Robert Witmeyer has been a lifelong fan of Django Reinhardt, the Belgian-born guitarist and composer who is celebrated for raising “gypsy jazz” to a popular music form in the 1930s. This Saturday, Witmeyer brings his Los Gatos trio “Djangatos,” to the Ugly Mug Café in Soquel. The band features Witmeyer on guitar, mandolin and banjo, and Ron La France on rhythm guitar. Witmeyer has owned Keith Holland Guitars in Los Gatos for the past three years. La France works in the store as a luthier and repairman. For Saturday’s show, they’ll be joined by Tanner Hallinan on standup bass. Hallinan works at the store as a bass and piano teacher. They’re serious music people.

“When I graduated high school in the late 1990s,” Witmeyer recalled in a recent interview, “there was that big swing revival with bands like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and The Brian Setzer Orchestra. Me and my band were a part of that locally but there weren’t a lot of guitar players who played swing. And if you’re going to play swing guitar, Django is one of the guys you need to learn from. I studied him, but I never had the money to get the right guitars for that kind of music. It’s a big commitment financially.”

He continued, “When I started working at Keith’s store, one of the employees knew I liked Django and gave me a guitar. He said you can borrow this, because I want someone to play with. He encouraged me to really pick it up and study it.”

For the uninitiated, Witmeyer explains Django’s guitar style and why it’s so unique and has influenced so many players: “There’s no drummer, so the besides playing chords, you have to play the percussive part that you’d hear on the high hat or on a ride cymbal on a drum. It’s a whole different strumming style.”

Reinhardt also overcame a pretty catastrophic accident — two fingers on his left hand were fused together when he rescued his wife from a caravan fire. He then developed his playing style to accommodate and work around the injury.

In performing gypsy jazz, Witmeyer adds, “Everybody has to do their part to serve the song when they’re not soloing. When the bass player takes a lead, for example, I’ll carry the rhythm. It’s very democratic with everyone stepping up to the mic to take a turn and then stepping back.” In a way it’s analogous to a bluegrass jam. “There a lot of bluegrass people who enjoy gypsy jazz for those reasons,” Witmeyer says, “because they see the similarities” (in both the instrumentation and soloing styles).

Reinhardt was born in 1910 and came into musical prominence in the 1920s and ’30s. “In those days,” Witmeyer says, “saxophones, pianos, trumpets were all the lead instruments. No one cared about guitars. And when Django came out, he was one of the key guitar players who created this style of music that brought out the guitar as a solo instrument.”

He’s influenced countless guitar players in the decades since, Witmeyer adds, “If you look at Willie Nelson, B.B. King, and even Kirk Hammett from Metallica, the one thing they have in common is they were really big fans of Django. All those guys learned from Django.”

There’s another big takeaway in Saturday’s show, Witmeyer says: “We’re trying to honor Django Reinhardt, and the whole thing of overcoming a handicap, of being persecuted. Django overcame a career-threatening injury to become the greatest and fastest guitarist of his time if not ever, while being chased by the Nazis who were trying to kill him for three different reasons.”

He went on, “He was a gypsy, a jazz musician and he had a disability. Those were all death sentences to the Nazis. These are all things that are relevant to today’s world. Not to get too political, but certain groups, especially minorities, are being vilified. This is the same song that we heard in the ‘40s, and we didn’t like it then. Now we’re hearing the same rhetoric again.”

“We need something that’s positive and uplifting. Even when they’re in a minor key,” he laughs and adds. “The big thing is to that passion and joy, letting people know about the music and culture of it, so they are more likely to be part of the solution. Django did it in his day, and we’re trying to bring it back.”

Michael Gaither is a performing songwriter, DJ at KPIG radio, and in a previous life was also a writer for The Santa Cruz Sentinel.