Small-group sessions with Stan Getz turned out to be something of a disappointment, with each man sounding a little diffident in the other’s company, but there were more characteristic fireworks on albums with the two Sonnys, Stitt and Rollins, and recordings from the end of the decade with a band which featured the rolling, blues-inflected Chicago piano style of Junior Mance, a sharp contrast to the flowing bop style of Dizzy’s earlier pianists.
It was not, however, the end of the big band story. Gillespie had made big band recordings for Granz in both 1954 and 1955 (and did so again in 1956 and 1957), with a studio band put together with the help of trumpeter and arranger Quincy Jones. In 1956, he was invited by the State Department (on the recommendation of Senator Adam Powell) to put together a big band for a government-sponsored goodwill tour of the Near East, Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe, and again turned to Jones for assistance in getting the band in shape. His was the first jazz ensemble to be offered such an undertaking, and the trumpeter ‘liked the idea of representing America’, but with the caveat that he ‘wasn’t going over to apologize for the racist policies of America’. He side-stepped the State Department briefing, telling his wife that ‘I’ve got three hundred years of briefing. I know what they’ve done to us, and I’m not gonna make any excuses. If they ask me any questions, I’m gonna answer them as honestly as I can’.
The tour was a success, and audiences seemed genuinely gripped by the music, especially on a rhythmic level, even if it was new ground for the vast majority of them: ‘The mentality of jazz, its spontaneous organization, really got to them. They couldn’t understand how we could seem so unorganized until we began to play. Our music really exemplifies a perfect balance between discipline and freedom.’ The experience also allowed Dizzy to add to his already ample knowledge of ethnic musics from around the world, and he was able to stock that cupboard even further – and in even more significant fashion – when the band toured in South America several months later, also under the aegis of the government.
Dizzy’s love of Caribbean and Latin American music had long since been established – as well as the Afro-Cuban experiments, his forays into that field included recording Latin-themed charts with arranger Chico O’Farrill, and a session with a band made up of South American musicians billed as His Latin-American Rhythm (which included the first recording of another of his most famous compositions, the lovely ‘Con Alma’), both in 1954. On this trip, and especially in Brazil, he picked up on yet more authentic Latin rhythms and forms to add to his music, and met up with an important collaborator of that period, the pianist, arranger and composer Lalo Schifrin. The pianist came to Dizzy’s attention when the band visited Buenos Aires, where, as Schifrin explained in an interview with this writer in 1996, he had turned to jazz at a time when the music was not officially sanctioned in his country.
I grew up in Argentina during the period of Peron, which was a fascistic period in my country, and jazz was not well regarded, because it was not a nationalistic music. For me, though, it was not so much a political protest as almost like a religious conversion when I first heard Charlie Parker and George Shearing, and actually, even before them, Bix Beiderbecke. I used to get records from a merchant sailor who sailed between Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, and smuggled records back to us.
Dizzy was an important influence even before I met him, and before I ever had a chance to work with him, I knew his music. In fact, he has said that when I joined his band he didn’t have to teach me anything – I already knew all the band charts! It wasn’t quite true, but nearly, and of course, he did teach me very many things. In particular he taught me how to accompany, which is an art in itself.
Dizzy told Schifrin to look him up when he got to the USA, and the pianist took him up on the offer when he arrived in New York in 1960. Schifrin joined Dizzy’s quintet as a replacement for Junior Mance, although it is likely that what Dizzy really wanted was his writing rather than piano skills. They collaborated on the most successful of the longer works which Gillespie attempted at this time, Schifrin’s Gillespiana, in which the pianist achieved a highly successful interweaving of Latin and jazz elements within a five-section structure which adapted elements from the classical suite and the ensemble-within-an-ensemble counterpoint of the concerto grosso form, using Gillespie’s quintet against an expanded horn and percussion section. Both the original album (recorded in November 1960) and the concert debut of the work at Carnegie Hall also included Dizzy’s ‘Tunisian Fantasy’, an extended re-working of ‘Night in Tunisia’, and a version of ‘Manteca’ which, thirteen years on, had lost none of its irresistible exuberance. The relationship with the classically trained Schifrin, which Dizzy likened to that between Duke Ellington and arranger and composer Billy Strayhorn (though one big difference lay in the fact that Schifrin received the composer credits so often denied to Strayhorn), and the emphasis on large-scale works at this time reflected Dizzy’s own desire to see his music given greater recognition and acceptance within the ‘legitimate’ musical establishment, but it remains firmly jazz-rooted.
A subsequent large-scale collaboration with Schifrin, The New Continent, was a far less satisfactory affair, but this period did give rise to one of the most singular projects in all of Gillespie’s discography. The trumpeter commissioned trombonist J.J. Johnson to write an album of music for the big band; the result Perceptions (1961), was one of the most challenging compositions ever to emerge from a jazz writer. Gunther Schuller conducted the sessions with a 21-piece orchestra, and the trumpeter’s creative struggles to come to terms with the unfamiliar structures of Johnson’s often surprisingly un-jazz-like compositions makes for absorbing listening.
Dizzy was able to keep his big band together until 1960, and returned to it at various points thereafter, including a memorable 1968 edition preserved on record from the Berlin Jazz Festival on the MPS album Reunion Big Band 20th & 30th Anniversary (the tour marking the respective anniversaries of his first big band European tour in 1948, and his first visit to Europe with Teddy Hill in 1938), and again from 1987 onward. He dabbled unsuccessfully with jazz-rock fusion in the 1970s (including a collaboration with Stevie Wonder), but miscalculations of that kind were rare in a career which retained a clear focus on the music he spent a lifetime developing. He renewed his recording relationship with Norman Granz on numerous blowing sessions (including a 1975 set with Cuban band-leader Machito) after the latter launched his Pablo label in 1974, while another reunion, this time with Max Roach in Paris in 1989, produced a fascinating (if uneven) duo album. Gillespie almost died after ingesting something narcotic slipped into his drink in a club in 1973 (‘just what happened is missing, but apparently someone gave me something that wasn’t kosher, and when I woke up I was in the hospital’), an experience which strengthened his religious conversion, and led him to quit drinking. He continued to play until a year or so before his death and finally succumbed to cancer of the pancreas on 7 January 1993. The focus of this chapter on the origins of bebop and his Latin experiments has underplayed the continuing quality and importance of much of his later music – Dizzy remained a force throughout his career, and produced great music at all points within it. His revolutionary stylistic developments of the 1940s were pushed to greater levels of both tonal and emotional refinement throughout the 1950s, culminating in a mature style which revealed no really significant stylistic alterations or additions thereafter.
The characteristic technical hallmarks which identified his work were all firmly in place: the nervy, hard-edged sonority; the innovative false fingerings which enabled him to find notes where they are not supposed to be on the valves, and to articulate those notes at dazzling speeds; his liking for launching a phrase off the top of a scale and working down through the helter-skelter chromatic descending figures, strongly accenting the important notes in the harmony of the phrase while expanding the spaces in highly unexpected directions.
In