10 Euros - Albert II Django Reinhardt

Django Reinhardt died in 1953, and Belgium waited nearly six decades to put him on a coin — perhaps because his story resists easy commemoration. Born in a Romani caravan in Liberchies in 1910, he spent much of his career in France and is claimed as readily by jazz history as by any national identity. The Belgian state's decision to issue this centenary piece in 2010 acknowledged a figure who had, in life, operated largely outside institutional recognition of any kind.

A 1928 caravan fire destroyed two fingers on his fretting hand. The chord voicings he subsequently developed around that limitation became the technical foundation of an entirely new guitar idiom.