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’.
Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker is the ultimate example of both the creative glory of bebop as a musical form, and the degrading destructiveness of its social ethos. Bebop cemented the domination of the soloist in jazz begun by Louis Armstrong two decades earlier, and nobody stood higher on that pinnacle than Parker. A largely self-taught musician, a drug addict and chronic drinker with acute self-destructive tendencies, Parker and his music burned as brightly as any in the annals of twentieth-century culture, but, unlike the more astute Dizzy Gillespie, he was never destined for longevity.
Burned out by drugs, alcohol, and the pressures of trying to maintain his own slipping artistic standards, he died on 12 March 1955 while watching Tommy Dorsey’s television show in the Manhattan apartment of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter (generally known as Nica), a rebellious member of the Rothschild family who became a celebrated patroness of jazzmen – Thelonious Monk spent his last years in her New Jersey home, and also passed away there.
Parker’s life and death is the stuff of legend, and the sequence has been played out many times in American music, from Hank Williams and Elvis Presley to Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye. The physician who performed the final inspection of the corpse infamously estimated his age to be fifty-three. He was thirty-four. Nica claims to have heard a momentous rumble of thunder at the moment his pulse finally faltered and stopped. Alternative unsubstantiated accounts of his death have circulated, suggesting he was killed by another musician – one story suggests internal injuries received in a fight, another that he was shot. The graffiti began to appear in the streets of Greenwich Village almost immediately, with its simultaneously defiant and triumphant cry: Bird Lives!
And so he does, or at least his music does, both in itself and in the huge, pervasive influence which it exerted on the course of modern jazz. There has also been more than one account of the origins of his nickname, but the most canonical version maintains that he acquired it while with the Jay McShann Band, after ordering the driver to go back and let him retrieve a chicken (or ‘yardbird’) hit by the car they were travelling in, to be cooked and eaten at their destination because black musicians travelling in the south generally roomed in private houses, since hotels were rigorously segregated, and most towns offered no alternative. The other musicians began to call him Yardbird, which was sometimes shortened to Yard (Dizzy Gillespie’s favoured version), but most commonly simply to Bird. Its connotations of freedom and flight have been milked relentlessly by writers and album-compilers ever since, but with ample justification.
Ross Russell first became involved with Parker as the co-owner and sole record producer of Dial Records in Los Angeles, a shop-based label which cut some of the saxophonist’s most important sides. His biography of Parker, Bird Lives!: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, remains the most vivid account of his life, despite its self-serving tendency to myth-making and the liberties it takes in reconstructing many events. (Carl Woideck’s Charlie Parker: His Music and Life, is largely a penetrating analysis of Bird’s music, but also attempts to sort out some of the biographical confusions surrounding the saxophonist in a useful opening chapter.) Here Russell describes Parker’s attitude and reaction to drugs.
Charlie’s attitude was conditioned by the discovery that his physiology, uniquely resilient in so many ways, could tolerate heroin far better than most. Junkies were usually detached and on the nod. They had no appetite for food, and less for sex. They shunned alcohol as if it were poison. Charlie experienced none of these reactions. His appetites went unchecked. He could drink and he could eat like a horse and run after all the women that interested him. At Monroe’s, where the management stood drinks, he would start the night with two double whiskeys, and continue to down shots between sets. Nor was there ever a time when he could not play.
That final statement seems an extraordinary one, and if accurate, certainly only applied for a limited time early in Parker’s use of heroin, for Russell’s own book, as well as many others, goes on to catalogue a whole series of occasions when the saxophonist could not play. He became infamous for missing sets and entire gigs, and for nodding off on stage. Gil Fuller’s story of his brief sojourn in Dizzy’s big band in the previous chapter is only one of many such tales – Norman Granz once offered Red Rodney a substantial bonus for every time he delivered Bird on time and in fit state for their portion of a JATP touring show: the trumpeter never collected once. It is true that Parker’s physical and carnal
