Kenny Mathieson
Dizzy Gillespie
Unlike Charlie Parker, who burned with incandescent brilliance and died young, Dizzy Gillespie carved out a lengthy career and became a respected elder statesman of the music, which is an unhip thing to do in jazz mythology. In the birth of bebop, though, his pyrotechnic brilliance was the perfect foil for Parker’s own, and was underpinned by a more thorough understanding of harmonic theory than many of his contemporaries routinely possessed. If Dizzy is assured immortality on the strength of his contribution to the emergency of bebop alone, his place in the history of 20th-century music will rest on a considerably wider achievement.
Dizzy also enshrined what many saw as a contradiction. Like Louis Armstrong, he was both a great innovator and a great entertainer, a man who did previously undreamed-of things on trumpet, but at the same time was ready and willing to mug furiously on stage, and, even worse, send up his own artistic inventions in songs like ‘He Beeped When He Should’ve Bopped’. His clowning antics have been held against him by those who saw them as either Uncle Tom-style servility or a betrayal of the sacred torch of musical revolution, but Gillespie was a natural showman as well as a brilliant musician, and is one of the select band of jazzmen who have become household names. Unlike Armstrong, he was no great singer and yet even on these novelty tunes his scatting was always highly inventive and musically sophisticated, a mixture of extraordinary skill and zaniness which is partly a reflection of his natural ebullience and partly a shrewd awareness of more practical necessities.
That combination of high artistic aspiration and street-smart commercial wisdom is reflected again and again in his life and work, and surely lies at the root of his complex personality. In later years, he became increasingly aware of the importance of his African roots and of the civil rights campaigns in America, and even ran for President in 1964 (and again, briefly, in 1972). Being Dizzy he did so under a ‘politics ought to be a groovier thing’ banner but behind the fun there lay a serious concern over the way things were run, especially from the perspective of black Americans.
Those qualities were formed early. As a child, he tells us in his memoirs, ‘mischief, money-making, and music captured all of my attention’, and he was to develop all three capacities in the course of his long life in jazz. He remained unapologetic about his antics throughout his career, from the zany dancing and novelty chants through to a routine which became a staple of his live shows, his announcement that he wanted to introduce the band, followed by his starting to introduce the musicians to each other. Dizzy was a natural comedian, and even though you knew it was coming, it was hard not to smile at his cornball schtick. In his autobiography, Dizzy – To Be Or Not To Bop, he claims there was also a more pragmatic purpose to his routines. (All quotations from Dizzy in this chapter are from that book, unless otherwise stated.)
People always thought I was crazy, so I used that to my advantage to attract public attention and find the most universal audience for our music. I fell back on what I knew. While performing modern jazz, I emphasized certain inimitable parts of my own style . . . Comedy is important. As a performer, when you’re trying to establish audience control, the best thing is to make them laugh if you can. That relaxes you more than anything. A laugh relaxes your muscles; it relaxes muscles all over your body. When you try to get people relaxed, they’re more receptive to what you’re trying to get them to do. Sometimes, when you’re laying on something over their heads, they’ll go along with it if they’re relaxed.’
He was born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, South Carolina, on 21 October, 1917, the youngest of nine children. His father was a part-time musician, but died when John was only ten. He began to teach himself trombone a couple of years later, then trumpet and cornet. His musical prowess earned him admission to the progressive Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina in 1933, where he played in the school band and continued to teach himself music, adding piano to his accomplishments. He quit school in 1935 and joined his family in Philadelphia, where he launched his professional career in a band led by Frankie Fairfax.
It was at this point that he acquired the nickname Dizzy, bestowed by another player in the trumpet section, Fats Palmer, on account of his habitual antics. That trumpet section later featured Charlie Shavers, one of the formative influences on Gillespie’s early style. Through copying Shavers, Dizzy also absorbed stylistic elements from the man to whom he owed the greatest debt as an influence at this formative stage of his career, Roy Eldridge. It was appropriate, then, that when he made his next move, to New York in 1937, he should end up occupying the lead trumpet chair in the Teddy Hill band, which Eldridge had held until earlier that year.
Indeed, Dizzy was allegedly hired largely because he could sound uncannily like Eldridge, notably in his speed and facility in the high register. His first recorded solo, on Hill’s version of ‘King Porter Stomp’ from a May session that year, bears out that suspicion. Gillespie has always acknowledged the debt, but what he went on to make of it was very much his own thing, as he developed an increasingly original musical conception over the next decade. As is always the way of it when something new happens along, some players put his harmonic innovations down to his playing wrong notes, but since he built one of the greatest careers in jazz on that foundation, I guess they must have been the right wrong notes.
Having established his presence on the competitive New York scene, including working with the Cuban band-leader Alberto Socarras, he was invited to join Cab Calloway’s successful outfit in August 1939, with a little help from another eminent Cuban musician, trumpeter Mario Bauza. These associations established an interest in Afro-Cuban music which would bear rich fruit in due course, but he was already developing into a formidable musician at this stage.
It has been argued that Lionel Hampton’s ‘Hot Mallets,’ cut on 11 September 1939 with a ten-piece all-star band which included Dizzy alongside swing era giants like Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, was the first recorded example of the emerging bebop style. That would certainly overstate the case, but it is another clear indication of the way Gillespie was moving; Hampton, who was then working regularly with Benny Goodman, recalled the circumstances in his autobiography, Hamp.
Diz was just coming up then. I’d heard him for the first time at the Apollo Theater a few days before. I went to the Apollo a lot – we all did. That was where you heard real black music. I was sitting behind the stage, and I heard this guy playing trumpet in a different style than I or anyone else had ever heard before. It was the new bebop style, and I said, ‘Man, I got to get this guy on my next recording session’. Some say that it was on those recordings we made, especially ‘Hot Mallets’, which I wrote, that early bebop was first recorded.
The two years the trumpeter spent with the Calloway orchestra were important ones, but his relationship with his employer turned sour when, in a famous incident, Calloway accused him of throwing a spitball at him on stage. It escalated into a backstage confrontation, and an indignant Dizzy, who was genuinely innocent on this occasion, pulled a knife and cut his accuser, which seems as good a way as any to lose a job. It could have been an even more serious matter.
He put his hands up in my chest and pulled me up, getting ready to hit me. He didn’t know I was getting ready to kill him. Oh, yes, I nicked him. He turned me loose, quick. When he saw that blood, nobody had to tell him to turn me loose. Milt Hinton grabbed my hand to keep me from really injuring him. I coulda killed him, I was so mad. It was a serious fight, a very serious thing, and somebody could’ve gotten really hurt because I’m a firm believer in non-violence when it comes to me.
Musically, though, the most significant events of his years with Calloway were happening elsewhere. Teddy Hill had disbanded his outfit (following, according to Dizzy, a falling out with the mob-backed promoters at the Savoy Ballroom) and in 1940 became the booking agent for a Harlem nightspot named Minton’s Playhouse, where he instituted a series of after-hours jam sessions. The musicians who gravitated to these sessions at Minton’s (and the slightly later scene which emerged at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House) were the ones with the