CCSinM

What's the innovation?

I've been thinking about Peter's question about Django's Dinah (1934), to which my answer wasn't very ...ummm... eloquent. Seems to me that there are interesting parallels to Armstrong's West End Blues (1925). Both were read by contemporary listeners as announcements of something new and distinctive, and both are now recognized as sui generis, and admired as pieces that one just can't be ho-hum about. The electricity and lift and inspiration of the improvization comes across 70 and 80 years later.
I can identify a number of other recordings that I feel that way about, personally --real gobsmackers, things that got and kept my attention from the first moment. I might even be able to persude a few others to have the same experience of frisson that I enjoy every time I hear them, though they don't have the instant recognition of, well, greatness for everybody that I hear coming through in both Dinah and West End Blues.
Now surely this is all pretty subjective, and we'd like to get a little closer to what specific features of the performances are "new". I'm working on it. The insight I picked up from the bits of film yesterday have to do, oddly, with the relation to the bal musette style that Django was playing in before he and Grappelly got together, exemplified by that button accordian segment, and we'll see this sort of transference from one instrument to another when we look at African guitar evolution: the right-hand patterns of the so-French lady accordianist seem to me to be part of the inspiration for Django's approach to Dinah, combined with the constraint of the successive notes having to be reachable by those TWO fingers.
Mystification? Maybe so. Still trying to sort it all out.
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Addendum: Django's Forgotten Era
By Wayne Jefferies has a pretty good summary discussion of style and innovation, including this:

During the thirties Django was at the forefront of the development of the guitar in Jazz. His records had begun to reach America, and many major American musicians would arrive in France to record with him, spreading the word of this amazing musician on their return to the USA. Who knows what effect he would have had on Be-Bop in America during the early forties, had he been able to get there, but just when he was at his peak, his career was radically affected by the outbreak of War. Cut off from the brewing pot of Be-Bop for six years , he was not privy to the developments of modern Jazz until it was well along the way. By which time the movements main guitar innovator - Charlie Christian had been dead from tuberculosis for four years!