Nonetheless, when the quintet travelled to the west coast early in 1946 for an ill-fated engagement at Billy Berg’s club in Los Angeles, the trumpeter took six musicians in all, adding vibraphonist Milt Jackson in the knowledge that Parker, already unreliable and heading for the breakdown that would put him in the state hospital at Camarillo, would not make a fair proportion of the gigs during their six-week engagement.
When they went into the studio for Ross Russell’s Dial label in February in LA, it was with tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson standing in for Bird, as he did on many of the gigs as well. By all accounts, their music was met with uncomprehending indifference by the public and those musicians not conversant with or sympathetic to the new style, although the younger musicians were enthusiastic, and Ray Brown later pointed out that ‘Dizzy went back there a few years later and tore it up, same chords, same crowd. So the music was valid; it was just a matter of them catching on’.
The Dial session produced one of the trumpeter’s most effective recorded solos of the period on Parker’s Confirmation’, while a subsequent session later that month (on 22 February) for RCA Victor in New York with a sextet featuring Don Byas included Monk’s ‘52nd Street Theme’, Dizzy’s own ‘Night in Tunisia’ and Bird’s ‘Anthropology’, all key parts of the emerging bebop repertory. Although Parker and Gillespie played together in Dizzy’s Carnegie Hall concert in 1947, they would not record together again until 1950, also under Bird’s leadership.
They had laid down the template (and perhaps the gauntlet) for anyone playing this music, however, and if Bird would make the more spectacular advances in a small-group setting, Dizzy chose to direct his principal energies elsewhere. At the same time as they were making these historic recordings, the trumpeter was also putting together what would become a celebrated big band, and one that made an equally important contribution to the development of modern jazz. His first attempt at forming a genuine bebop big band came in 1945, and was short-lived. The trumpeter brought together a unit featuring many of the players and arrangements from the Eckstine band for what he understood was to be a concert tour in the south, only to run into the same block which had led Eckstine to abandon his own project.
This orchestra and our style of playing, generally, was geared for just sitting and listening to music; nearly all of our arrangements were modern, so imagine my chagrin and surprise when I found out that all we were playing was dances . . . They couldn’t dance to the music, they said. But I could dance to it. I could dance my ass off to it. They could’ve too, if they had tried. Jazz should be danceable. That’s the original idea, and even when it’s too fast to dance to, it should always be rhythmic enough to make you wanna move. When you get away from the movement, you get away from the whole idea. So my music is always danceable. But the unreconstructed blues lovers down South who couldn’t hear nothing else but the blues didn’t think so. They wouldn’t even listen to us. After all these years, I still get mad just talking about it.
Dizzy broke up the band straight after the tour, and took his quintet into The Three Deuces, but the lure of the orchestral sound palette of a big band remained alive in his mind. On his return from California, he tried again with a second band, which he took into another of the 52nd Street jazz haunts, The Spotlite, owned by Clark Monroe of Monroe’s Uptown House. At Monroe’s suggestion, he opened with an engagement for a new small group he had formed, with Sonny Stitt replacing Bird on alto (that sextet, with Milt Jackson, Al Haig, Ray Brown and Kenny Clarke, can be heard in the Guild/Musicraft recording session of 15 May 1945, which included versions of ‘One Bass Hit’, a staple of the Gillespie repertory, and ‘Oop Bop Sh’Bam’, something of a novelty hit, and the progenitor of several more in a similar vein), then introduced the big band. He hired Walter Fuller as the band’s arranger, and drew heavily on his administrative and organizational experience as well. It was necessary, too, as Dizzy, something of a stickler for band discipline, especially in the matter of showing up on time, dryly noted on the subject of the by-now entrenched disregard for convention practised by some of his key players: ‘When I formed the new big band, I hired Bud Powell on piano and Max on drums. The money was a little erratic, and Bud was super-erratic, and I had to do something about that, so I got Monk. I had no trouble outta Monk, not too much, but Monk wasn’t showing up on time either. It was against the law to show up on time.’
Public interest in bebop was growing at this point, fuelled in part by sensational and generally dismissive media coverage of the peripheral aspects of the lifestyle associated with the music, from fashions and hip-talk to drugs. Dizzy was one of the very few major jazz figures of the era not to become embroiled with hard drugs, but he was a trend-setter in most other respects, both musical and sartorial. It was the trumpeter who popularised the famous beret and horn-rimmed shades which personified the bebop fashion parade, and much of the hip slang bouncing around New York’s clubs came into wider currency through his records (though the bebop argot would be exploited in even more relentless fashion by the fast-talking Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson and Slim Gaillard).
While on the subject of appearances, it was around this time that the trumpeter began to develop his unusual air-filled cheeks when he played, a stylistic quirk that made him look like a fully-inflated bullfrog. Air held in the cheeks is certainly not part of standard trumpet technique, but it worked just fine for Dizzy. He claimed African trumpeters from Nigeria and Chad adopted similar techniques, and that it was related to his particular embouchure (the position of the lips and muscles around the mouth when blowing). One consequence of playing that way was that
you have to have perfect time because you have to let the air out at exactly the right time. I don’t just pick up my horn and spit out notes. Clark Terry can do that. He can take two horns and spit out notes into each one on a different beat. I can’t. I’d never be able to do that because my chops have to get set. The right side of my upper lip comes down, like, in a little twist that over the years has left a mark there. A lotta people walk up to me and say, ‘You got half a mustache, half a mustache, that’s weird. You’re a weird dude’.
If the trademark pouches (a physician officially bestowed the name Gillespie’s Pouches on the condition in 1969) were there in the late 1940s, they were still puffed grotesquely around a conventional trumpet. The famous upturned bell did not arrive on the scene until 1953, when Dizzy’s horn was accidentally damaged during a birthday party for his wife, Lorraine. The party was held in Snookie’s in New York, and while Dizzy had gone round the corner to be interviewed for a radio broadcast, one of the comedy team Stump ’n’ Stumpy contrived to push the other over his horn where it sat on its stand, bending it out of shape so that the bell pointed skyward. Dizzy reports that Illinois Jacquet immediately quit the scene, saying ‘I’m not gonna be here when that man comes back and sees his horn that way. I ain’t gonna be here when that crazy muthafucka gets back’. So as not to spoil the party, Dizzy jokingly played the horn, and although it sounded strange, he liked both the way in which ‘it came quicker to my ear’ and the softness of the sound. He had the horn straightened, but subsequently approached the Martin company to build him one with the bell angled at forty-five degrees. It became a much more lasting visual trademark than the berets and horn-rims.
That was still six years in the future when the new residency at The Spotlite began, though, and however misinformed the publicity the beboppers attracted (both the prestigious Time and Life magazines ran patronising and misleading features on the new music), it was beginning to generate a lot more interest in what the musicians were actually up to down in the jazz dens of 52nd Street. Consequently, Dizzy was able to launch his second big band in more auspicious circumstances this time around. Both he and Walter Fuller worked hard to develop a distinctive feel for the music which would clearly signal this as being Gillespie’s band, down to arranging ensembles for the trumpet section in the manner of Dizzy’s solos and restricting use of vibrato in the saxophone section to the first horn only, creating a harder-edged sound than that typical of the lusher swing-band reed sections. The band opened to considerable attention, and it’s not hard to imagine the impact they made in the small confines of The Spotlite, graphically described by Fuller.
That night, about ten o’clock, all these people were coming in, and Monroe had ballyhooed up the opening, ‘DIZZY