the dance hall was a dank underground cave,a truly infernal underworld

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Next to Le Rat Mort on place Pigalle stood the grand restaurant l’Abbaye de Thélème. Here sometime in 1926, Django came upon a novel sound. Through the nightclub’s windows he could hear the music: It was hot, exotic, strange. It was music so amazing, so different that the world seemed to have changed the direction it spun. Clarinets howled. Saxophones honked. Trombones wailed. Trumpets screamed. And it was all propelled by wild drumming. The sound was unlike anything Django had ever heard, beyond anything he could imagine. Each afternoon, he made a pilgrimage from his family’s caravan to the restaurant