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
