He has revolutionized jazz, redefined trumpet playing and, after nearly 60 years in the business, kept his berth at the forefront of modern music.
But when Dizzy Gillespie recently learned that he will be receiving a Kennedy Center Honor on Dec. 3 in Washington, D.C., he was-for one of the few moments in his life-speechless.
”I fainted,” says Dizzy, as everyone has called John Birks Gillespie since he first began clowning around on stage as a teenager. ”I didn`t expect nothing like that.
”I guess if you get a Kennedy Center Honor it means that you have reached the pinnacle of your craft,” adds Gillespie, who plays Nov. 17 at Great Lakes Naval Base and Nov. 21 at Star Plaza Theatre (see adjoining story).
”And maybe it also means that they recognize the importance of our music.”
That recognition probably explains why Dizzy felt a little, well, dizzy when he heard the news. For ever since he first picked up a horn as a kid in dirt-poor Cheraw, S.C., he has been battling to get people-black, white and every other pigmentation-to listen.
Along the way, he has been kicked out of ”white” hotels, barred from
”white” nightclubs, initially ignored and/or swindled by record companies, banned from some radio stations, vilified in the press and excoriated by officials of the U.S. government.
He has seen his colleagues destroyed by drugs (Charlie ”Bird” Parker), emotional instability (Bud Powell) and poverty (scores of his ex-sidemen gave up jazz decades ago to work other jobs).
Nevertheless, Dizzy Gillespie, at 73, still is spreading the gospel of bebop, the incendiary music that he and Bird, more than anyone else, created in the late `30s and early `40s.
Before Dizzy and Bird ignited the jazz world, swing maestros such as Benny Carter, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and the Dorsey brothers ruled. But their sweetly tuneful dance music eventually-and inevitably-gave way to the fiercer, more demanding sounds of bop, which required listeners to respond more with their ears than their feet.
It was a feverish, rhythmically complex, harmonically dense language, as sophisticated as the most erudite classical music, except that its roots were African-American rather than white-European.
To this day, no musical language is more pervasive in jazz; bebop remains the vocabulary against which virtually all up-and-comers must define themselves.
If not for Dizzy`s tenacity, it might not be so.
”Once it (bebop) got inside the marketplace, our style was subverted by the press and music industry,” writes Dizzy in ”To Be or Not to Bop: Memoirs of Dizzy Gillespie” (with Al Fraser, Da Capo paperback, $13.95).
”First, the personalities and weaknesses of the people (drug addiction, etc.) started becoming more important in the public eye than the music itself. ”Then they diluted the music. They took what were otherwise blues and pop tunes, added `mop, mop` accents and lyrics about abusing drugs wherever they could and called the noise that resulted bebop. . . .
”The accusations in the press pointed to me as one of the prime movers behind this. I should`ve sued, even though the chances of winning in court were slim.”
What`s more, ”All the big money went to the guys who owned the music, not to the guys who played it. . . . More was stolen from us during the bebop era than in the entire history of jazz, up to that point.”
Gillespie does not exaggerate the tough times. As late as 1948, after he had led his band on a triumphant tour of Europe, Time magazine called bebop
”screechingly loud . . . dissonant . . . and something Duke Ellington had thought better of a long time ago.” A year later, Time grimly noted that,
”Bebop, a frantic disorganized musical cult whose high priest was quid-cheeked Dizzy Gillespie, replaced Swing.”
Perhaps Gillespie persevered simply because he was accustomed to hardship.
Born to a poor Southern family on Oct. 21, 1917, John Birks Gillespie was the last of nine children, seven of whom survived past infancy. All were whipped by their father every Sunday morning without fail. For Gillespie, the beatings didn`t end until he was nearly 10; by then, he had discovered music. ”The first music I ever remember hearing was gospel,” recalls Gillespie today. ”My friends and I used to go down to the Sanctified Church on Sunday nights and just listen outside. It was real exciting. Even a lot of white people used to sit outside listening.”
What they heard was a blast of sound as parishioners shouted, sang, spoke in tongues, practiced demon possession and invoked other ancient religious rites, mixed in with the traditional spirituals of 19th and 20th Century America.
So when, in 1929, a slew of musical instruments turned up at Cheraw`s Robert Smalls Public School, Gillespie predictably leaped at one.
”The bigger guys got the horns that they wanted, and all that was left was the trombone, so I took that,” recalls Gillespie. ”I wasn`t too interested in trombone, but I didn`t know exactly what I wanted, either.
”But the boy next door to me got the trumpet, and when I heard that sound out the window, I said to myself: `Hey, man, that`s what I want, let me practice on that thing.`
”At that point, I couldn`t read music, but I sure could play it.”
Indeed, he quickly was recruited into a small band led by his schoolteacher, Alice Wilson, an amateur musician who could play piano in one key.
”She organized a little minstrel show for the kids at school, and we played everything in B-flat-we sang it, we danced it, we tromboned and trumpeted it in B-flat,” says Gillespie, with a chuckle.
”Now, this was so long ago that we had to have two drummers because we didn`t have any foot pedals (in other words, the foot-operated bass drum on the standard drum kit wasn`t around yet).
”So we had to have a bass drummer and a snare drummer.
”But that was a hot little band. We didn`t know what we were doing, but we were having a blast doing it.”
By the time he was a teen, Gillespie was playing white high schools near Cheraw for $1 or $2 a gig, ”a whole lot of money for that time and that place,” he says. His innate virtuosity won him a scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute (a prestigious, private high school in Laurinburg, N.C.), and though he didn`t receive a diploma until he had become world famous, he was launching the revolution as early as the late-`30s.
Though the myth prevails that bebop was born in New York around 1940, in fact its language was being created years earlier in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker was working in the mid-`30s, and Philadelphia, where Gillespie worked from 1935 to 1937. By astonishing coincidence, both of these players-independent of each other-were experimenting with fast-moving harmonic changes built on prodigiously complex chords.
If Gillespie`s style was influenced by the long-lined playing of Roy Eldridge (who in turn had been influenced by Louis Armstrong), he nevertheless was simultaneously working on a new way of playing jazz. His trumpet was faster, lighter and more piercing in tone than any virtuoso who preceded him. More important, his chord changes whirred past the ear faster than listeners could perceive at first.
”No one even understood what we were doing, but that was OK, because those were highly electric times,” says Gillespie, who explains the key to his then-radical approach in a single word: piano.
”I didn`t know for quite a while that Diz could play piano, `cause he never let it be known,” recalled ”Fats” Palmer Davis in the Gillespie autobiography. ”I knew that he knew his chords, but when I actually heard him playing piano, then it all dawned on me.
”I said, `Well, this is why this guy knows his horn.` . . .
”Some cats can start playing and run all off chord, but (Dizzy`s) would be correct. And he had learned to invert them so well; he could take a major chord and invert it and make it minor, and this takes a whole lot `cause your mind`s got to really be working.
”Now guys are doing it every day, but in those days it was a major innovation. I think a lot of musicians didn`t even realize what the guys were doing. Maybe he didn`t even realize it.
”When he came to New York (in 1937) and was with Teddy Hill and Edgar Hayes, the cat was upsetting everybody. And if Diz had been an ofay (white) in them days, it`s no end to what he would have been, because he had said something really new in music.
”I don`t care whether black, blue or white, when he came in and put that horn up, all them cats stopped.”
The miracle was that Dizzy and Bird found each other. By 1939, Dizzy had been hired for the best-paying band in the land, Cab Calloway`s orchestra, and when the ensemble was passing through Kansas City in 1940, the momentous meeting took place in a cramped room of the Booker T. Washington Hotel.
”I remember it just like it was yesterday,” says Gillespie today.
”When I heard Charlie Parker for the first time, man, I had never heard anybody play like that. I mean, he sounded really different. So we locked ourselves up in that hotel room and played all day.”
There isn`t a jazz fan alive who wouldn`t pay a life`s fortune to hear a tape of that meeting, the birth of bop. In the next few years, Bird and Dizzy would hone and shape their new language, aided by the likes of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk on piano; Kenny Clarke and Max Roach on drums; Oscar Pettiford and Ray Brown on bass; Billy Eckstine as bandleader/singer; Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald as vocalists; and other, lesser lights.
”We didn`t even call it bebop yet,” recalls Gillespie.
”The word came about because people didn`t know what tunes we were playing (because of the boppers` complex melodies and harmonies).
”So folks would come up to us and say, `Hey, man, play that tune, you know the one you played the other night, which goes like: Ye de bop, do dob it dop, be bop, doo doo,` ” adds Gillespie.
”So that`s how they started calling our music bebop.”
The new music was developed and refined in Harlem and Greenwich Village
(in spots such as Minton`s Playhouse and Monroe`s Uptown House), later migrating to 52nd Street and fanning out across America and the world.
The cost of the revolution, however, was steep. By 1955, Gillespie had lost the colleague who was closest to him (Parker died on March 12).
”Yard and I were like two peas,” Dizzy once said. ”His contribution and mine just happened to go together, like salt in rice. Before I met Charlie Parker my style had already developed, but he was a great influence on my whole musical life.
”The same thing goes for him too because there was never anybody who played any closer than we did on those early sides like `Groovin` High,` `Shaw `Nuff` and `Hothouse.` Sometimes I couldn`t tell whether I was playing or not because the notes were so close together.”
And by 1956, when the State Department sent Gillespie and his band on the first government-sponsored jazz tour (which won press accolades), bebop was still a dirty word. Sen. Allen J. Ellender, from Louisiana, and Rep. John J. Rooney of Brooklyn raised Cain over how much the boppers had been paid for their gig. Congress abruptly cut the budget for such programs by 26 percent, calling the tour a ”waste” of taxpayer money.
Why did Gillespie survive the onslaught, where others self-destructed?
”Maybe it`s because I was married, and I had a good home life,” says Gillespie, who recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with Lorraine (they have no children).
”Frankly, I was scared to do all those things (narcotics, etc.). I didn`t want to do them because of my wife. She would have yelled bloody murder.
”So I just concentrated on the music, man.
”For a long time, it didn`t look like we were going to take over. But you know why we did? `Cause of the young guys. They were eager to hear the new sound, they idolized us. And that`s why it spread.”
As the decades unfolded, Gillespie-who considers himself ”a searcher”-
continued to evolve. What began, for instance, as a passing interest in Latin music in the `30s developed into a passion, with Gillespie creating such Latin-tinged classics as ”Manteca,” ”Tin Tin Deo,” ”Cubana Be Cubana Bop” and ”A Night in Tunisia.” When a rambunctious comedian accidentally bent his horn in the `50s, Gillespie decided he liked the sound of the mangled instrument and had one custom-made.
”I`m still learning Latin music; I just organized a United Nations band, and it`s working out pretty good,” says Gillespie, who doesn`t quite know why his cheeks puff out when he plays, though he thinks it has something to do with the unusual, self-taught way he holds his instrument.
”I guess I never stop changing. You have to-you go so far, and you just have to keep going.
”And anyway,” says Gillespie, who coins words as easily as he does musical phrases, ”I never was a disillusionary.”
