small-group recordings in 1945, when any such distinction was already all but indiscernible. Dizzy’s harmonic understanding may indeed have been more firmly grounded in theory, and Bird’s rhythmic sense a shade more finely graded, but by the time the fledgling bebop had matured in the middle of the decade, the differences were too minimal even to measure. Nonetheless, many musicians felt – and still feel – that Gillespie was the principal harmonic theorist behind the new music. Monk’s harmonic developments were highly advanced and far-reaching, but Dizzy’s were more widely accessible to players coming into the music, and less strongly marked with the idiosyncratic personal stamp of Monk’s ideas; in addition, Dizzy’s outgoing personality made him more approachable as a source of wisdom than the forbiddingly strange pianist.
The trumpeter clearly saw his function as an informal teacher as an important one, and his mastery of the piano was a crucial element in that process. He recalls that musicians like Miles Davis would ask him where he found the notes and harmonic ideas he utilised. The answer was from the piano.
That’s your ass if you don’t play piano, you can’t find them. You might luck on them sometimes, but if you know the piano, you’ll know where they are all the time. You might get lucky and find one every now and then just from playing your own instrument, but if you know the piano, you’ll know where they are all the time. You can see them.
One of the most productive of Dizzy’s musical relationships during the war years was his time spent in 1943–44 in the small group led by bassist Oscar Pettiford, who is another musician singled out as a key figure of the era by the trumpeter. Pettiford was born on 30 September 1922, in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, of mixed Afro-American and Native American extraction, and was another musician to make the move to Europe, settling in Copenhagen in 1958, where he died in 1960. Gillespie describes him as ‘the most distinctive bass player among us’ at Minton’s.
Ray Brown came on the scene afterwards, but Oscar Pettiford was the bass player for our music . . . Jimmy Blanton was the first one that I heard playing differently, but they tell me that Oscar was playing the new way in Minneapolis before he came to New York. He’d picked up on Charlie Christian and was playing melody on the bass, like a soloist, like a trumpet, or any other melody instrument.
Both Charlie Christian, a brilliant guitarist working with Benny Goodman, and Jimmy Blanton, the innovative young bass player with the Duke Ellington Orchestra of 1939–41, clearly prefigured the developments of the bop era in their playing, but both were prematurely dead by 1942, before it really got underway. Pettiford, however, went on to make a major contribution to the development of the music. The bass player, who was also an accomplished cellist, possessed a legendary irascible temperament, especially when fuelled by drinking, and many of his collaborators fell foul of it over the years; Dizzy was no exception, and the band which played the Onyx residency that winter eventually broke up over personal differences (although the two men recorded together the following year).
It was during this residency that Dizzy claims the term bebop came into currency. His explanation is that the band played a lot of tunes which had not been assigned titles, and by way of cueing the tune, he would say something like ‘dee-da-pa-da-n-de-bop’ and the band would go into the tune he had just sung. When people wanted to hear that tune, but didn’t know the name, ‘they would ask for bebop. And the press picked it up and started calling it bebop.’ Dizzy describes the process:
[we would take] the chord structures of various standard and pop tunes and create new chords, melodies, and songs from them. We found out what the composers were doing by analyzing these tunes, and then added substitute chords . . . When we borrowed from a standard, we added and substituted so many chords that most people didn’t know what song we really were playing . . . That was our thing in bebop, putting in substitutions . . . This wasn’t pilfering. In cases where we needed substitute chords for these tunes, we had to create new melodies to fit them. If you’re gonna think up a melody, you’d just as well copyright it as a new tune, and that’s what we did. We never did get any suits from publishers.
That process was endemic to bebop. In his book Bebop: The Music and Its Players (published in 1995 and recommended for anyone looking for an introduction to the technicalities of the music), Thomas Owens adopts the term ‘melodic contrafact’ (coined by James Patrick in an earlier essay) to describe such grafting of a new melodic and harmonic formulation onto an existing harmonic structure. The use of the word ‘contrafact’ in this book should be understood in that sense.
That harmonic expansion, and the opportunities it afforded for extending harmonic exploration by the soloists, became a fundamental of bebop, and also its in-built weakness. It evolved as a music of great sophistication built on a repetitive and limited structure, a restriction that would drive many of the great figures of the music into more experimental areas. At the same time, it had a great deal to offer in the scope it afforded for melodic, harmonic and rhythmic invention, and it continues to offer this as a central stream of the jazz repertory today. At this stage, though, when songs like ‘How High the Moon’ and ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’ were still new to the musicians, it was a freshly-minted source of inspiration.
It might be worthwhile at this point mentioning a distinction which sometimes causes confusion for non-playing listeners. Chords were the building blocks of bebop (and later hard bop) harmony, and are described as the simultaneous sounding of two or more notes in a series of defined relationships to each other, generally dictated in Western musical theory by the major-minor (or diatonic) system of harmony. Chords are made up of intervals, which is to say the distances between each of the notes included in the chord, again within that same defining relationship in which the basic unit is the triad, made up of the first (known as the root), third, and fifth intervals of the octave (and there are major, minor, augmented and diminished versions of the triad). Bebop made much greater use of higher intervals, which were either underused or not used at all in earlier forms of jazz, including the famous flatted fifth and the popular seventh (a staple in blues), but also the more esoteric ninths, elevenths and thirteenths beyond the octave. Such intervals tend to unresolved dissonance and an implication of polytonality (the impression of being in more than one key at once which is produced by overlaying a triad with another formed by the higher intervals, which are simultaneously a triad, or part of one, in a different key), elements which gave the music much of its complexity and ‘new’ sound – the source of all those alleged wrong notes.
Chords are most strongly associated with the so-called chordal instruments like piano and guitar, where the notes can literally be played simultaneously (this is sometimes referred to as vertical harmony). However, a chord can also be played with the notes following one after the other: on a chordal instrument, that technique is known as an arpeggio, but that linear method of spelling out the notes which form a chord sequentially rather than simultaneously is the one which must be used by the reed, wind and brass instruments.
Thus, a saxophonist or trumpeter can compose or improvise a single, linear melodic line which refers constantly to the underlying chord structure of the tune, either spelling those chords out in continually changing fashion (often called ‘running the changes’, where changes refers to the chord sequence – or chord changes – in question), or can create a new melodic/harmonic line which touches base with the underlying harmony at key points, and will sometimes deliberately contradict it in order to surprise the listener. That is what is meant when referring to horn players (or any other single note, linear instrument) playing the harmony or playing chords, and it is a fundamental element of bebop.
After parting with Pettiford, Dizzy co-led his own band across the street at the Downbeat with the Lester Young-influenced saxophonist Budd Johnson, an undervalued musician who came out of swing, but was also able to adjust to the harmonic demands of the new music (they recorded together with Coleman Hawkins in February of 1944). The other major landmark for Gillespie that year – and for many of the nascent beboppers – arrived with the formation of another under-recorded outfit which played a major role in bop history (and perhaps an even bigger one
