It’s a strange but true saying that nice guys finish
last, and this saying applies, in some ways to the great jazz trumpeter,
composer, and bandleader John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie. Although Dizzy in no way finishes last in any
jazz conversation – you never get too far down the list of jazz giants before
Gillespie’s name appears – he importance is often overshadowed by
contemporaries such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.
In a new biography by Donald L. Maggin, whose last book
examined the life of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, the legendary Gillespie
receives his due share of historical reassessment. Dizzy’s crucial importance in the history of
jazz’s development may be overlooked in part because he made very difficult
things look very easy, and, in part, it may be because his life story lacks the
sordid or mysterious glamour of Parker and Davis.
But biographer Maggin makes it very clear just how
prodigal and ambitious Gillespie was from the very beginning. Determined, with his family, to escape the
sharecropping life in South Carolina, Dizzy quickly found that music was his
magic carpet to ride to personal fulfillment and material success. Barely more than 20 years old in 1938,
Gillespie would find himself in New York City on the verge of developing –
along with Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk – an entirely new
approach to playing music. Gillespie and
his colleagues called it modern jazz – although it came to be known as bebop –
and it offered a wide-open and virtuosic style of writing and improvisation
that made the prevailing swing music of the time seem slow and boring. Historically, most people credit Charlie
Parker with “discovering” bebop, but Dizzy more than anyone else was able to
synthesize all the contributions of its founders into a coherent new way of playing. And Gillespie was bebop’s public face and
leading emissary in the new music’s struggle for mainstream acceptance in the
years to come.
An often overlooked contribution of Gillespie’s, too, are
his approach to leading a band. Dizzy
insisted upon an extremely high standard of technical mastery from all those he
played with – in fact, developing the idea of a “virtuoso ensemble” where
everyone – all the horn players and the rhythm section – could play anything at
any time and in any way imaginable. In
his big bands and small combos, too, he set up the idea – later copied by Art
Blakey and Miles Davis – making his groups both a laboratory for developing new
ideas from young talent and as a musical finishing school for those players.
Gillespie, too, was central in bringing Latin elements
into the vocabulary of jazz – first in his development of Afro-Cuban jazz with
1940s musicians Mario Bauza and Chano Pozo, into the 80s and 80s with Arturo
Sandoval and Paquito D’Rivera. Just as
Gillespie was interested in expanding the harmonic vocabulary of music through
bebop, he expanded the music’s rhythmic vocabulary as well with the infusion of
Chono Pozo’s polyrhythms in his early Afro-Cuban music, which paid tribute to
the Yoruba ancestors that both Gillespie and Pozo had in common.
Some would argue that Gillespie lost his way a bit in his
later decades when he became caught up in his role as sometime musical
ambassador to the world, in participating in the civil rights movement, even in
his half-serious campaign for president.
But Gillespie, who never succumbed as did his contemporaries to his
darker demons, was a man of generous spirit and social conscience. He remained, to the end, an expansive musical
thinker, a bighearted teacher of his knowledge of music, and a champion of the
universal appeal of the music he loved.
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