Shooting Stars / Les Doigts de L’Homme (2004)
Formed in 2003, Les Doigts de L’Homme (The Fingers of Man) are celebrating their 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, they released an ambitious double album that reflects the journey they have taken over the years, showcasing an approach that is more original and personal than ever. Technically breathtaking “Manouche” or “Gypsy Jazz” rooted, but not bound by it.
While they clearly draw from the Django Reinhardt/Hot Club de France tradition (fast arpeggios, swing rhythm, chromatic runs), they push far beyond it. They incorporate: Rock & Funk (distortion effects, slap bass techniques adapted to acoustic guitar); Flamenco (rasgueados, percussive hits on the guitar body): Classical (counterpoint, fugue-like passages) and Latin & World rhythms (bossa nova, Afro-Cuban, Balkan odd meters). A friend suggested they sounded like a combination of Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin and Paco DeLucia
Since 2003, the year of their first album’s release, Les Doigts L’Homme have constantly reinvented themselves, questioning their aesthetic and artistic direction with each new album. Their initial Gypsy jazz style has evolved into an acoustic and electric jazz imbued with a more modern sensibility. Spanning acoustic and electric styles, the 23 tracks feature a creative, guitar-driven jazz sound that is both colorful and sophisticated. The track in the video is titled “Étoiles filantes” (Shooting Stars) and is the first single from the double album Erratic: The Art of Roaming (September 2024). The music is powerful and appropriate for a world phenomenon that happened in 1833.
Above is the most famous depiction of the 1833 Leonids, actually produced in 1888 for the Adventist book Bible Readings for the Home Circle. The engraving is by Adolf Vollmy based upon an original painting by the Swiss artist Karl Jauslin, that is in turn based on a first-person account of the 1833 storm by a minister, Joseph Harvey Waggoner on his way from Florida to New Orleans.
The title of the song Shooting Stars refers to an event in November of 1833 in North America that sparked a mass panic among the population. It was a great annual meteor shower associated with the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Known as the Leonids, they get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo: the meteors appear to radiate from that point in the sky.
It was the night the stars fell. In 1833, people across North America witnessed a powerful celestial event that appeared downright apocalyptic. Hundreds of thousands of streams of fire lit up the night sky in a massive shower that lasted from the early hours of the morning to the cusp of sunrise. On the night of November 12–13, 1833, 240,000 shooting stars rained down on North America—a thousand times the usual number—sparking fear among the population. Interpreted by Native Americans as a divine sign, this Leonid meteor shower foreshadowed the intensification of colonization, the rise of capitalism, and the end of a world where humans lived in symbiotic harmony with nature.
Near Independence, Missouri in Clay County, a refugee Mormon community watched the meteor shower on the banks of the Missouri River after having been driven from their homes by local settlers. Joseph Smith, the founder and first leader of Mormonism, afterwards noted in his journal for November 1833 his belief that this event was “a fulfillment of the word of God” and a harbinger of the imminent second coming of Christ.
“The Falling Stars, Nov. 13, 1833.” Bible Readings for the Home Circle, p. 323. Review and Herald Publishing Association. 1914.
Reports from across the country on November 12 and November 13 described the meteor shower as “like snowflakes” or a “shower of stars.” This reflects the huge number of meteors visible from Earth that night, a whopping 150,000 meteors per hour.An article from the Arkansas Gazette by William Woodruff described it as a “remarkable phenomena…they could be seen in every quarter and flying in every direction, though generally toward the southwest, and kept up an incessant illumination of the heavens.” Woodruff went on to note that the event began late night/early morning and the sky was clear. The meteor shower was only visible in North America.