Jean "Django" Reinhardt was born January 23, 1910, in a Romani caravan camp at Liberchies, Belgium, to Jean Eugene Weiss, an Alsatian entertainer who performed under his wife's family name, and Laurence "Negros" Reinhardt. He grew up largely in Manouche Romani encampments on the edge of Paris, taught himself banjo-guitar as a boy, and by his early teens was working the city's bal-musette dance halls alongside accordionists including Guerino and Vetese Guerino, cutting his first recordings as a sideman in 1928.

On the night of November 2, 1928, a candle set fire to a stock of celluloid flowers his wife Bella had been making for sale, and Reinhardt was badly burned escaping the family caravan. His right leg was injured and the third and fourth fingers of his left hand were left permanently curled, leaving doctors convinced he would never play guitar again. Over an eighteen-month recovery he rebuilt his technique from nothing, working out a way to solo using only his index and middle fingers while reserving the two damaged fingers for chord shapes on the top strings, a limitation that became one of the most recognizable techniques in jazz guitar.

In 1934, promoter Pierre Nourry and critic Charles Delaunay, building on informal jam sessions at the Hotel Claridge on the Champs-Elysees, pushed Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli to form a permanent group: the Quintette du Hot Club de France, with Reinhardt's brother Joseph Reinhardt and Roger Chaput on rhythm guitar and Louis Vola on bass. Built entirely from strings, with no piano, horns or drums, the group was an immediate sensation in Europe, and its sides for the Ultraphone, Decca and Swing labels, including "Djangology," "Minor Swing" (1937) and "Daphne," made Reinhardt the first major jazz musician to emerge from outside the United States. In April 1937, Reinhardt and Grappelli joined visiting Americans Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Alix Combelle and Andre Ekyan for a single Paris studio date, billed to Hawkins's All-Star Jam Band, that produced "Crazy Rhythm" and "Honeysuckle Rose," one of the first meetings on record between European and visiting American jazz musicians.

War intervened in September 1939 while the Quintette was touring England. Reinhardt, uneasy with his limited English, returned to occupied France; Grappelli, judging it safer, stayed in London for the war's duration. Reinhardt spent the Occupation performing in Paris, at genuine personal risk as a Romani man under a regime that was murdering Roma elsewhere in Europe, and rebuilt the Quintette around clarinetist Hubert Rostaing in Grappelli's absence. This wartime lineup recorded roughly seventy sides, including Reinhardt's best-known composition, "Nuages," cut in December 1940 for Swing, which took on the character of an unofficial anthem of hope for Parisians awaiting liberation.

In 1946, Reinhardt toured the United States as a guest soloist with Duke Ellington's orchestra, his first sustained exposure to American audiences and his first prominent use of an amplified electric guitar. The tour drew a mixed reception, and he returned to France in 1947, resuming intermittent work with Grappelli through the late 1940s while also absorbing the new vocabulary of bebop, documented on a 1949-1950 run of Rome engagements with Italian musicians and, from January to April 1953, a series of quartet and quintet dates for Blue Star and for producer Norman Granz that paired him with younger modernists including pianist Martial Solal and vibraphonist Sadi.

Reinhardt settled in 1951 in Samois-sur-Seine, southeast of Paris on the Seine, largely retiring from touring life. His final recording session took place April 8, 1953, and included his own composition "Deccaphonie." On May 16, 1953, he collapsed from a brain hemorrhage in Fontainebleau while walking home from the Avon train station, and passed away the same day at age 43. He is buried in Samois-sur-Seine, which has hosted an annual festival in his honor since 1983.

Reinhardt's playing grew directly out of his injury: confined to two fretting fingers for single-note lines, he moved up and down the neck in wide, arcing positions that guitarists with a full set of fingers rarely used, producing long, rhythmically free phrases built from tremolo picking, chromatic runs and sudden octave leaps that had no real precedent on the instrument. He fused the harmonic language of American swing with the driving, syncopated rhythm-guitar pulse of Manouche musette playing, known as "la pompe," and effectively invented the style now called gypsy jazz or jazz manouche, still played today in essentially the vocabulary he set down, from the annual festival at Samois-sur-Seine to touring Manouche guitarists such as Biréli Lagrène and Stochelo Rosenberg. His influence reached directly into American jazz guitar: Chet Atkins named him the single most influential guitarist of the twentieth century, B.B. King cited him as a formative influence on his own phrasing, and Jim Hall, Joe Pass, Wes Montgomery and Pat Metheny have all acknowledged direct debts to his vocabulary, several recording tribute albums built entirely around his repertoire. His reach extended well past jazz as well, cited as a formative influence by rock and country guitarists including Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Willie Nelson.