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
