POST # 132 Stochelo Rosenberg on Developing His Playing

I cannot read notes and I never went to music school. Sometimes they give me a piece of music and when I say that I cannot read notes they gaze at me in a strange way. I was raised among my family and I learned a little from my cousins. The only way to improve my playing was by lowering the speed of my record player and thus figuring out the music of Django. That’s how I developed my playing. What I did in the beginning was pure Django. After that I listened to and learned to play more types of music. That brought me to a style of my own with the music of Django as the base. - Stochelo Rosenberg

( I think written music is just one way of conveying music to another person when you can not hear that person playing it. Here Stochelo plays Django's Tiger in a casual jam at Samois. - Ed)