Dizzy Gillespie: Happy Birthday
Back in the late 1930s, Cab Calloway, the bandleader whose songs “Reefer Man” and “Sportin’ Life” gave a just-say-yes nod to drugs, seemed pretty exotic fare to the mainstream audiences he courted.
John Birks Gillespie, nicknamed Dizzy for his constant clowning, thought otherwise. In his early 20s, he considered Calloway a square for preferring Jonah Jones’s mellow, accessible swing to Dizzy’s dissonant bebop, a style that Calloway branded “Chinese music.” When Calloway made Jones his first trumpeter and cut back on Dizzy’s solos, Dizzy fought back in two ways. The first wasn’t particularly elevated: living up to his nickname, he played the cut-up onstage, mugging and shooting spitballs while Calloway was crooning love songs, making the audience laugh.
When an especially large spitball landed on a footlight, Calloway called Dizzy on it, and Dizzy pulled a knife and slashed Calloway. The cut wasn’t serious, but Dizzy was out of a job—even though, as it turns out, Jones was the guilty party, having fired the spitball that one fateful time.
Dizzy’s second form of resistance, writes biographer Donald Maggin in Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie, was more substantial. Wounded by Calloway’s frequent but usually deserved rebukes, Dizzy spent his off hours in a series of jam sessions in two Harlem clubs that brought forth a new kind of jazz. “People didn’t pay much attention to what was going on,” remembered Carmen McRae. “So when you went in you’d see cats half-stewed who weren’t paying much mind to what was happening on stage. But the musicians were.”
Exactly so. As Dizzy churned it up with the likes of Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and, soon, Charlie Parker, he shed more and more of his swing training and veered straight into rhythmically difficult territory, playing without a net. The innovations were as revolutionary as the shift from Brahms to Bartok, from Journey to The Jam.
Before long, even the most mainstream jazz orchestras—Calloway’s, for one—were adding bebop to the repertoire. (The word has its origins in a Dizzyism: asked by a writer about the cadence of one of his compositions, he replied by singing, “bebop-a-rebop-a-bebop.”) But Dizzy was far ahead of them, venturing into the then little-known world of Afro-Cuban music and bringing back some remarkable finds. In 1947, he unveiled some of them at a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, wedding African polyrhythms to bebop. The result was a commercial success. But by the early ’50s the big-band sound was on its way out, and Dizzy had to scale his unit back to a sextet—one of whose members was John Coltrane, whom he later fired for using heroin on the job.
Dizzy’s later career was a series of ups and downs, much dependent on changing popular taste in the ’50s and ’60s, when rock was dominant and jazz was exiled to the left of the dial. He was a pioneer in blending other Latino sounds into American jazz, broadly influential among salsa and merengue players of the day. But he missed setting a trend or two, as when he shelved a sequence of bossa nova recordings in the early ’60s, leaving it to Stan Getz to hit with Jazz Samba, the first American bossa nova release. And though Dizzy pioneered the use of the electric bass in jazz, he never quite hit with the rock crowd.
He had no complaints, though. At the end of his life, Dizzy said simply, and memorably, “It’s been a great gig.”
He has been gone 14 years now; had he lived, yesterday would have been his 90th birthday. Even today, Dizzy Gillespie is best remembered for his trademark puffed cheeks, which rivaled Louis Armstrong’s. But the secret in his playing lay elsewhere: “You start by tightening . . . your butt muscles,” Gillespie said, “and build your foundation from there. Then the stomach muscles. If you don’t start from the bottom, your diaphragm will never contract and push that air up and out. You finally control the stream of air with your lips. The cheeks have a minor role; they’re just a way station.”
Horn players in training, take note. So, too, should students and buffs of modern jazz, for whom the legendary player still offers pleasure—and even a spitball or two.
Read entire article at Gregory McNamee at Britannica Blog
John Birks Gillespie, nicknamed Dizzy for his constant clowning, thought otherwise. In his early 20s, he considered Calloway a square for preferring Jonah Jones’s mellow, accessible swing to Dizzy’s dissonant bebop, a style that Calloway branded “Chinese music.” When Calloway made Jones his first trumpeter and cut back on Dizzy’s solos, Dizzy fought back in two ways. The first wasn’t particularly elevated: living up to his nickname, he played the cut-up onstage, mugging and shooting spitballs while Calloway was crooning love songs, making the audience laugh.
When an especially large spitball landed on a footlight, Calloway called Dizzy on it, and Dizzy pulled a knife and slashed Calloway. The cut wasn’t serious, but Dizzy was out of a job—even though, as it turns out, Jones was the guilty party, having fired the spitball that one fateful time.
Dizzy’s second form of resistance, writes biographer Donald Maggin in Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie, was more substantial. Wounded by Calloway’s frequent but usually deserved rebukes, Dizzy spent his off hours in a series of jam sessions in two Harlem clubs that brought forth a new kind of jazz. “People didn’t pay much attention to what was going on,” remembered Carmen McRae. “So when you went in you’d see cats half-stewed who weren’t paying much mind to what was happening on stage. But the musicians were.”
Exactly so. As Dizzy churned it up with the likes of Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and, soon, Charlie Parker, he shed more and more of his swing training and veered straight into rhythmically difficult territory, playing without a net. The innovations were as revolutionary as the shift from Brahms to Bartok, from Journey to The Jam.
Before long, even the most mainstream jazz orchestras—Calloway’s, for one—were adding bebop to the repertoire. (The word has its origins in a Dizzyism: asked by a writer about the cadence of one of his compositions, he replied by singing, “bebop-a-rebop-a-bebop.”) But Dizzy was far ahead of them, venturing into the then little-known world of Afro-Cuban music and bringing back some remarkable finds. In 1947, he unveiled some of them at a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, wedding African polyrhythms to bebop. The result was a commercial success. But by the early ’50s the big-band sound was on its way out, and Dizzy had to scale his unit back to a sextet—one of whose members was John Coltrane, whom he later fired for using heroin on the job.
Dizzy’s later career was a series of ups and downs, much dependent on changing popular taste in the ’50s and ’60s, when rock was dominant and jazz was exiled to the left of the dial. He was a pioneer in blending other Latino sounds into American jazz, broadly influential among salsa and merengue players of the day. But he missed setting a trend or two, as when he shelved a sequence of bossa nova recordings in the early ’60s, leaving it to Stan Getz to hit with Jazz Samba, the first American bossa nova release. And though Dizzy pioneered the use of the electric bass in jazz, he never quite hit with the rock crowd.
He had no complaints, though. At the end of his life, Dizzy said simply, and memorably, “It’s been a great gig.”
He has been gone 14 years now; had he lived, yesterday would have been his 90th birthday. Even today, Dizzy Gillespie is best remembered for his trademark puffed cheeks, which rivaled Louis Armstrong’s. But the secret in his playing lay elsewhere: “You start by tightening . . . your butt muscles,” Gillespie said, “and build your foundation from there. Then the stomach muscles. If you don’t start from the bottom, your diaphragm will never contract and push that air up and out. You finally control the stream of air with your lips. The cheeks have a minor role; they’re just a way station.”
Horn players in training, take note. So, too, should students and buffs of modern jazz, for whom the legendary player still offers pleasure—and even a spitball or two.