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Dizzy Gillespie

Unlike Charlie Parker, who burned with incandescent brilliance and died young, Dizzy Gillespie carved out a lengthy career and became a respected elder statesman of the music, which is an unhip thing to do in jazz mythology. In the birth of bebop, though, his pyrotechnic brilliance was the perfect foil for Parker’s own, and was underpinned by a more thorough understanding of harmonic theory than many of his contemporaries routinely possessed. If Dizzy is assured immortality on the strength of his contribution to the emergency of bebop alone, his place in the history of 20th-century music will rest on a considerably wider achievement.

Dizzy also enshrined what many saw as a contradiction. Like Louis Armstrong, he was both a great innovator and a great entertainer, a man who did previously undreamed-of things on trumpet, but at the same time was ready and willing to mug furiously on stage, and, even worse, send up his own artistic inventions in songs like ‘He Beeped When He Should’ve Bopped’. His clowning antics have been held against him by those who saw them as either Uncle Tom-style servility or a betrayal of the sacred torch of musical revolution, but Gillespie was a natural showman as well as a brilliant musician, and is one of the select band of jazzmen who have become household names. Unlike Armstrong, he was no great singer and yet even on these novelty tunes his scatting was always highly inventive and musically sophisticated, a mixture of extraordinary skill and zaniness which is partly a reflection of his natural ebullience and partly a shrewd awareness of more practical necessities.

That combination of high artistic aspiration and street-smart commercial wisdom is reflected again and again in his life and work, and surely lies at the root of his complex personality. In later years, he became increasingly aware of the importance of his African roots and of the civil rights campaigns in America, and even ran for President in 1964 (and again, briefly, in 1972). Being Dizzy he did so under a ‘politics ought to be a groovier thing’ banner but behind the fun there lay a serious concern over the way things were run, especially from the perspective of black Americans.

Those qualities were formed early. As a child, he tells us in his memoirs, ‘mischief, money-making, and music captured all of my attention’, and he was to develop all three capacities in the course of his long life in jazz. He remained unapologetic about his antics throughout his career, from the zany dancing and novelty chants through to a routine which became a staple of his live shows, his announcement that he wanted to introduce the band, followed by his starting to introduce the musicians to each other. Dizzy was a natural comedian, and even though you knew it was coming, it was hard not to smile at his cornball schtick. In his autobiography, Dizzy – To Be Or Not To Bop, he claims there was also a more pragmatic purpose to his routines. (All quotations from Dizzy in this chapter are from that book, unless otherwise stated.)

People always thought I was crazy, so I used that to my advantage to attract public attention and find the most universal audience for our music. I fell back on what I knew. While performing modern jazz, I emphasized certain inimitable parts of my own style . . . Comedy is important. As a performer, when you’re trying to establish audience control, the best thing is to make them laugh if you can. That relaxes you more than anything. A laugh relaxes your muscles; it relaxes muscles all over your body. When you try to get people relaxed, they’re more receptive to what you’re trying to get them to do. Sometimes, when you’re laying on something over their heads, they’ll go along with it if they’re relaxed.’

He was born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, South Carolina, on 21 October, 1917, the youngest of nine children. His father was a part-time musician, but died when John was only ten. He began to teach himself trombone a couple of years later, then trumpet and cornet. His musical prowess earned him admission to the progressive Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina in 1933, where he played in the school band and continued to teach himself music, adding piano to his accomplishments. He quit school in 1935 and joined his family in Philadelphia, where he launched his professional career in a band led by Frankie Fairfax.

It was at this point that he acquired the nickname Dizzy, bestowed by another player in the trumpet section, Fats Palmer, on account of his habitual antics. That trumpet section later featured Charlie Shavers, one of the formative influences on Gillespie’s early style. Through copying Shavers, Dizzy also absorbed stylistic elements from the man to whom he owed the greatest debt as an influence at this formative stage of his career, Roy Eldridge. It was appropriate, then, that when he made his next move, to New York in 1937, he should end up occupying the lead trumpet chair in the Teddy Hill band, which Eldridge had held until earlier that year.

Indeed, Dizzy was allegedly hired largely because he could sound uncannily like Eldridge, notably in his speed and facility in the high register. His first recorded solo, on Hill’s version of ‘King Porter Stomp’ from a May session that year, bears out that suspicion. Gillespie has always acknowledged the debt, but what he went on to make of it was very much his own thing, as he developed an increasingly original musical conception over the next decade. As is always the way of it when something new happens along, some players put his harmonic innovations down to his playing wrong notes, but since he built one of the greatest careers in jazz on that foundation, I guess they must have been the right wrong notes.

Having established his presence on the competitive New York scene, including working with the Cuban band-leader Alberto Socarras, he was invited to join Cab Calloway’s successful outfit in August 1939, with a little help from another eminent Cuban musician, trumpeter Mario Bauza. These associations established an interest in Afro-Cuban music which would bear rich fruit in due course, but he was already developing into a formidable musician at this stage.

It has been argued that Lionel Hampton’s ‘Hot Mallets,’ cut on 11 September 1939 with a ten-piece all-star band which included Dizzy alongside swing era giants like Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, was the first recorded example of the emerging bebop style. That would certainly overstate the case, but it is another clear indication of the way Gillespie was moving; Hampton, who was then working regularly with Benny Goodman, recalled the circumstances in his autobiography, Hamp.

Diz was just coming up then. I’d heard him for the first time at the Apollo Theater a few days before. I went to the Apollo a lot – we all did. That was where you heard real black music. I was sitting behind the stage, and I heard this guy playing trumpet in a different style than I or anyone else had ever heard before. It was the new bebop style, and I said, ‘Man, I got to get this guy on my next recording session’. Some say that it was on those recordings we made, especially ‘Hot Mallets’, which I wrote, that early bebop was first recorded.

The two years the trumpeter spent with the Calloway orchestra were important ones, but his relationship with his employer turned sour when, in a famous incident, Calloway accused him of throwing a spitball at him on stage. It escalated into a backstage confrontation, and an indignant Dizzy, who was genuinely innocent on this occasion, pulled a knife and cut his accuser, which seems as good a way as any to lose a job. It could have been an even more serious matter.

He put his hands up in my chest and pulled me up, getting ready to hit me. He didn’t know I was getting ready to kill him. Oh, yes, I nicked him. He turned me loose, quick. When he saw that blood, nobody had to tell him to turn me loose. Milt Hinton grabbed my hand to keep me from really injuring him. I coulda killed him, I was so mad. It was a serious fight, a very serious thing, and somebody could’ve gotten really hurt because I’m a firm believer in non-violence when it comes to me.

Musically, though, the most significant events of his years with Calloway were happening elsewhere. Teddy Hill had disbanded his outfit (following, according to Dizzy, a falling out with the mob-backed promoters at the Savoy Ballroom) and in 1940 became the booking agent for a Harlem nightspot named Minton’s Playhouse, where he instituted a series of after-hours jam sessions. The musicians who gravitated to these sessions at Minton’s (and the slightly later scene which emerged at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House) were the ones with the most progressive ideas on the contemporary jazz scene of the day – Dizzy himself, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian and numerous others, including many of the major soloists of the swing era.

Of those swing era soloists, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young had the greatest influence on the emergence of bebop. In his exemplary study of the social and musical roots of the music, The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVeaux looks in detail at Hawkins’s contact with and influence on the bop generation. As part of that examination, he considers the respective qualities which Hawkins and Young bequeathed to bebop.

Coleman Hawkins’s music was built on the principles of continuity and certainty. The certainty derived from the precision with which he understood the workings of tonal harmony. Each note of his improvisations finds its place within the framework of tonal relations implied by the tune . . . The appropriate rhetorical mode is thus continuity: an earnest, relentless building of intensity.

Bebop relied on these principles as well – at least as the underlying thread for most passages. But more broadly, it made striking use of the contrary principles of ambiguity and discontinuity. These qualities are notably absent from Hawkins’s music but salient in the music of Lester Young.

Hawkin’s approach ‘represents a narrowing of the possibilities open to a soloist’, since the ‘tendency is always to fill in, to flesh out, to maintain the illusion of harmonic movement even where it is absent’, while Young takes an opposite tack, preferring ‘to reduce the harmonic implications, often to the point of appearing to ignore harmonic movement altogether’, a strategy which created both an ambiguity in harmonic relationships, and allowed a greater rhythmic freedom.

An illustrative aside which provides a colourful description of Young’s attitude to harmonic movement is recounted in a memoir by pianist Bobby Scott. Scott recalled arriving at a club where Young was playing to be greeted by the saxophonist with the following complaint: “Oh, Socks, baby, I’m glad to see you here! This boy playin’ piano plays very well. But he puts eight changes where there ought to be two! You know me, Socks. Somethin’ like “These Foolish Things”, I mean, I like the E-flat chord, the C-minor, the F-minor seventh, the B-flat nine. You know. Shit. I can’t play when there are eighty-nine motherfuckin’ changes in the bar!”

Hawkins was the dominant model for the bebop players, but both he and young had their part to play in the evolution of the style, as DeVeaux suggests.

The bebop pioneers were, on the whole, too deeply invested in the orthodoxies of the time – the ‘progressive’ fascination with chromatic harmony, the professional advantage associated with overt displays of virtuosity – to model their style directly on Young’s understated approach. (It was not until considerably later, in the 1950s, that a younger generation of musicians would do so.) Nevertheless, they saw in Young’s example a way of extending the legacy of Coleman Hawkins and other harmonic improvisers in new and unexpected directions.

Minion’s became a forcing ground for the subsequent evolution of bebop. Many stories have been circulated about the exclusivity of the scene there. It has been said, for example, that Dizzy, Monk and Clarke operated a system designed to exclude white musicians from proceedings. If there was a bar in operation, however, it was not a matter of colour: the musicians have admitted many times that they would call tunes with difficult or unusual changes in order to weed out those players who could not handle the musical demands made on them. In an interview with this writer in 1989, Gillespie answered the charge that Monk in particular would try to scare off newcomers with his music by asserting that ‘the music wasn’t meant to keep nobody away, man, it was just plain hard’.

Trumpeter Johnny Carisi was one white regular able to hang in with the challenges, and as such was always welcome on stage, while the most notorious denizen of Minton’s was an apparently awful but unshakeably persistent black saxophonist from Newark known as The Demon, whom Dizzy dubbed ‘the first freedom player – freedom from harmony, freedom from rhythm, freedom from everything’.

Nonetheless, it would be foolish to ignore the racial dimension implicit in the developments at Minton’s. From the outset, black musicians had made the major creative explorations in jazz, while white musicians had won wider recognition and better rewards, usually on the back of those musical innovations. In 1917, the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz records, drawing on black forms (and in an even more ironic twist, it is said that trumpeter Freddie Keppard turned down the chance of that historic landmark because he was afraid other musicians would steal his ideas); in the 1920s, it was Paul Whiteman who was crowned King of Jazz, not Armstrong, Oliver, or any of the New Orleans pioneers; in the swing era, it was Benny Goodman who was dubbed King of Swing, not Duke or Basie or Fletcher Henderson or Jimmie Lunceford.

That pattern extended to jobs – the white bands played the best residences in the best hotels. The accumulation of bitterness implicit in all this bubbled under in the scene around Minion’s, which was less commercially-directed than on 52nd Street, and where many of the musicians saw themselves as engaged in creating a music which those outside of the circle could not readily imitate (a process which Charles Mingus characterised as the innovators being ripped-off by copyists ‘singing their praises while stealing their phrases’), or could only do so if they had the ‘chops’ and musicality to handle its ferocious challenges. The inner circle of bebop was also based on drug use to a large extent, but at root it was down to ability and had a brutally competitive edge, a point made by the bop pianist Hampton Hawes (whose own contribution to the music will be considered in a future volume). In his autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, the pianist recalls his first experience in New York in the 1940s.

One night at Minton’s, a club in Harlem where there were all-night sessions, somebody recognized me and said, ‘There’s a cat from California supposed to play good, let’s get him up here’. Now at that time there were a lot of East Coast musicians who thought it slick to try to shoot down anyone new on the scene who was starting to make a reputation. It was like an initiation, a ceremonial rite (chump, jump or I’ll burn you up, you don’t know nothin’), calling far-out tunes in strange keys with the hip changes at tempos so fast if you didn’t fly you fell – that’s how you earned your diploma in the University of the Streets of New York.

For a week I had watched these cats burning each other up, ambushing outsiders, fucking up their minds so bad they would fold and split the stand after one tune. Surprised by their coldness because they were so friendly off the stand. I peeked that I wasn’t quite ready, maybe they could get me; you don’t want to be a poopbutt but sometimes it’s better to pass, wait for a better hand. I knew I wouldn’t flop, but neither would I win acclaim. No point in selling tickets if you don’t have a show.

The challenge lifted me a few notches – I knew I had to go out and tighten my hand – and when I came back that way a couple of years later, strung out, five albums under my belt and a lot of playing with Bird, I was ready for them; they couldn’t make me feel funny anymore and left me alone after that. A drummer paid me the ultimate compliment after a set: ‘We been hearin’ about you out on the coast, you a bad motherfucker’. My days of being scared and nervous – at least about music – were over.

It’s too bad it had to be that way, cutting friends up to make them feel inferior so they could get better. That isn’t what music is about. You play for love and for people to enjoy. It’s okay to show a few feathers, you got to have pride in yourself, but you shouldn’t have to wear boxing gloves and spurs; this ain’t no cockfight or main bout at Madison Square Garden. We’re all brothers, aren’t we? – came up the same way, earned our diplomas listening, picking up, hanging out, nervous, some of us getting busted?

Even Hawes, however, then capitulates to the remorselessly Darwinian logic of the process at work. In a society where the ever-present taint of racism denied their achievements both as people and as musicians, and in which criticism of the new music also flowed from opposite poles of the black community (the older style traditional and swing musicians who put down the new music on one hand, the growing ‘respectable’ black bourgeoisie who were plain anti-jazz on the other), it provided an informal but highly codified means of allowing excellence to ride to the top, at least within the music’s own internal hierarchy. Hawes goes on to finish: ‘Yet when I think back, the system did serve a purpose. Blacks in those days had to bear down hard to handle the shadow that was always haunting them, and the constant challenge was the pressure cooker in which you earned recognition and respect. In the process, the music grew leaner, tightened up; the ones who didn’t have it, who couldn’t contribute, fell away.’

The environment which forged bebop was a tough one, but it meant that the music evolved as a meritocracy rather than a closed shop. That element of competitive muscle-flexing probably played its part in determining both the strengths and weaknesses of the emerging form, with its emphasis on virtuoso soloing, advanced harmonic understanding and crackling tempos, and its underlying structural paucity (the characteristic bebop tunes were simply blowing vehicles on a set of often very familiar chord changes, one of the things which would eventually prove to be a major limitation). Gillespie and his cohorts at Minton’s and Monroe’s were at the heart of that evolution. The musicians would play whenever their paying jobs permitted, and the sympathetic respective proprietors, Henry Minton and Clark Monroe, would often provide food, but no fee. Only the house band, which was led by trumpeter Joe Guy at Minton’s, and included Monk and Clarke, was paid, and the sessions were carried on in defiance of union regulations against sitting-in. The rest of the musicians had to be on their guard against hefty fines for playing without a contract if they were caught by union ‘walkers’, whose job it was to keep tabs on the after-hours proclivities of the members (and as the first black delegate to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, Henry Minton was in a more privileged position in that respect, although Gillespie was not alone in seeing the union as ‘just a dues collector’ with little of real benefit to offer the jazz musician). As he wrote in his memoir:

What we were doing at Minton’s was playing, seriously, creating a new dialogue among ourselves, blending our ideas into a new style of music. You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other. We had some fundamental background training in European harmony and music theory superimposed on our own knowledge from Afro-American musical tradition. We invented our own way of getting from one place to the next . . . Our phrases were different. We phrased differently from the older guys. Perhaps the only real difference in our music was that we phrased differently. Musically, we were changing the way that we spoke, to reflect the way that we felt. New phrasing came in with the new accent. Our music had a new accent.

The new rhythmic accents and evolved harmonies of bebop began to take on shape in these jam sessions, most of which went unrecorded. Some private tapes have survived, however, the best known of which is Jerry Newman’s wire recording of May 1941, which has been issued in a number of formats. The music is clearly poised in transition between swing mannerisms and the emerging modernist concept. Gillespie features on three of the tunes, the uptempo ‘Kerouac’ and two versions of Hoagy Carmichael’s famous ballad ‘Stardust’, and while he is not at his best in them, they confirm the evolution in his style which was increasingly evident at this time.

If Gillespie was a prime mover in the emerging new music, so too was the drummer at Minton’s, Kenny Clarke, who adopted the Islamic faith and the name Liaquat Ali Salaam in 1946, but continued to work under his given name. Clarke was born in Pittsburgh on 9 January 1914 (he died in Paris in 1985), and played with Gillespie in both the Edgar Hayes and Teddy Hill bands in the late 1930s. Gillespie rightly credits Clarke with a key role in the developments of the period, arguing that ‘it was Kenny Clarke who set the stage for the rhythmic content of our music. He was the first one to make accents on the bass drum at specific points in the music. He’d play 4/4 very softly, but the breaks, and the accents on the bass drum you could hear. Like, we called them dropping bombs.’

The claim is not entirely accurate, since drummers in the swing era had already experimented with just that kind of more fluid accentuation on the bass drum Dizzy describes, but it was Clarke who transformed the idea into the basis of a fully-developed style. His innovations were crucial to the emergence of the music which became bebop. It is arguable that all revolutions in jazz have been at root a revolution in the rhythmic basis of the music, with an associated harmonic and melodic development built on that new foundation, and that is certainly the case with bebop. The move away from the persistently stated 2-beat and 4-beat emphasis on the bass drum which had sustained all previous jazz styles became a fundamental of the new music.

Clarke himself had been developing a more sparely accented style even in swing band settings; ironically, Teddy Hill had fired him from his own band, disenchanted with what he dubbed Clarke’s ‘klook-mop’ style (a description which became the source of the drummer’s familiar nickname, Klook). Nonetheless, he was astute enough to see that he was the right drummer for the music at Minton’s, and gave him the opportunity to push his experiments even further, abetted by the promptings of Monk and his co-participants at the club, as Clarke explained to his biographer, Mike Hennessey, in Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke.

I had to change my style to play with this clique. Monk’s using accents and things made me play accents more myself, on the bass drum. And I needed to play lighter because we weren’t using a straight beat. I couldn’t play brushes all the time, so naturally I played the top cymbal and used the bass drum for punctuations. When people came into Minton’s they’d say, ‘Hey, listen to that drummer’s accents on the bass drum; man, I never heard that before!’

Clarke used his bombs more sparingly than his protege, Max Roach, dropping them only every few measures to accent his rolling ride cymbal. His style has not been well served by early recordings, however, which have tended to muddy the detail of his playing, and his cymbal work in particular. In any case, it was Roach who would emerge as the leading drummer of the bebop movement, in part because of his phenomenal talent, and in part because Clarke had been drafted to serve in Europe (he was eventually to settle permanently in Paris in 1956), and was off the New York scene from 1943–46 at a crucial time in the development of the music, although he did have further important contributions to make. An intriguing footnote was added to the Minton’s story in 1997, when plans to re-open the venue as a jazz club were announced as part of a regeneration project in Harlem.

As the 1940s progressed, however, the geographical focus of the emerging music in New York shifted downtown, to 52nd Street. Pilgrims in search of the heartbeat of the bop scene on what was once the legendary ‘Swing Street’ will now find a row of anonymous office blocks on the site of the street that never slept (to borrow the title of Arnold Shaw’s book on the subject), but in the mid-1940s it was a sleazy but vital location, and not just for the beboppers – the great names of the swing era also played the street’s many clubs on a regular basis, sharing the space with comedians and strippers.

The jazz clubs on the street had been operating since the mid-1950s, and peaked in the mid-1940s. Clubland was situated in the block between 5th and 6th Avenues, and its names have become a part of the roll-call of jazz history, and probably even more of jazz myth (the reality was way grubbier and more tawdry than the legend). Those clubs, however, provided the breeding ground for the momentum launched at Minton’s and Monroe’s (which relocated to 52nd Street in 1943), and the music moved to a higher level at places like The Onyx, The Famous Door, The Three Deuces, The Spotlite, The Yacht Club and its successor, the original Downbeat. The street also housed the Dixieland stronghold of Jimmy Ryan’s, and Kelly’s Stable, where Coleman Hawkins laid down his famous pre-war marathon versions of ‘Body and Soul’, while the Sunday afternoon jazz sessions attracted the bebop crew.

The modernists and the traditionalists eventually went to war, just after the real one had finished, in a blinkered, partisan debate about old versus new that has remained with jazz ever since, conducted in a hail of disparaging remarks that did neither side much credit, and the cause of jazz as a whole little good. It did at least serve to remind people that new things were happening in the music, and a lot of the put-downs doubtless had at least one eye on the commercial benefits of the publicity which a bit of controversy brought to the musicians and clubs concerned. For a while, though, the concentration of music in the narrow brownstone basements of 52nd Street was the epicentre of the bebop earthquake. Historian and critic James Lincoln Collier described it thus in The Making of Jazz.

The phenomenon was an old one. We have seen the concentration of jazz places in the honky-tonks of Storyville, Chicago’s South Side, the nightclubs of Kansas City, the big show spots of Harlem. 52nd street was another such. It provided economic support for a lot of musicians, a place to practice their trade, and a confluence of musical ideas. It was easy for a man working the street to walk a few doors down on his break and find out what his friends and enemies were doing. 52nd street was not, of course, the only jazz location; there were several clubs in Greenwich Village, others in Harlem, and still others in other cities, notably Chicago. But 52nd Street became the symbolic headquarters of jazz, the jazz center of the world. At the time it appeared that the big bands were the major movement in the music, at least to the casual observer; but it was clear to jazz buffs then, and obvious to us today, that the most important developments in the music were taking place on 52nd Street and in similar places.

Collier’s assessment of the Street is echoed by pianist and educator Billy Taylor, who recalled the cut and thrust atmosphere which prevailed there for Shapiro and Hentoff’s famous (if not always very reliable) oral history, Hear Me Talkin to Ya, published in 1955 when the memories were still relatively fresh.

The cutting sessions there were just fantastic. With all of the musicians regularly working on The Street and with all those sitting in, astonishing sessions were inevitable. There were nights with five trumpets on stand and five saxophones . . . A man faced with the kind of challenge you get in a sitting-in session is not so prone to imitate. He’s apt to concentrate on building better and more original solos. Because, if after the third chorus at a free session, a man is still imitating, the guys there who are playing original lines will make him sound pretty sad. So that was one of the very good things about The Street – the practice of sitting in all the time and the challenges that came out of it.

Over time, the sitting-in sessions began to diminish, partly as a consequence of greater emphasis on preparation within the bands, and partly as a result of increasing pressure to hang on to the jobs that were around. In Taylor’s view, though, the real death-knell came from familiar sources.

The Street sort of folded gradually. The decline had begun around late 1946 and 1947. Why? Well, with so large a number of hangers-on around, those hangers-on were finding a lucrative market for all the vices – drugs, et cetera – and were preying on the school kids and others who came down . . . And the club owners didn’t help much either, because of their own greed and the fact that they didn’t police their clubs better. By their greed, I mean the small tables and the big cover charges didn’t build up good will. And the owners got into booking wars. If Dizzy were working at the Onyx, The Deuces would have Roy Eldridge and Charlie Shavers. Or if Bird were at one club, another club would get all the other alto men available – like Pete Brown and fifteen others. That sort of thing was wonderful for listeners, but it didn’t help music, having that kind of battle of attractions.

The Street’s reputation for sleaze began to eclipse the music, the striptease joints began to take over from the clubs, and the scene moved again when new clubs like The Royal Roost (where disc-jockey Symphony Sid Torin’s broadcasts helped popularise the music, and earned the venue – which later moved to become the even bigger Bop City – the nickname ‘the house that bop built’) and Birdland opened their doors to bebop on Broadway, offering larger capacities and plusher surroundings.

While the music was developing fast on the Street, though, the progress in documenting it was slower. It is one of the great frustrations of jazz history that the recorded evidence for the evolution of bebop is not as complete as it might have been, partly as a result of a recording ban which lasted through 1942–43, and was then exacerbated by wartime shortages of shellac, although it is unlikely that record companies fixated on commercial returns would have rushed to record the beboppers at this stage in their development anyway.

As the examples of 1939–42 suggest, the music was picking up considerable momentum at that crucial stage, and a fuller discography might have made the development from swing to bop seem less abrupt, bringing its evolutionary aspects into greater balance with its revolutionary face, which emerged as if from another planet in the immediate post-war years, with Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the vanguard of the movement.

The two men first met in Parker’s hometown of Kansas City in 1940, while the trumpeter was on the road with the Calloway band. Parker had been developing his own version of the music, both in Kansas and in New York, as his recordings with Jay McShann demonstrate. Their historic collaborations still lay ahead of them at this point, however, and following his split with Calloway, Dizzy worked briefly with a number of leaders, including Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Les Hite, and, very briefly and tantalisingly, Duke Ellington. His solo on Lucky Millinder’s ‘Little John Special’ in 1942 has some claim to being the first fully formed bop solo on record, and contained what would become the famous ‘Salt Peanuts’ riff, although Gunther Schuller has argued in his monumental study The Swing Era that the figure had already surfaced on a recording of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ by the John Kirby Sextet in 1939, a reminder of the informal nature – or at least origin – of many bop compositions.

An important association in this period arrived with Gillespie’s tenure in the big band led by Earl Hines, which the trumpeter joined in late 1942. By all accounts, the pianist’s band was a strange amalgam of players firmly rooted in the swing style, and the emerging beboppers. Gunther Schuller has worked out that in March and April of 1943, the band briefly included Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Wardell Gray, Bennie Green, Benny Harris, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine from the evolving modernist camp. Dizzy recalled that Earl ‘had a lotta young guys who all wanted to play in the modern style’, and described the unit as ‘a beautiful, beautiful band’. He admired (and learned from) Hines’s class and professionalism, and it was at this time that he began to form a close relationship with Parker, who had also been recruited to play tenor in the band – Diz claims each was lured into the band by being told the other was planning to join up.

I guess Charlie Parker and I had a meeting of the minds, because both of us inspired each other. There were so many things that Charlie Parker did well, it’s hard to say exactly how he influenced me. I know he had nothing to do with my playing the trumpet, and I think I was a little more advanced, harmonically, than he was. But rhythmically, he was quite advanced, with setting up the phrase and how you got from one note to another. How you get from one note to another really makes the difference. Charlie Parker heard rhythms and rhythmic patterns differently, and after we had started playing together, I began to play, rhythmically, more like him. In that sense he influenced me, and all of us, because what makes the style is not what you play but how you play it.

Too much has been made at times of that implied distinction between the two men’s harmonic and rhythmic capabilities. What was true in 1942 was a very different case by the time they made their celebrated small-group recordings in 1945, when any such distinction was already all but indiscernible. Dizzy’s harmonic understanding may indeed have been more firmly grounded in theory, and Bird’s rhythmic sense a shade more finely graded, but by the time the fledgling bebop had matured in the middle of the decade, the differences were too minimal even to measure. Nonetheless, many musicians felt – and still feel – that Gillespie was the principal harmonic theorist behind the new music. Monk’s harmonic developments were highly advanced and far-reaching, but Dizzy’s were more widely accessible to players coming into the music, and less strongly marked with the idiosyncratic personal stamp of Monk’s ideas; in addition, Dizzy’s outgoing personality made him more approachable as a source of wisdom than the forbiddingly strange pianist.

The trumpeter clearly saw his function as an informal teacher as an important one, and his mastery of the piano was a crucial element in that process. He recalls that musicians like Miles Davis would ask him where he found the notes and harmonic ideas he utilised. The answer was from the piano.

That’s your ass if you don’t play piano, you can’t find them. You might luck on them sometimes, but if you know the piano, you’ll know where they are all the time. You might get lucky and find one every now and then just from playing your own instrument, but if you know the piano, you’ll know where they are all the time. You can see them.

One of the most productive of Dizzy’s musical relationships during the war years was his time spent in 1943–44 in the small group led by bassist Oscar Pettiford, who is another musician singled out as a key figure of the era by the trumpeter. Pettiford was born on 30 September 1922, in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, of mixed Afro-American and Native American extraction, and was another musician to make the move to Europe, settling in Copenhagen in 1958, where he died in 1960. Gillespie describes him as ‘the most distinctive bass player among us’ at Minton’s.

Ray Brown came on the scene afterwards, but Oscar Pettiford was the bass player for our music . . . Jimmy Blanton was the first one that I heard playing differently, but they tell me that Oscar was playing the new way in Minneapolis before he came to New York. He’d picked up on Charlie Christian and was playing melody on the bass, like a soloist, like a trumpet, or any other melody instrument.

Both Charlie Christian, a brilliant guitarist working with Benny Goodman, and Jimmy Blanton, the innovative young bass player with the Duke Ellington Orchestra of 1939–41, clearly prefigured the developments of the bop era in their playing, but both were prematurely dead by 1942, before it really got underway. Pettiford, however, went on to make a major contribution to the development of the music. The bass player, who was also an accomplished cellist, possessed a legendary irascible temperament, especially when fuelled by drinking, and many of his collaborators fell foul of it over the years; Dizzy was no exception, and the band which played the Onyx residency that winter eventually broke up over personal differences (although the two men recorded together the following year).

It was during this residency that Dizzy claims the term bebop came into currency. His explanation is that the band played a lot of tunes which had not been assigned titles, and by way of cueing the tune, he would say something like ‘dee-da-pa-da-n-de-bop’ and the band would go into the tune he had just sung. When people wanted to hear that tune, but didn’t know the name, ‘they would ask for bebop. And the press picked it up and started calling it bebop.’ Dizzy describes the process:

[we would take] the chord structures of various standard and pop tunes and create new chords, melodies, and songs from them. We found out what the composers were doing by analyzing these tunes, and then added substitute chords . . . When we borrowed from a standard, we added and substituted so many chords that most people didn’t know what song we really were playing . . . That was our thing in bebop, putting in substitutions . . . This wasn’t pilfering. In cases where we needed substitute chords for these tunes, we had to create new melodies to fit them. If you’re gonna think up a melody, you’d just as well copyright it as a new tune, and that’s what we did. We never did get any suits from publishers.

That process was endemic to bebop. In his book Bebop: The Music and Its Players (published in 1995 and recommended for anyone looking for an introduction to the technicalities of the music), Thomas Owens adopts the term ‘melodic contrafact’ (coined by James Patrick in an earlier essay) to describe such grafting of a new melodic and harmonic formulation onto an existing harmonic structure. The use of the word ‘contrafact’ in this book should be understood in that sense.

That harmonic expansion, and the opportunities it afforded for extending harmonic exploration by the soloists, became a fundamental of bebop, and also its in-built weakness. It evolved as a music of great sophistication built on a repetitive and limited structure, a restriction that would drive many of the great figures of the music into more experimental areas. At the same time, it had a great deal to offer in the scope it afforded for melodic, harmonic and rhythmic invention, and it continues to offer this as a central stream of the jazz repertory today. At this stage, though, when songs like ‘How High the Moon’ and ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’ were still new to the musicians, it was a freshly-minted source of inspiration.

It might be worthwhile at this point mentioning a distinction which sometimes causes confusion for non-playing listeners. Chords were the building blocks of bebop (and later hard bop) harmony, and are described as the simultaneous sounding of two or more notes in a series of defined relationships to each other, generally dictated in Western musical theory by the major-minor (or diatonic) system of harmony. Chords are made up of intervals, which is to say the distances between each of the notes included in the chord, again within that same defining relationship in which the basic unit is the triad, made up of the first (known as the root), third, and fifth intervals of the octave (and there are major, minor, augmented and diminished versions of the triad). Bebop made much greater use of higher intervals, which were either underused or not used at all in earlier forms of jazz, including the famous flatted fifth and the popular seventh (a staple in blues), but also the more esoteric ninths, elevenths and thirteenths beyond the octave. Such intervals tend to unresolved dissonance and an implication of polytonality (the impression of being in more than one key at once which is produced by overlaying a triad with another formed by the higher intervals, which are simultaneously a triad, or part of one, in a different key), elements which gave the music much of its complexity and ‘new’ sound – the source of all those alleged wrong notes.

Chords are most strongly associated with the so-called chordal instruments like piano and guitar, where the notes can literally be played simultaneously (this is sometimes referred to as vertical harmony). However, a chord can also be played with the notes following one after the other: on a chordal instrument, that technique is known as an arpeggio, but that linear method of spelling out the notes which form a chord sequentially rather than simultaneously is the one which must be used by the reed, wind and brass instruments.

Thus, a saxophonist or trumpeter can compose or improvise a single, linear melodic line which refers constantly to the underlying chord structure of the tune, either spelling those chords out in continually changing fashion (often called ‘running the changes’, where changes refers to the chord sequence – or chord changes – in question), or can create a new melodic/harmonic line which touches base with the underlying harmony at key points, and will sometimes deliberately contradict it in order to surprise the listener. That is what is meant when referring to horn players (or any other single note, linear instrument) playing the harmony or playing chords, and it is a fundamental element of bebop.

After parting with Pettiford, Dizzy co-led his own band across the street at the Downbeat with the Lester Young-influenced saxophonist Budd Johnson, an undervalued musician who came out of swing, but was also able to adjust to the harmonic demands of the new music (they recorded together with Coleman Hawkins in February of 1944). The other major landmark for Gillespie that year – and for many of the nascent beboppers – arrived with the formation of another under-recorded outfit which played a major role in bop history (and perhaps an even bigger one in bop mythology), the Billy Eckstine Big Band. The trumpeter was invited to be musical director of that ambitious outfit when the singer put the band together in 1944, and remained in that role until the following year, when he left to concentrate on his own group, and was replaced by Fats Navarro.

By 1944 Gillespie stood on the cusp of his two most significant contributions to modern jazz: his initial small-group bebop recordings, and the formation of his bebop big band which would undertake the first real explorations in fusing modern jazz with Afro-Cuban rhythms. As we saw earlier, Dizzy’s interest in the latter music was kindled by his stint in Alberto Socarras’s band in 1939, where he first met Mario Bauza. That, though, was a Cuban dance band rather than the kind of unit which evolved through the trumpeter’s association with percussionist Chano Pozo, in what would be a genuinely ground-breaking development. Before that, however, came the electrifying small-group studio sessions enshrined amongst the earliest formal recordings of bebop. The first such session under Gillespie’s leadership came on 9 January 1945, in New York, with a sextet based on the musicians from the Onyx club band, including Pettiford, who formed the rhythm section with pianist Clyde Hart and west coast drummer Shelly Manne. Dizzy was joined by Don Byas on tenor and Trummy Young on trombone, and the session, issued on the Manor label (an independent based in Newark, New Jersey, and managed by Irving Berman) featured the first recorded versions of Tadd Dameron’s ‘Good Bait’, the Gillespie staples ‘Salt Peanuts’ and ‘Be-bop’, and a version of ‘I Can’t Get Started’ which furnishes a good early example of the way in which the bebop players would substitute more complex chord sequences in standard tunes (Gillespie’s reharmonisation here comes in the third and fourth bars of the ‘A’ section of the tune, and only in the solo line, but the enriched chords were widely adopted in later accompaniments on the tune as well).

Charlie Parker had recorded a quartet session under the leadership of guitarist Tiny Grimes in the previous September, and returned to the studio himself in January, this time with a band nominally led by pianist Clyde Hart, another player with roots in swing (Dizzy felt his style was closer to Teddy Wilson than Bud Powell) who was tidy rather than inspired, but could handle the difficult chord changes proficiently enough. There was still a strong swing influence evident on these recordings, but bebop had now been named, and its formal codes had been worked out on the bandstands of 52nd Street: the time had come to document the new music on discs.

In February, Dizzy took another sextet into the studio, at the behest of Guild/Musicraft, a label which had begun life as a classical music specialist in 1937, but had turned to jazz when Albert Marx, who had produced Art Tatum’s earliest recordings, became its artistic director in 1944, when the end of the recording ban had seen the formation and growth of many small independent labels. This time it was Parker who occupied the saxophone chair, with an augmented rhythm section of Reno Palmieri on guitar, Clyde Hart, Slam Stewart on bass, and drummer Cozy Cole. The three tunes chosen for this historic session were ‘All the Things You Are’, ‘Dizzy Atmosphere’, and ‘Groovin’ High’, a contrafact of ‘Whispering’ with a complex new melody. The first is distinctly lacklustre, but the latter two are important route-markers in the bebop story. In ‘Dizzy Atmosphere,’ the rhythm section strive hard to set aside their swing inclinations, while the horns lay down full-blooded bebop solos. ‘Groovin’ High’ is even more significant, although it has an unusually complex structure and variations of tonality (technically known as modulation between keys) for a bebop tune. If Diz and Bird are clearly careering along the same track, however, the sense that the horn players are working towards areas where the rhythm section fear to tread is also palpable in these recordings. It would require a further degree of refinement in that key section of the band before bebop would be truly established on record.

Perhaps the most significant development represented by this session is the beginning of the crucial phase of the partnership between its two principal protagonists. The quintet which Bird and Diz co-led lasted less than a year, but it remains one of the seminal groups in jazz history. In the sleeve notes to the Verve compilation Dizzy’s Diamonds (1992), trumpeter Jon Faddis reports the following interesting observation:

I tell you one thing Dizzy said: ‘Well, I know Charlie Parker was playing that music, because I wasn’t playing all the notes.’ When they’re playing the lines, he said he wasn’t playing all of the notes, so he said he knew Charlie Parker was playing it [all]. When they played, Dizzy said Bird once told him that the two of them were like the heartbeat, one beat on the downbeat and one beat on the upbeat. That’s the way Charlie Parker saw it. When they played together they became one.

In order to realize the music’s full potential, however, the question of a rhythm section more completely in empathy with the new music still had to be resolved. Rhythmic changes lie at the root of every major jazz style, from New Orleans and Dixieland through to swing, bop, free jazz and fusion. In each case, the new style was an outgrowth of a previous development, and brought with it often radical revisions of the musicians’ approach to melody and harmony. The fundamental impetus, though, and the vital underpinning, came from the altered rhythmic basis of the music. That is not simply a matter of the way the recognised rhythm section deals with matters of tempo, metre and rhythmic accents, but also the way in which all the players adapt the tiny shifts in accentuation in their own playing. As we saw earlier, bebop brought a move away from the old regular 2 and 4-beat marking of time by the bass drum, and freed the drummer to adopt a much more fluid style, often leaving the bass player to anchor the beat, either by a walking pattern, or through stressing the key notes – most often the root of the chord – in each bar or measure. This more flexible rendering of time was accompanied by a marked quickening in tempos and indeed the speed at which the music was played began to reach fearsome levels, bringing with it additional problems of clean articulation and accurate intonation for the horn players. As a musical process, bebop is a curious mixture of macho display and infinitely subtle musicality, of rote playing (all players have their melodic clichés, their little phrases which will always work when run over a particular given sequence of chord changes) and inspirational improvisation.

In the transitional period of the mid-1940s, many rhythm sections were clearly torn between the old swing manner and the emerging music. On 11 May 1945, the hornmen were back in the studio with a new band, again for Guild/Musicraft. Al Haig, a white pianist with a real bebop feel, replaced Hart while Curly Russell took over the bass and the drummer was the great Sid Catlett. Catlett, like Buddy Rich on a later session, was something of a mismatch, in that while he was a brilliant drummer, he was not really tuned in to the mores of bebop. Big Sid, however, was too good a musician to let anybody down, and for the most part he succeeds in bridging the gap.

They cut four tunes, one a version of ‘Lover Man’ with Sarah Vaughan guesting on vocal. ‘Shaw ’Nuff’ (named for Dizzy’s agent, Billy Shaw) is a good example of the blistering tempos the beboppers increasingly favoured, with Curly Russell marking the time in a finger-busting four to the bar. Catlett adds plenty of shimmering cymbal colour, but not enough of the kind of energising punctuations which help lift the momentum of the music, a process which would become standard with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. The drummer sounds happier on a new version of ‘Salt Peanuts’, itself based on a riff figure reminiscent of the swing era and encased in what is, by bebop standards, a sophisticated head arrangement (the term ‘head’ referring to a theme or chorus which has been worked out to varying degrees of specificity, but not formally notated). Despite the novelty aspects of the tune and the comic vocal interjections from Dizzy on the famous ‘Salt Peanuts’ phrase, the structure of standard chorus lengths with interpolated interludes which they adopt for the tune is complex. Parker solos twice, once in the 8-bar bridge on the second chorus (which is separated from the first full chorus by an 8-bar break using richer chords than in the main theme), and again throughout the fourth chorus. His contributions are typically sharp, poised and inventive, and leave Al Haig’s solo on the third chorus sounding a little flat. Dizzy follows Bird after an asymmetrical ten bar insert, launching his solo with a spectacular 4-bar flourish, then scampering through a fleet, emotional full chorus. His slightly astringent trumpet tone lacked the richness and lustre of a Fats Navarro or the giants of the swing era, but nobody could match him for either speed or drama. His playing was peppered with sudden, startling twists and contrasts in phrasing and dynamics, or lung-bursting forays into the outer limits of the instrument.

Arguably, though, it is their version of ‘Hot House’ which comes closest to fulfilling the template for the new music. The chromatic melody dances in angular fashion over rich augmented chords in the piano accompaniment (a process generally known as ‘comping’) while the bass walks a copy-book bebop line, and the improvised choruses, while restrained by the limitations of the playing time of the standard 78 rpm record (around three minutes), are masterpieces of melodic and rhythmic invention, playing off the enriched harmonies of this elegant but quirky contrafact of ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’

With this session, bebop all but comes of age in the studio, and by the time they met again in that environment on 26 November 1945, the process had been completed. The session was Parker’s first as a leader, and Gillespie played piano on it, turning to trumpet only briefly in the introduction to ‘Koko’. (The session, and the aftermath of the California trip mentioned below, will be discussed in Chapter Two.) At this point, Dizzy led a famous quintet at The Three Deuces on 52nd Street, with Parker on alto, Bud Powell on piano, Curly Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums, a unit he described as ‘the height of perfection in our music’.

If not quite that, it certainly marked the full flowering of the quintessential bebop band, with its trumpet and saxophone front line, and both a pianist and a drummer who were fully in tune with the music rather than trying to adapt their natural inclinations to its demands. Powell and Roach were to become giants in their own right, and Russell, while not a Pettiford or a Ray Brown, was a solid, sympathetic bass player in this demanding idiom. Bebop had arrived, and if Dizzy would shortly come to a separation from his front-line partner, in retrospect he recognised the obvious musical empathy that existed between them at this seminal time.

Yard and I were like two peas. We played all our regular shit. Charlie Parker and I were closer musically than Monk and I. Our music was like putting whipped cream on jello. His contribution and mine just happened to go together, like putting 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 . . . Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether I was playing or not because the notes were so close together. He was always going in the same direction as me when he was way out there in Kansas City and had never heard of me.

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 GILLESPIE’S BIG BAND’, and put a big sign in front of the club . . .

By this time he had people who liked him, they’d been seeing him on the Street and everything, so they all came there to see what the hell he was gonna do. And, man, he hit into that opening. Well, they weren’t expecting that noise, the whole band, a little club, and this first thing started with the whole band hitting one note. And Dizzy brought his hand up, and everybody jumped. And by the time they landed on their feet, thinking it was over – no, he hit another one – another one – another one! And old Max was going, took off with the shit . . . The cats were something, man.

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, and another from one of west coast impresario Gene Norman’s concerts in Pasadena in July 1948, in which the rhythm section is given space for an extended stretch out in the middle of the tune, featuring a solo from Pozo which clearly fires up the excited crowd. It would be his last performance to be captured on record.

The more complex and sophisticated ‘Cubana Be’ and ‘Cubana Bop’ take a very different approach to the fusion of jazz and Cuban music. If ‘Manteca’ reveals the showier side of Dizzy’s personality, then these paired tunes return us to the unadulterated advanced musician in him. Dizzy co-wrote the tune with George Russell (Chano Pozo was also co-credited, as Russell explains below), who would go on to be one of the few jazz musicians to make a major reputation almost exclusively on the basis of his contributions as a composer. Even more unusual were his influential formal theories worked out in his book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation, an advanced distillation of his modal experiments published in 1953 (revised in 1959), just as Miles Davis was about to bring modal jazz to a wider audience with his classic Kind of Blue. At this point, however, Russell was a tyro arranger and composer who had moved to New York from his native Ohio a couple of years earlier and joined the informally constituted group of musicians which gathered around Gil Evans’s apartment, including, at various times, Dizzy, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan, among many others. In an interview with this writer in 1988, Russell recalled the circumstances of the composition of ‘Cubana Be’ and ‘Cubana Bop’, in which he brought in the concept of modal rather than chordal harmony in his introduction.

I sold an arrangement of a tune called ‘New World’ to Dizzy in 1945, but then I was in the hospital for almost sixteen months. The guys all kept in touch and visited me and so on, and when I got out, Dizzy and I got together to work on a sketch he had, which became ‘Cubana Be’. He had sketched out a section of the theme, and I added a long introduction to the piece which was really modal, in that it wasn’t based on chords, which was not done in jazz at that time. Dizzy had a really remarkable harmonic sense, and his chord progression for ‘Cubana Be’ was pretty advanced in any case, but the modal concept was really a new innovation for jazz at that period.

The ‘Cubana Bop’ section I wrote after hearing Chano play one of those Cuban rhythms on the bus one night – it was a rhythm they called nanigo, and it’s a kind of mystical thing in Cuban music. We performed it with an improvised section by Chano when we played it for the first time at Symphony Hall in Boston that night, and that’s why he is co-credited as a composer, but in reality the writing was all done by me and Dizzy. That was a pretty sensational piece for audiences at that time, who hadn’t really heard anything like it before. The rhythmic accent of the music was very much based on bringing the Cuban rhythms together with the American jazz drumming style of the period, with complex harmonic development on top of that. That’s what we were trying to get.

And that is exactly what they did get. The opening section of the tune must have sounded very strange indeed to contemporary jazz audiences. Announced by Pozo’s congas in a strong dynamic (loud/soft) variation, then Clarke’s drums, the complex musical textures of Russell’s modal introduction, ending at around 1' 16" on the recorded version, when Dizzy takes off on his own theme with more conventional chordal writing for the ensemble, can be heard as a preview of things to come in jazz. The ‘Cubana Bop’ section, with Chano’s solo and lots of chanting, is closer to the riotous exuberance of ‘Manteca’, but if it is a less obvious show-stopper than that hit, it is an even more daring musical development.

While others were taking the bebop small group to greater and greater heights in the late 1940s, Dizzy was able to keep his big band together for four years, an achievement in itself. The band provided a platform for a whole slew of emerging musicians who worked their way through its ranks, including trombonist J.J. Johnson, saxophonists Sonny Stitt, James Moody, Jimmy Heath, Paul Gonsalves and John Coltrane, and the core of the original line-up of the long-lived Modern Jazz Quartet. Indeed, it was in Dizzy’s 1946–7 rhythm section that John Lewis (piano), Milt Jackson (vibes), Ray Brown (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums) first played together; that band would record in 1951–2 as the Milt Jackson Quartet, and, with Percy Heath replacing Brown, who was otherwise engaged with his then wife, Ella Fitzgerald, became the MJQ in 1952. Chano Pozo’s decisive influence also remained active in the band’s repertory after his death, and can be heard in tunes like ‘Guarachi Guaro’ and the universally known ‘Tin Tin Deo.’

Despite considerable concert success both in America and Europe, and further recordings in 1949, Dizzy eventually began to feel the financial squeeze of trying to keep a big band going in an era where the trend had moved to smaller groups (even Count Basie broke up his band in the early 1950s, and toured for a time with a sextet). The large dance venues which had sustained the swing era big bands on the road were closing up, and did not provide an appropriate ambience for Gillespie’s ambitious bebop charts in any case. His aspirations for the band did not stop at making money.

The big band became a definite road success by 1947, but I still hoped for a greater recognition of culture, the whole culture of our music, and wanted a more universal appeal. By 1947, a lotta bands had begun to imitate our style of playing. And some of them, especially the white bands like Stan Kenton’s, did better in America, commercially, than we could at that time with segregation. No one could take our style, but we had to stay in existence to keep the style alive. They had us so penned up within the concept of race that a colored big band wasn’t all that economically feasible, unless you were playing and doing just what the people ordered . . . Our band got a lotta publicity, but the money didn’t roll in like the publicity. We didn’t play that kinda music.

The financial pressures were exacerbated by another familiar pressure which had afflicted jazz musicians right from the start of the music – their reliance on the largely white businessmen who ran the clubs, record companies, management and booking agencies, and, most significantly, music publishing. The shaving of bands’ fees by club-owners and agents, and the practice of managers and agents adding their names to the publishing rights of tunes – and thereby claiming a share of their often lucrative proceeds – had begun early in jazz (Duke Ellington’s manager, Irving Mills, is a famous example, and while Ellington himself was never slow to claim a co-credit on works instigated by his sidemen, at least he had a musical hand in them) and, according to Dizzy, had grown no better by the time of the bebop era.

People with enough bucks and foresight to invest in bebop made some money. I mean more than just a little bit. All the big money went to the guys who owned the music, not to the guys who played it. The businessmen made much more than the musicians, because without the money to invest in producing their own music, and sometimes managing poorly what they earned, the modern jazz musicians fell victim to the forces of the market. Somehow, the jazz businessman always became the owner and got back more than his ‘fair’ share, usually at the player’s expense. More was stolen from us during the bebop era than in the entire history of jazz up to that point. They stole a lot of our music, all kinds of stuff . . . The people who stole couldn’t create, so I kept interested in creating the music, mostly, and tried to make sure my works were protected.

That lack of money to invest in the production of the music eventually forced Dizzy to dismantle his big band in 1950, prompted by an ultimatum from his wife, Lorraine – either the band goes, or I do. Dizzy made some dates with the Stan Kenton Orchestra and formed a sextet of his own, and in 1951 he set up his own record label, Dee Gee Records, to issue his music, but it too succumbed to financial pressures the following year.

Dizzy had been a featured artist on Norman Granz’s ground-breaking Jazz At The Philharmonic shows, which won new audiences for jazz, and also did much to help chip away at prejudice (Granz would not allow segregated audiences at his shows, even in the south – it was either a mixed audience or no show, and he had the legal and financial muscle to stand up to official intimidation). In the wake of the dissolution of Dee Gee Records, it seemed an obvious step to sign up with Granz’s labels, Norgran and Clef, which were later absorbed into the more familiar Verve label, which he launched in 1956.

Dizzy had already taken part in a 1950 quintet session under Charlie Parker’s leadership for Clef (issued by Verve on LP as Bird and Diz), which also featured Monk and a mis-cast Buddy Rich, and was reunited with Bird, Bud Powell and Max Roach in the celebrated concert date at Massey Hall in Toronto in 1953. This performance was clandestinely taped for posterity by bass player Charles Mingus, and has been much reissued since its initial appearance on his Debut label (although Roach, as Mingus’s partner in the record company, would also have been aware of the arrangement). The records Gillespie cut for Granz included a trumpet summit meeting with Eldridge on Roy and Diz (1954), and a surprisingly successful session with violinist Stuff Smith (1957), one which was oddly echoed in 1967 when the veteran Ellington violinist Ray Nance guested on a New York club date with Dizzy (in a band that also included Chick Corea and Elvin Jones), issued as Live at the Village Vanguard by Blue Note.

Small-group sessions with Stan Getz turned out to be something of a disappointment, with each man sounding a little diffident in the other’s company, but there were more characteristic fireworks on albums with the two Sonnys, Stitt and Rollins, and recordings from the end of the decade with a band which featured the rolling, blues-inflected Chicago piano style of Junior Mance, a sharp contrast to the flowing bop style of Dizzy’s earlier pianists.

It was not, however, the end of the big band story. Gillespie had made big band recordings for Granz in both 1954 and 1955 (and did so again in 1956 and 1957), with a studio band put together with the help of trumpeter and arranger Quincy Jones. In 1956, he was invited by the State Department (on the recommendation of Senator Adam Powell) to put together a big band for a government-sponsored goodwill tour of the Near East, Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe, and again turned to Jones for assistance in getting the band in shape. His was the first jazz ensemble to be offered such an undertaking, and the trumpeter ‘liked the idea of representing America’, but with the caveat that he ‘wasn’t going over to apologize for the racist policies of America’. He side-stepped the State Department briefing, telling his wife that ‘I’ve got three hundred years of briefing. I know what they’ve done to us, and I’m not gonna make any excuses. If they ask me any questions, I’m gonna answer them as honestly as I can’.

The tour was a success, and audiences seemed genuinely gripped by the music, especially on a rhythmic level, even if it was new ground for the vast majority of them: ‘The mentality of jazz, its spontaneous organization, really got to them. They couldn’t understand how we could seem so unorganized until we began to play. Our music really exemplifies a perfect balance between discipline and freedom.’ The experience also allowed Dizzy to add to his already ample knowledge of ethnic musics from around the world, and he was able to stock that cupboard even further – and in even more significant fashion – when the band toured in South America several months later, also under the aegis of the government.

Dizzy’s love of Caribbean and Latin American music had long since been established – as well as the Afro-Cuban experiments, his forays into that field included recording Latin-themed charts with arranger Chico O’Farrill, and a session with a band made up of South American musicians billed as His Latin-American Rhythm (which included the first recording of another of his most famous compositions, the lovely ‘Con Alma’), both in 1954. On this trip, and especially in Brazil, he picked up on yet more authentic Latin rhythms and forms to add to his music, and met up with an important collaborator of that period, the pianist, arranger and composer Lalo Schifrin. The pianist came to Dizzy’s attention when the band visited Buenos Aires, where, as Schifrin explained in an interview with this writer in 1996, he had turned to jazz at a time when the music was not officially sanctioned in his country.

I grew up in Argentina during the period of Peron, which was a fascistic period in my country, and jazz was not well regarded, because it was not a nationalistic music. For me, though, it was not so much a political protest as almost like a religious conversion when I first heard Charlie Parker and George Shearing, and actually, even before them, Bix Beiderbecke. I used to get records from a merchant sailor who sailed between Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, and smuggled records back to us.

Dizzy was an important influence even before I met him, and before I ever had a chance to work with him, I knew his music. In fact, he has said that when I joined his band he didn’t have to teach me anything – I already knew all the band charts! It wasn’t quite true, but nearly, and of course, he did teach me very many things. In particular he taught me how to accompany, which is an art in itself.

Dizzy told Schifrin to look him up when he got to the USA, and the pianist took him up on the offer when he arrived in New York in 1960. Schifrin joined Dizzy’s quintet as a replacement for Junior Mance, although it is likely that what Dizzy really wanted was his writing rather than piano skills. They collaborated on the most successful of the longer works which Gillespie attempted at this time, Schifrin’s Gillespiana, in which the pianist achieved a highly successful interweaving of Latin and jazz elements within a five-section structure which adapted elements from the classical suite and the ensemble-within-an-ensemble counterpoint of the concerto grosso form, using Gillespie’s quintet against an expanded horn and percussion section. Both the original album (recorded in November 1960) and the concert debut of the work at Carnegie Hall also included Dizzy’s ‘Tunisian Fantasy’, an extended re-working of ‘Night in Tunisia’, and a version of ‘Manteca’ which, thirteen years on, had lost none of its irresistible exuberance. The relationship with the classically trained Schifrin, which Dizzy likened to that between Duke Ellington and arranger and composer Billy Strayhorn (though one big difference lay in the fact that Schifrin received the composer credits so often denied to Strayhorn), and the emphasis on large-scale works at this time reflected Dizzy’s own desire to see his music given greater recognition and acceptance within the ‘legitimate’ musical establishment, but it remains firmly jazz-rooted.

A subsequent large-scale collaboration with Schifrin, The New Continent, was a far less satisfactory affair, but this period did give rise to one of the most singular projects in all of Gillespie’s discography. The trumpeter commissioned trombonist J.J. Johnson to write an album of music for the big band; the result Perceptions (1961), was one of the most challenging compositions ever to emerge from a jazz writer. Gunther Schuller conducted the sessions with a 21-piece orchestra, and the trumpeter’s creative struggles to come to terms with the unfamiliar structures of Johnson’s often surprisingly un-jazz-like compositions makes for absorbing listening.

Dizzy was able to keep his big band together until 1960, and returned to it at various points thereafter, including a memorable 1968 edition preserved on record from the Berlin Jazz Festival on the MPS album Reunion Big Band 20th & 30th Anniversary (the tour marking the respective anniversaries of his first big band European tour in 1948, and his first visit to Europe with Teddy Hill in 1938), and again from 1987 onward. He dabbled unsuccessfully with jazz-rock fusion in the 1970s (including a collaboration with Stevie Wonder), but miscalculations of that kind were rare in a career which retained a clear focus on the music he spent a lifetime developing. He renewed his recording relationship with Norman Granz on numerous blowing sessions (including a 1975 set with Cuban band-leader Machito) after the latter launched his Pablo label in 1974, while another reunion, this time with Max Roach in Paris in 1989, produced a fascinating (if uneven) duo album. Gillespie almost died after ingesting something narcotic slipped into his drink in a club in 1973 (‘just what happened is missing, but apparently someone gave me something that wasn’t kosher, and when I woke up I was in the hospital’), an experience which strengthened his religious conversion, and led him to quit drinking. He continued to play until a year or so before his death and finally succumbed to cancer of the pancreas on 7 January 1993. The focus of this chapter on the origins of bebop and his Latin experiments has underplayed the continuing quality and importance of much of his later music – Dizzy remained a force throughout his career, and produced great music at all points within it. His revolutionary stylistic developments of the 1940s were pushed to greater levels of both tonal and emotional refinement throughout the 1950s, culminating in a mature style which revealed no really significant stylistic alterations or additions thereafter.

The characteristic technical hallmarks which identified his work were all firmly in place: the nervy, hard-edged sonority; the innovative false fingerings which enabled him to find notes where they are not supposed to be on the valves, and to articulate those notes at dazzling speeds; his liking for launching a phrase off the top of a scale and working down through the helter-skelter chromatic descending figures, strongly accenting the important notes in the harmony of the phrase while expanding the spaces in highly unexpected directions.

In other words, his playing combined structural lucidity of the highest order with a maverick genius for the unexpected, and mixed those uncompromising musical qualities with a shrewd crowd-pleasing humour. And that combination is surely the essence of the man once described by one of his early bandleaders as ‘Dizzy? Sure, he’s dizzy – dizzy like a fox’.