outfit when the singer put the band together in 1944, and remained in that role until the following year, when he left to concentrate on his own group, and was replaced by Fats Navarro.
By 1944 Gillespie stood on the cusp of his two most significant contributions to modern jazz: his initial small-group bebop recordings, and the formation of his bebop big band which would undertake the first real explorations in fusing modern jazz with Afro-Cuban rhythms. As we saw earlier, Dizzy’s interest in the latter music was kindled by his stint in Alberto Socarras’s band in 1939, where he first met Mario Bauza. That, though, was a Cuban dance band rather than the kind of unit which evolved through the trumpeter’s association with percussionist Chano Pozo, in what would be a genuinely ground-breaking development. Before that, however, came the electrifying small-group studio sessions enshrined amongst the earliest formal recordings of bebop. The first such session under Gillespie’s leadership came on 9 January 1945, in New York, with a sextet based on the musicians from the Onyx club band, including Pettiford, who formed the rhythm section with pianist Clyde Hart and west coast drummer Shelly Manne. Dizzy was joined by Don Byas on tenor and Trummy Young on trombone, and the session, issued on the Manor label (an independent based in Newark, New Jersey, and managed by Irving Berman) featured the first recorded versions of Tadd Dameron’s ‘Good Bait’, the Gillespie staples ‘Salt Peanuts’ and ‘Be-bop’, and a version of ‘I Can’t Get Started’ which furnishes a good early example of the way in which the bebop players would substitute more complex chord sequences in standard tunes (Gillespie’s reharmonisation here comes in the third and fourth bars of the ‘A’ section of the tune, and only in the solo line, but the enriched chords were widely adopted in later accompaniments on the tune as well).
Charlie Parker had recorded a quartet session under the leadership of guitarist Tiny Grimes in the previous September, and returned to the studio himself in January, this time with a band nominally led by pianist Clyde Hart, another player with roots in swing (Dizzy felt his style was closer to Teddy Wilson than Bud Powell) who was tidy rather than inspired, but could handle the difficult chord changes proficiently enough. There was still a strong swing influence evident on these recordings, but bebop had now been named, and its formal codes had been worked out on the bandstands of 52nd Street: the time had come to document the new music on discs.
In February, Dizzy took another sextet into the studio, at the behest of Guild/Musicraft, a label which had begun life as a classical music specialist in 1937, but had turned to jazz when Albert Marx, who had produced Art Tatum’s earliest recordings, became its artistic director in 1944, when the end of the recording ban had seen the formation and growth of many small independent labels. This time it was Parker who occupied the saxophone chair, with an augmented rhythm section of Reno Palmieri on guitar, Clyde Hart, Slam Stewart on bass, and drummer Cozy Cole. The three tunes chosen for this historic session were ‘All the Things You Are’, ‘Dizzy Atmosphere’, and ‘Groovin’ High’, a contrafact of ‘Whispering’ with a complex new melody. The first is distinctly lacklustre, but the latter two are important route-markers in the bebop story. In ‘Dizzy Atmosphere,’ the rhythm section strive hard to set aside their swing inclinations, while the horns lay down full-blooded bebop solos. ‘Groovin’ High’ is even more significant, although it has an unusually complex structure and variations of tonality (technically known as modulation between keys) for a bebop tune. If Diz and Bird are clearly careering along the same track, however, the sense that the horn players are working towards areas where the rhythm section fear to tread is also palpable in these recordings. It would require a further degree of refinement in that key section of the band before bebop would be truly established on record.
Perhaps the most significant development represented by this session is the beginning of the crucial phase of the partnership between its two principal protagonists. The quintet which Bird and Diz co-led lasted less than a year, but it remains one of the seminal groups in jazz history. In the sleeve notes to the Verve compilation Dizzy’s Diamonds (1992), trumpeter Jon Faddis reports the following interesting observation:
I tell you one thing Dizzy said: ‘Well, I know Charlie Parker was playing that music, because I wasn’t playing all the notes.’ When they’re playing the lines, he said he wasn’t playing all of the notes, so he said he knew Charlie Parker was playing it [all]. When they played, Dizzy said Bird once told him that the two of them were like the heartbeat, one beat on the downbeat and one beat on the upbeat. That’s the way Charlie Parker saw it. When they played together they became one.
In order to realize the music’s full potential, however, the question of a rhythm section more completely in empathy with the new music still had to be resolved. Rhythmic changes lie at the root of every major jazz style, from New Orleans and Dixieland through to swing, bop, free jazz and fusion. In each case, the new style was an outgrowth of a previous development, and brought with it often radical revisions of the musicians’ approach to melody and harmony. The fundamental impetus, though, and the vital underpinning, came from the altered rhythmic basis of the music. That is not simply a matter of the way the recognised rhythm section deals with matters of tempo, metre and rhythmic accents, but also the way in which all the players adapt the tiny shifts in accentuation in their own playing. As we saw earlier, bebop brought a move away from the old regular 2 and 4-beat marking of time by the bass drum, and freed the drummer to adopt a much more fluid style, often leaving the bass player to anchor the beat, either by a walking pattern, or through stressing the key notes – most often the root of the chord – in each bar or measure. This more flexible rendering of time was accompanied by a marked quickening in tempos and indeed the speed at which the music was played began to reach fearsome levels, bringing with it additional problems of clean articulation and accurate intonation for the horn players. As a musical process, bebop is a curious mixture of macho display and infinitely subtle musicality, of rote playing (all players have their melodic clichés, their little phrases which will always work when run over a particular given sequence of chord changes) and inspirational improvisation.
In the transitional period of the mid-1940s, many rhythm sections were clearly torn between the old swing manner and the emerging music. On 11 May 1945, the hornmen were back in the studio with a new band, again for Guild/Musicraft. Al Haig, a white pianist with a real bebop feel, replaced Hart while Curly Russell took over the bass and the drummer was the great Sid Catlett. Catlett, like Buddy Rich on a later session, was something of a mismatch, in that while he was a brilliant drummer, he was not really tuned in to the mores of bebop. Big Sid, however, was too good a musician to let anybody down, and for the most part he succeeds in bridging the gap.
They cut four tunes, one a version of ‘Lover Man’ with Sarah Vaughan guesting on vocal. ‘Shaw ’Nuff’ (named for Dizzy’s agent, Billy Shaw) is a good example of the blistering tempos the beboppers increasingly favoured, with Curly Russell marking the time in a finger-busting four to the bar. Catlett adds plenty of shimmering cymbal colour, but not enough of the kind of energising punctuations which help lift the momentum of the music, a process which would become standard with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. The drummer sounds happier on a new version of ‘Salt Peanuts’, itself based on a riff figure reminiscent of the swing era and encased in what is, by bebop standards, a sophisticated head arrangement (the term ‘head’ referring to a theme or chorus which has been worked out to varying degrees of specificity, but not formally notated). Despite the novelty aspects of the tune and the comic vocal interjections from Dizzy on the famous ‘Salt Peanuts’ phrase, the structure of standard chorus lengths with interpolated interludes which they adopt for the tune is complex. Parker solos twice, once in the 8-bar bridge on the second chorus (which is separated from the first full chorus by an 8-bar break using richer chords than in the main theme), and again throughout the fourth chorus. His contributions are typically sharp, poised and inventive, and leave Al Haig’s solo on the third chorus sounding a little flat. Dizzy follows Bird after an asymmetrical ten bar insert, launching his solo with a spectacular 4-bar flourish, then scampering through a fleet, emotional full chorus. His slightly astringent trumpet tone lacked the richness and lustre of a Fats Navarro or the giants of the swing era, but nobody could match him for either speed or drama. His playing was peppered with sudden, startling twists and contrasts in phrasing
