|
|
| |
 |
|
|
| |
| |
By Jim Macnie
Imagine Dizzy Gillespie getting the cold shoulder from Southern audiences in the mid-'40s, audiences who had come out to dance to an orchestra called the Hep-Sations. At the time the celebrated jazz trumpeter was in the process of foisting bebop's trailblazing turns into a commercially viable music, and those who came to dance had little interest in such innovation - smooching and swaying would suffice. But Gillespie, one of the century's most profound musicians, was high on the intellectual nourishment provided by the nascent style. Bebop was a physical sound. It threw its arms around and kicked a bit, deliriously animating swing's steady groove. It was mental as well, presenting a scad of harmonic and rhythmic questions that had to be answered quickly. The dancers shrugged; the band clamored on, suspecting that what it was creating was valuable.
"Nah, to tell you the truth, they didn't like it too much," Gillespie once told me. "They were used to heavy blues down there: shickadatta … shickadatta … shickadatta. So when they heard us boppin', they just stood still."
Coming up against indifference didn't faze the man who was on his way to becoming a symbol of American ingenuity. Immediately after that tour, Gillespie forged ahead, taking the still-jelling sound to a gig in Hollywood with a smaller ensemble. Side by side with Charlie Parker, bebop's principal architect, Diz was dissed again. Yet the trumpeter wouldn't allow bop's forward motion to be squashed.
When the trumpeter initially came across Parker in Kansas City in 1940, a light bulb went off. "'That's the way our music should go,' I said after hearing him play," Gillespie mused in his raspy voice, "I'd been playing like Roy Eldridge, but when I heard Bird's phrasing, that was it. And all the other guys fell right in, too. He was like a god."
By the late 1940s, bop had spoke to enough musicians to earn itself plenty of credibility. Hectic, jubilant, and cagey, it grew to be the era's defining style. And of course its listenership blossomed. Such a flourishing was unquestionably due to Gillespie's skill at creating a spectacular sound. His influential horn lines were quick witted and arresting. They could transfigure the musical moment in a flash. As an improviser, Gillespie was intimidating; he'd take the bandstand and fire off completely designed, devastatingly balanced phrases - virtuosic in their seemingly endless variety.
"I had no problem playing rapidly," he said with a throaty cackle. "In fact when I first met Bird we jammed all day; [our approaches] just went together. Fast blues, slow blues, standards that we'd stretch out. All of 'em were loaded with those quick little lines."
Though a superb technician, the bandleader was keen on art music's need to keep people entertained. Bop was bubbling with an easily identifiable personality, and Gillespie stretched it even farther. Having come up in large bands led by vivid characters such as Cab Calloway, the trumpeter, who had a knack for offbeat humor and good-natured prankstering anyway, didn't rein in his comic impulses. Such fun gave bop's knotty musical notions an air of caprice, which helped seduce those who were only mildly interested in the style's formal breakthroughs.
Gillespie concurred that frolic was key to taking bop out of the underground. "It was something I learned back with the orchestras: Earl Hines, Tiny Bradshaw, and Cab. When the audience sees that you feel good about the music, they [start to feel good] too. If you're too serious, they say 'What the hell's he playing?' It helps sell the music."
To many, it also made Gillespie the top dog of modern jazz, moreso than even Parker, to whom the trumpeter always deferred ("He was the creator of the style - that's it!"). Bird's early death helped mythologize his talents; with Diz's longevity (he died in 1993 at the age of 75) came the task of perpetuating the creativity he was known for. His interest in Cuban rhythms had already teamed him with conga player Chano Pozo; their late-'40s collaboration was fertile, creating the distinctive Afro-Cuban sound, typified by the now-classic "Manteca." As the years spilled by, Gillespie remained an extraordinarily adept soloist, often devastating in his enthusiasm and sophistication. "The Eternal Triangle," a blowing vehicle recorded with sax players Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins, is hot-blooded and clear-headed, uncanny in its ability to channel fleet ideas into a hard-driving musical environment.
Gillespie's vitality never waned very much. His legendary good humor was acknowledged by the government to promote good will: he and associates toured the Middle East and South America in the mid-'50s, representing the U.S.'s rich arts scene, and giving others a chance to hear jazz performed firsthand by one of its cornerstone artists. His puckish attitude was fully intact when he recorded "Swing Low Sweet Cadillac," a spoof on the well-known spiritual.
Through the '70s and '80s, he played a huge number of one-nighters in clubs, and endless festival dates - including the famed summer gathering in Newport, R.I. There, on a balmy summer's evening in the late 1980s, Gillespie led a stellar large ensemble that reactivated much of his explosive big-band charts. He continued to tour through the early '90s, playing interesting ideas at the age of 75. His chops were spotty; even during the less articulate moments his undiminished inventiveness was on display. His bent horn spit out a number of frisky proclamations. To the end, potency remained this African-American original's most obvious gift.
"Sometimes you go for a note and it doesn't come out," he said without a whit of embarrassment during our talk "It's like 'ouch!' But what can you do? You've got to keep on going, just keep on going."
With an imagination as colossal as Gillespie's, making headway was a simple as bringing the horn to your lips.
|
|
|
