Joe Pass - For Django (Japanese Pacific Jazz Stereo Vinyl LP)

Joe Pass - For Django | Vinyl LP - Japanese Pacific Jazz Stereo Reissue (JP-8728, Jazz Milestones Series, Toshiba Musical Industries)

• The album that made Joe Pass’s name, recorded across two sessions at Pacific Jazz Studios in Los Angeles in 1964 and widely regarded as the finest jazz guitar tribute to Django Reinhardt ever committed to tape
• A working quartet at its most intuitive, with rhythm guitarist John Pisano, bassist Jim Hughart and drummer Colin Bailey providing a supple, responsive framework that lets Pass’s bebop-rooted lines breathe
• Japanese pressing manufactured by Toshiba Musical Industries, sourced from the original Pacific Jazz stereo masters in the Jazz Milestones Series reissue programme

For Django was the first Pacific Jazz session where label owner Dick Bock let Joe Pass call his own shot. Pass had come back from years lost to addiction, rebuilding his reputation through the early Pacific Jazz quartet dates with producer Richard Bock. When it came time to record a personal statement, he chose to pay tribute to the guitarist who had first inspired him as a teenager in Pennsylvania, where he’d played in a band modelled on Django Reinhardt’s Hot Club sound. What makes the album exceptional is that Pass never imitates Reinhardt. He brings his own harmonic vocabulary, shaped far more by Charlie Christian and bebop than by gypsy jazz, to a programme of Reinhardt compositions, Reinhardt-associated standards and his own title track. The result is a conversation across eras rather than a pastiche. John Lewis’s “Django” opens the record with a quiet authority, and from there the quartet moves through “Nuages”, “Cavalerie” and “Django’s Castle” with warmth and swing, closing side two with a brisk “Limehouse Blues” that underlines how completely Pass had made this music his own.

The quartet’s chemistry is central to why the album holds up. John Pisano had taken it upon himself to serve as Pass’s dedicated rhythm guitarist, and their interplay across these ten tracks is a model of two-guitar jazz without ego. Jim Hughart’s bass lines are firm but never heavy, and Colin Bailey’s drumming is light enough to let the acoustic detail of the guitars come through. For Django was originally released as Pacific Jazz PJ-85 (mono) and ST-85 (stereo) in 1964, and has never been out of favour with collectors or critics since.

This is the Japanese stereo reissue on the Jazz Milestones Series, catalogue number JP-8728, manufactured by Toshiba Musical Industries Ltd. The release year is unknown but likely early-to-mid 1970s.