GYPSY.

A happy place to spend a winter afternoon in Paris is a bar called the Chope des Puces, just outside the Clignancourt flea market. Every Sunday, for longer than anyone can remember, two battered, time-worn guitarists have met there to play, on battered, time-worn guitars, popular jazz tunes in the manner of the Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and his Quintet of the Hot Club of France. The ringing chords, the jaunty minor-key-ballade melodies, the peculiar heavy, heartbreak vibrato, the broken-icicle chromatic runs up and down the fretboard, all played against the steady boom-chick, boom-chick of the cast-iron guitar chords: the cherished Django sound is there, and ...