Dizzy Gillespie

Obituary: Dizzy Gillespie: John Birks 'Dizzy' Gillespie, trumpeter, composer, band leader, born Cheraw South Carolina 21 October 1917, died Englewood New Jersey 6 January 1993. WELL, yes, they do come any bigger than Dizzy Gillespie, but not much. His great achievement was to take jazz by the scruff of the neck in the middle Forties and to change it to fit the radical ideas which had been forming in his mind for several years before. The inspired work and development of those ideas led him to become one of the biggest single influences in the history of the music. 'Work' is the right word, for Dizzy was not a natural genius in the manner of Art Tatum or Charlie Parker. True, he was inspired, but his creations didn't have the almost divine momentum and natural authority which distinguished the solos of the other two men. Gillespie was a thinker and a teacher who changed the methods of jazz trumpet playing forever and stretched the range of big-band jazz as he took it beyond the age of swing into what became known as the bebop era. In his early days during the Thirties it seemed unlikely to most of his colleagues that he would ever amount to much. In an era when, to the public, the trumpet was dominated by the great majesty of Louis Armstrong or by the more florid lush sound of Harry James, Gillespie played with a pinched tone and poor intonation. 'He was trying for harmonic evolution,' recalled Milt Hinton, the bassist and colleague of Dizzy's in the Cab Calloway band, 'and his tone was very thin and weak. He improved it later.' Gillespie was a volatile young man with a sharp sense of humor and a fast resort to violence. These characteristics were intensified by the weekly beatings his father gave him as a matter of course during his childhood. He became a natural rebel, proud of his achievements in the face of authority. 'Not bad for a South Carolina high school dropout,' he would boast to a concert audience after a particularly good solo. His humour became a legend, and often came to his rescue in difficult situations. He was criticised for clowning on stage as a guest in the forbidding and sombre setting of a concert by the Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra, but he pointed out that, intimidated by the surroundings, the only way he could overcome his nerves was by joking with the men in his quintet. 'I would like to introduce the members of the quintet,' he would say at the beginning of a concert. He then went through the ritual of introducing the bass player to the drummer, the pianist to the guitarist and so on. Gillespie's father was a bricklayer who played several musical instruments. He died when Gillespie was 10, and Dizzy took up trombone and trumpet two years later. He ran a trio in his home town before taking up a scholarship at Laurinberg Institution in North Carolina. This he abandoned in 1935 before his last year and joined Frank Fairfax's band in Philadelphia where he was first nicknamed 'Dizzy'. When he was chosen to replace his idol Roy Eldridge in Teddy Hill's band at the Savoy Ballroom in New York in 1937 his rise to fame began. But it was to be a long one, fraught with incident. Hill's band broadcast from the Savoy Ballroom, and amongst the soloists was the legendary tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, with whom Gillespie was to work again when the two played for Cab Calloway. Gillespie was already developing revolutionary musical thoughts when he joined Cab Calloway in 1939. 'I don't want you playing that Chinese music in my band,' Calloway said. Gillespie found a sympathetic student in the free-thinking bassist Milt Hinton and in their spare time the two men would climb to the rooftop of whatever theatre they were working in and play duets together, probing new ways into the harmonic structures of jazz. It was during this period that Gillespie, touring through Kansas with Calloway, first met Charlie Parker, the altoist who was later to share the high priesthood of bebop with him. Back in New York he joined the coterie of young musicians who played in after-hours jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse. His fellow experimenters included Thelonious Monk, Parker and Kenny Clarke. On one occasion while Dizzy was with Calloway in 1941, the trumpeter Jonah Jones, Calloway's favourite, threw spitballs around the band while Cab was at the microphone. Calloway thought the offender had been Gillespie and in the row which ensued backstage Gillespie drew a knife and cut Calloway with it. Gillespie was fired of course. He subsequently worked briefly in the bands of Ella Fitzgerald, Claude Hopkins, Les Hite, Lucky Millinder, Charlie Barnet, Fletcher Henderson and Benny Carter. On Millinder's record of 'Little John Special' Gillespie played what is the first fully formed bebop solo on record, although he had burgeoned against the edges of swing as early as Lionel Hampton's 1939 'Hot Mallets'. Gillespie led his own small band at the Downbeat Club in Philadelphia in 1942 before joining Earl Hines for several months. By now he was becoming a powerful influence on younger musicians. The trombonist Benny Green remembered: 'I used to listen to Diz a lot. He sat right behind me in the Hines big band. Quite a few of the men in the band couldn't understand what he was doing, though they admired his control and execution. I didn't understand too much of it, either, but I liked it. He would take me to his house and show me on the piano the alternate chords and other things he was doing. It was like going to school. It opened up a new era for me.' The Hines band included Charlie Parker, who at that point was playing tenor, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine. Eckstine became such a crowd-puller that in June 1944 he was able to leave Hines to form his own big band, taking several of Hines's stars with him including Parker and Gillespie. The band became the main incubator for bebop, the onomatopoetically titled new music. At this period Gillespie also became a member of the Duke Ellington band for four weeks, and co-led a band with the virtuoso bassist Oscar Pettiford at New York's Onyx Club.