Fuller also introduced Parker to the band on his return to New York, but it was to be a short-lived liaison. He brought the altoist in for a gig at the McKinley Theatre in the Bronx, but he
came in the place and had his shit in him and sat there all through the whole thing till his solo comes, and when his solo comes, Bird put his horn in his mouth and . . . ‘doodle-loo-deloodle-lo’. And Dizzy, on stage with people in the audience, said, ‘Get that muthafucka off my stage!’ Because he didn’t want the whole band to be tagged as a bunch of junkies, you know. He wouldn’t let me put him in there anymore; he just wasn’t gonna have that. Because Bird would always get high, man, and then start to nodding right up on the bandstand. And you’re playing the whole thing with no first saxophone player.
This time, the big band was successful enough to allow Gillespie room to develop his ideas in that expanded context. The band broadcast from The Spotlite that year, but by the time they made their first official recordings for RCA Victor in August 1947, the trumpeter was introducing another significant element into the mix. That first session included John Lewis’s ‘Two Bass Hit’, Tadd Dameron’s ‘Stay On It’, Dizzy’s adaptation of Babs Gonzales’s novelty vocal hit, ‘Oop-Pop-A-Da’ (which was initially issued without a composer credit for its legitimate source, but later amended to give credit to Babs Brown, Gonzales’s real name), and the ‘I Got Rhythm’ contrafact ‘Ow!’ Shorn of the two-bar tag at the end of its 32-bar AABA structure and fitted with a new melody, and often altered harmonies as well, George Gershwin’s chord progression on ‘I Got Rhythm’ became the base for literally countless jazz compositions and improvisations, to the point where a jazzman could simply call for ‘the Rhythm changes’.
By the time the band hit the studio again in December, however, a vibrant new colour had been added to their palette. Dizzy was a prime mover in the creation of Afro-Cuban jazz (sometimes referred to as Cubop), and his principal collaborator in the enterprise was the percussionist Chano Pozo. Mario Bauza introduced Dizzy to the conga player, who spoke very little English, in 1947, and he became the catalyst for the trumpeter’s absorption of specific Cuban folk and popular idioms into the band’s music.
Chano taught us all multirhythm; we learned from the master. On the bus, he’d give me a drum, Al McKibbon a drum, and he’d take a drum. Another guy would have a cowbell, and he’d give everybody a rhythm. We’d see how all the rhythms tied into one another, and everybody was playing something different . . . He’d teach us some of those Cuban chants and things like that. That’s how I learned to play the congas. The chants, I mix up. I don’t know one from the other, really, but they’re all together . . . They’re all of African derivation.
Pozo’s grip of jazz rhythm and structure was, in Dizzy’s testimony, a lot less secure, and yet the fusion which emerged from their combined efforts to overcome cultural, linguistic and musical barriers produced one of Dizzy’s most successful records, ‘Manteca’ (in which Walter Fuller is credited as co-composer with Gillespie and Pozo), and the equally celebrated paired compositions ‘Cubana Be’ and ‘Cubana Bop’ (written by George Russell and Dizzy), among others.
But it was to be a short association. Pozo, described by Al McKibbon as ‘a hoodlum’, was shot dead in a bar in Harlem on 2 December 1948, in mysterious circumstances which have been linked with the shadowy underworld of the Cuban sects. Some people say the percussionist had been talking a little too freely about his sect’s secret rituals. Other versions cite a narcotics deal as the root source of the shooting, claiming that Pozo challenged a dealer over a bad sale, and was shot in the exchange. Dizzy confirms McKibbon’s assertion, if a shade less bluntly.
Chano personally was a roughneck . . . Even in Cuba, Chano was known to be very high strung. He travelled with a long knife too . . . He was shot twice; the second time he didn’t get up. The first time he was shot in Cuba, sometime in the early forties. He went into the publisher’s office. Chano went in there with his knife and grabbed the guy and said, ‘I want my money, I want my royalty’. He went in for his royalties, and the guy reached in his drawer and shot him. The bullet lodged near the spine and they couldn’t operate because it was too close to the spine. He was pretty rough. That bullet next to his spine used to hurt him whenever the weather would get too cold. He used to sit on one half of his ass; he would be hurting on the stage. Chano had a reputation, and he got killed, later, on his reputation but not before he contributed to our music and helped carry it, out to the world overseas.
Whatever the cause, Chano Pozo’s death brought a premature end to his key role in the development of Afro-Cuban jazz, but his legacy is reflected not only in Dizzy’s music, but in much popular music of the 1950s and 1960s, albeit in a sadly watered-down fashion. The music he made with Gillespie was the first to integrate real Afro-Cuban polyrhythms within a bop idiom. It remained a significant element in the trumpeter’s music throughout his career, and was still prominent in his final band, the United Nation Big Band which he led in the late 1980s, featuring contemporary Latin musicians like singer Flora Purim and percussionist Airto Moreira from Brazil, and saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera and trumpeter Arturo Sandoval from Cuba, as well as American jazz stars like saxophonist James Moody, who joined Gillespie’s big band in 1947, and trombonists Slide Hampton and trumpeter Steve Turre. The singular use of ‘Nation’ reflected Dizzy’s belief in the unity of peoples, inspired by the Baha’i faith which he embraced in 1969, as well as his conviction that the music of Brazil, Cuba and the USA ‘is fast coming together’. At the time, though, others soon picked up on his example, including the Cuban band-leader Machito, Tadd Dameron, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Stan Kenton.
The band recorded only one set of studio sessions with Pozo, spread over two days in December 1947. The first session, on 22 December, produced ‘Algo Bueno’, a re-working of Dizzy’s ‘Woody ’n’ You’ with Cuban grooves, a novelty vocal number built on Tadd Dameron’s elegant ‘Cool Breeze’, and the classic ‘Cubana Be/Cubana Bop’. At the time, though, it was ‘Manteca’, laid down in the second session on 30 December with arrangements of ‘Minor Walk’ and Dameron’s ‘Good Bait’, and another onomatopoeic novelty, ‘Ool-Ya-Koo’, which really caught the imagination. It became Dizzy’s best-selling record, and when RCA assembled their indispensable The Complete RCA Victor Recordings in 1995, reissue producer Orrin Keepnews (a name we will meet again in this story) chose to break the otherwise chronological sequence of the two-disc set by placing ‘Manteca’ first, followed by a take of ‘Anthropology’ from the Gillespie-Parker quintet, a nicely symbolic pairing illustrating the two most important facets of Dizzy’s music at that crucial period.
The first thing that hits you about ‘Manteca’ is its sheer exhuberance, its immediate visceral impact. Chano Pozo’s congas and Al McKibbon’s bass lay down the lithe groove, Dizzy chants ‘Manteca’ (a Spanish word which means grease or lard, it was Chano’s audible handshake, his way of saying ‘gimme some skin’), the saxes enter with a lush counter statement of their rhythmic figure, Dizzy comes soaring in over the whole lot with a quicksilver trumpet line, and the trumpets explode into action, turning the tune’s characteristic rhythmic figure into a vibrant mass chorus. Bebop harmony takes over when tenor man Big Nick Nicholas blows a boisterous chorus over the ‘I Got Rhythm’ chord changes, Dizzy comes back with another stratospheric short break, and the horns play it out, leaving just Pozo and McKibbon to finish, with a final flourish from drummer Kenny Clarke. Simple, but hugely effective, even in the relatively buttoned-down studio version, and with Pozo’s pervasive rhythmic patterns underpinning and supporting the action, it is very different from the standard big band charts of the time, either in swing or bebop.
Live, the tune got really wild. There are several extant concert and broadcast recordings of the band from this period, including one from the Salle Playel in Paris, where they were a sensation on their first European tour in February 1948,