Jazz can be hard. Music doesn’t have to be hard. It’s music, a universal human art-form that has been around forever. But sometimes, music can get complicated. Someone who knows what’s going on can appreciate the works of Johann Sebastian Bach in the way he uses mathematical parallels in tonality and recursive melodies in his fugues and Brandenburg concertos, but to the uninitiated, it’s all rather quite overwhelming. The same goes for jazz. With its complex voicing, chord structures, and its emphasis on off-the-cuff improvisation, jazz can often come across as hopelessly opaque and bewildering to people who are not used to it. And I totally understand that. Listening to all of these albums in chronological order means that I have a lot of jazz front-loaded into the list, and that was certainly intimidating at first. But jazz, for all of its convolutions, has the ability to captivate and bewitch those who have become dissatisfied with other types of music. Jazz as a genre is fundamentally different than the vast majority of genres that came before and after, and it can grab you the way it grabbed Reinhardt and Grappelli.

Meet Django Reinhardt. A Romani-born man, he grew up living the traditional lifestyle of his people – in caravans, on the road, playing music, usually with traditional European string instruments. Reinhardt showed great and amazing talent as a guitarist from early on, a talent that was almost taken away from him permanently when his left hand was irreparably damaged in a caravan fire. But Reinhardt, being the sort of musician that he was, relearned the guitar, using only his thumb, index, and middle fingers to press the strings, becoming even better than he used to be, even when starting again with less. Django eventually left the Romani life and began to busk full-time, and then one day he heard records of American icon Louis Armstrong that changed his life. Reinhardt set himself to learning this new music, “jazz”, for himself, and it was during that time that he met Grappelli.

Meet Stephane Grappelli. His life is something like myth: a father off fighting World War I, a childhood in a brutal orphanage under horrid conditions. Upon his father’s return, Grappelli received a violin, and he began to teach himself, fascinated with the life of buskers who made their money playing on the street. Grappelli’s musical outlook changed upon hearing American violinist Joe Ventui play a standard called “Dinah”. You see, the thing about jazz in those days is that it was very much American, and very much lacking in string instruments, especially guitar and violin. But Grappelli and Reinhardt sought to change that, and, finding a musical kinship, formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France, an all-string European jazz band. The group disbanded at the start of World War II, but Reinhardt and Grappelli got back together afterwards and toured extensively, a time during which the recordings of Djangology were created. These recordings were never compiled and released as a whole until 1961, but the collection gives us more than an hour of some of the earliest gypsy-jazz guitar and violin from two of the most talented and influential jazz musicians of all time.

And this is where I kind of come back to jazz being hard. Djangology will probably work better as background music for most of you. Sometimes, it does for me. But sometimes, I listen closely and it blows me right over. Reinhardt’s guitar playing is more than amazing, and it’s actually more than more than amazing because he’s playing all of his solos with only three fingers! That alone should be enough to encourage you to listen a little bit more closely. You may not always understand the scales, voicings, and turnarounds that Reinhardt uses to create an inventive, wonderful solo, but it will sure be fun to listen to if nothing else. The same goes for Grappelli’s violin as well. Their Romani-inflected jazz joy romp, when you peer under the surface, is actually quite engaging and engrossing. Several of these songs are originals and have since become standards, like “Minor Swing” and “Heavy Artillery”. Others are cover recordings of standard classics like “Beyond the Sea” and “I Got Rhythm”, which are brought to life in a new European way through Djangology’s incessant invention. Other songs still are jazzed up versions of classical pieces by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Djangology is a record of reckless, ruthless experimentation. For Reinhardt and Grappelli, nothing was sacred, but jazz could assimilate just about anything and turn it into something new. It’s an enduring quality of the genre that has influenced jazz musicians from that period of time onward, especially Miles Davis’ later work.

If anything, Djangology is a great introduction to jazz (though I would also recommend the recordings of Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives and Sevens) because it allows you to discover jazz alongside two great musicians discover it as they play. Peer through this window into post-war Europe and see Grappelli and Reinhardt trading off solos, tinkering with songs and style, creating something altogether new and wonderful in the process.

Remember that song you sang in grade school, “This land is your land/this land is my land/from California/to the New York Islands”? Who doesn’t? That song was written by a certain Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, who can possibly lay the claim to be the most influential American songwriter of all time. That’s a pretty bold statement for me to make, but when you listen to many of the other folk musicians that rose out of the twentieth century, they all lift material off Guthrie. From Dylan to Seeger to Springsteen, Guthrie is the root of many branches that have sprouted in the American folk and rock scene. What you may not remember, or even know, is that “This Land Is Your Land” was a political protest song against the nationalism and patriotism of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” being played incessantly on the radio.

Woody Guthrie was a man who constantly lived on the run. His whole life, he was on the run from the Huntington’s Disease, which previously had claimed the life of his mother. Guthrie was also on the run from the poverty of the Great Depression and the endless blight of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Guthrie ran towards something for most of his life as well, “bound for glory”, in his own words. He may in fact have found it, but only after a long and difficult quest, the details of which are revealed in his 1940 album, Dust Bowl Ballads.

For readers who may not know, the Dust Bowl was a drought that occurred in the American Midwest during the Depression in the 1930s. The scope of the drought was enormous, centering in Kansas but extending outwards to Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Guthrie’s home state of Texas, along with many other states and parts of states. Today, it’s ranked as a natural disaster alongside the Great Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, and Hurricane Katrina. But, while many of the aforementioned disasters were sudden cataclysms that did their work with swift deadliness, the Dust Bowl worked slowly over the course of a decade to sap the life from the inhabitants of the American Midwest, resulting in many years where almost no precipitation was seen, making already financially difficult times even more so. Guthrie and his family were one of the many who realized that there was no prosperity to be had in the bone-dry land of Texas, so Guthrie left his family and struck out for California like so many others, hoping to find a way to make a living. It is out of this period of his life whence Dust Bowl Ballads comes. Dust Bowl Ballads ranks on par with John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath as one of the foremost works of art that brought the struggles of the Depression to the front of American consciousness. Guthrie even has a two-part song entitled “Tom Joad” on the record, which retells the novel in song. However, Dust Bowl Ballads holds a forever unique place in record music history as most likely the first album to feature a continuous narrative theme – the first concept album, if you will.

Of course, Guthrie’s music is, like all great art, political. But Guthrie, the clever songwriter that he is, often relates his politics by narrowing his to a particular story for a song. He observes the microcosmos and fits them into their place in the macrocosmos. Take, as an example, “Blowin’ Down This Road”, telling the simple story of a mistreated vagabond trudging down the road, hoping to make it to where “the water tastes like wine”. On the surface, it’s a pretty straightforward account of Guthrie’s story, as well as many others. Like many of the songs on this record, it’s told as plainly as possible, with minimal figurative language. Nevertheless, when the narrator of the song shouts: “I ain’t gonna be treated this-a way!”, we sense both the personal urgency of a personal situation and the broad urgency of a national situation, the helplessness of many vagabonds suffering abuse by the wealthy and the government. Woody’s simplicity is actually his greatest strength. Many songwriters are praised for their command over elaborate and sometimes extravagant poetic language. For Guthrie, simple, sing-along choruses like “So Long (It’s Been God to Know You)” and “Do Re Mi” are their enduring strengths. They’re written for the people they’re written about – common folk scraping dollars together to get by. It’s a lofty achievement that Guthrie claims here, a gold standard chased by many an American songwriter, but rarely ever realized.

Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads is a landmark of American folk music and tradition that certainly deserves to be studied and enjoyed to this day. Often, popular music helps people to sort out and work through the social problems and issues of the current day. The 1930s, a period where recorded music was not nearly as prevalent as in the present, can be illuminated and seen through the light of song and poetry with this record. Guthrie’s voice is nothing special; he has a very plain, blunt singing style. His guitar amounts to simple strumming with melodic voicings that any guitar student can nail with minimal practice. His lyricism is concise and direct, lacking the extravagant metaphors that sometimes characterized his followers. And yet, that directness only makes his political poetry even stronger, even more prevalent when listening today. Guthrie’s bold statement, a Depression-era concept album of hard times and tragedy, has become the root of a great, wonderful tree that forms the body of modern American folk music.

Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. Or so they say. The image of that lone, dusty man, standing at a crossroads at midnight, meeting the Evil One himself has become the myth and the legend, a legend that informed blues, rock-and-roll, and American Mythology as a whole for years and years afterward.