There is something terrifying and beautiful about the idea that even the darkest times are human times where creativity sustains us and music plays. Guitarist Django Reinhardt had everything the Nazis hated. He was a gypsy, unrestrained, happy and wild, and he also played jazz, that music of “blacks and monkeys” sentenced to death by Goebbels. And yet his name shone in Paris during the German occupation, playing night after night to an audience of soldiers and SS men who idolized him. The Germans had made the French capital their center of rest and relaxation, and when the troops arrived they wanted wine, women and dance rhythms, a window to paradise where they could take breath for the next war effort.

Django Reinhardt provided them with happy melodies served with fire while he lived in silence that horrible irony. He was born in 1910 inside a caravan at a crossroads in Belgium (his dancer mother named him Django, a term that means “I wake up” in Romani) and began as a child to earn a living playing the violin in the back of the family trailer, weaving baskets and making bracelets with the bullet casings she collected from the battlefields of the First World War. Life had trained him for disaster. At the age of 18, when he was already a sensation whose name was spreading from mouth to mouth, he was trapped in the fire of his caravan and lost the use of two fingers on his left hand, which forced him to take to the street again, where he was rescued to become one of the most amazing guitarists in history (Jimi Hendrix, who often appears on the charts at number one, formed his Band of Gypsies in his honor).

During the years of the war, perhaps to confront the horror of the gypsy genocide (500,000 Roma lost their lives in the extermination camps) or so that he himself could not forget it, the musician took advantage of the sleepless nights in bed to write a mass for organ and choir that should be played every year during the gypsy pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in honor of Sara Kali or Sara Negra. He did not finish it. But there is a radio recording from 1944 that guitarists of different generations have kept alive, pushing the sound of his beautiful melody always forward.

On Thursday, when gypsies from all over Europe arrive en masse in the small coastal town of the Camargue, riders on white horses will carry Sara Kali wrapped in bright robes from the crypt of the medieval church (the Vatican does not recognize her as a saint). and all together they will enter the sea. Then, in the streets, amid a bustle of Catalan rumberos, Parisian jazz duos, Balkan music bands and Hungarian string players, the free spirit, pure joy and robust humanity of Reinhardt’s music will resonate.