jazz. Boy, was I way off. Saw some wonderful stuff. The rhythm patterns tend to be fairly simple it's the lead lines that are intense. The Strat however doesn't do justice to that type of music. On your jazz axe I'm sure the more authentic feel of the music would come through. On most of the clips I saw including Django Reinhardt's everyone is playing an acoustic guitar. There's just something about the dry flat sound of a nylon string. Oddly enough there are usually one and mostly two guys on acoustics playing behind the lead guy and of course a guy on an upright doing root notes. For obvious reasons I didn't bother trying to come up with lead lines. Just an idea of what I saw those guys doing. There's a lot of the tunes with a singee songee violin which I suppose is traditional. Gypsy's around the campfire someone's gotta have a fiddle. A lot of the stuff is in minor keys and I know historically that the Gypsy culture has had a bad time of it, but I wanted to create something brighter. Did toss in a small minor refrain. I dunno I thought the listing was kinda funny it says Instrumentals Accepted: YES I didn't see any clips that had a vocalist!