though, it is their version of ‘Hot House’ which comes closest to fulfilling the template for the new music. The chromatic melody dances in angular fashion over rich augmented chords in the piano accompaniment (a process generally known as ‘comping’) while the bass walks a copy-book bebop line, and the improvised choruses, while restrained by the limitations of the playing time of the standard 78 rpm record (around three minutes), are masterpieces of melodic and rhythmic invention, playing off the enriched harmonies of this elegant but quirky contrafact of ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’
With this session, bebop all but comes of age in the studio, and by the time they met again in that environment on 26 November 1945, the process had been completed. The session was Parker’s first as a leader, and Gillespie played piano on it, turning to trumpet only briefly in the introduction to ‘Koko’. (The session, and the aftermath of the California trip mentioned below, will be discussed in Chapter Two.) At this point, Dizzy led a famous quintet at The Three Deuces on 52nd Street, with Parker on alto, Bud Powell on piano, Curly Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums, a unit he described as ‘the height of perfection in our music’.
If not quite that, it certainly marked the full flowering of the quintessential bebop band, with its trumpet and saxophone front line, and both a pianist and a drummer who were fully in tune with the music rather than trying to adapt their natural inclinations to its demands. Powell and Roach were to become giants in their own right, and Russell, while not a Pettiford or a Ray Brown, was a solid, sympathetic bass player in this demanding idiom. Bebop had arrived, and if Dizzy would shortly come to a separation from his front-line partner, in retrospect he recognised the obvious musical empathy that existed between them at this seminal time.
Yard and I were like two peas. We played all our regular shit. Charlie Parker and I were closer musically than Monk and I. Our music was like putting whipped cream on jello. His contribution and mine just happened to go together, like putting salt in rice. Before I met Charlie Parker my style had already developed, but he was a great influence on my whole musical life. The same thing goes for him too because there was never anybody who played any closer than we did on those early sides . . . Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether I was playing or not because the notes were so close together. He was always going in the same direction as me when he was way out there in Kansas City and had never heard of me.
Nonetheless, when the quintet travelled to the west coast early in 1946 for an ill-fated engagement at Billy Berg’s club in Los Angeles, the trumpeter took six musicians in all, adding vibraphonist Milt Jackson in the knowledge that Parker, already unreliable and heading for the breakdown that would put him in the state hospital at Camarillo, would not make a fair proportion of the gigs during their six-week engagement.
When they went into the studio for Ross Russell’s Dial label in February in LA, it was with tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson standing in for Bird, as he did on many of the gigs as well. By all accounts, their music was met with uncomprehending indifference by the public and those musicians not conversant with or sympathetic to the new style, although the younger musicians were enthusiastic, and Ray Brown later pointed out that ‘Dizzy went back there a few years later and tore it up, same chords, same crowd. So the music was valid; it was just a matter of them catching on’.
The Dial session produced one of the trumpeter’s most effective recorded solos of the period on Parker’s Confirmation’, while a subsequent session later that month (on 22 February) for RCA Victor in New York with a sextet featuring Don Byas included Monk’s ‘52nd Street Theme’, Dizzy’s own ‘Night in Tunisia’ and Bird’s ‘Anthropology’, all key parts of the emerging bebop repertory. Although Parker and Gillespie played together in Dizzy’s Carnegie Hall concert in 1947, they would not record together again until 1950, also under Bird’s leadership.
They had laid down the template (and perhaps the gauntlet) for anyone playing this music, however, and if Bird would make the more spectacular advances in a small-group setting, Dizzy chose to direct his principal energies elsewhere. At the same time as they were making these historic recordings, the trumpeter was also putting together what would become a celebrated big band, and one that made an equally important contribution to the development of modern jazz. His first attempt at forming a genuine bebop big band came in 1945, and was short-lived. The trumpeter brought together a unit featuring many of the players and arrangements from the Eckstine band for what he understood was to be a concert tour in the south, only to run into the same block which had led Eckstine to abandon his own project.
This orchestra and our style of playing, generally, was geared for just sitting and listening to music; nearly all of our arrangements were modern, so imagine my chagrin and surprise when I found out that all we were playing was dances . . . They couldn’t dance to the music, they said. But I could dance to it. I could dance my ass off to it. They could’ve too, if they had tried. Jazz should be danceable. That’s the original idea, and even when it’s too fast to dance to, it should always be rhythmic enough to make you wanna move. When you get away from the movement, you get away from the whole idea. So my music is always danceable. But the unreconstructed blues lovers down South who couldn’t hear nothing else but the blues didn’t think so. They wouldn’t even listen to us. After all these years, I still get mad just talking about it.
Dizzy broke up the band straight after the tour, and took his quintet into The Three Deuces, but the lure of the orchestral sound palette of a big band remained alive in his mind. On his return from California, he tried again with a second band, which he took into another of the 52nd Street jazz haunts, The Spotlite, owned by Clark Monroe of Monroe’s Uptown House. At Monroe’s suggestion, he opened with an engagement for a new small group he had formed, with Sonny Stitt replacing Bird on alto (that sextet, with Milt Jackson, Al Haig, Ray Brown and Kenny Clarke, can be heard in the Guild/Musicraft recording session of 15 May 1945, which included versions of ‘One Bass Hit’, a staple of the Gillespie repertory, and ‘Oop Bop Sh’Bam’, something of a novelty hit, and the progenitor of several more in a similar vein), then introduced the big band. He hired Walter Fuller as the band’s arranger, and drew heavily on his administrative and organizational experience as well. It was necessary, too, as Dizzy, something of a stickler for band discipline, especially in the matter of showing up on time, dryly noted on the subject of the by-now entrenched disregard for convention practised by some of his key players: ‘When I formed the new big band, I hired Bud Powell on piano and Max on drums. The money was a little erratic, and Bud was super-erratic, and I had to do something about that, so I got Monk. I had no trouble outta Monk, not too much, but Monk wasn’t showing up on time either. It was against the law to show up on time.’
Public interest in bebop was growing at this point, fuelled in part by sensational and generally dismissive media coverage of the peripheral aspects of the lifestyle associated with the music, from fashions and hip-talk to drugs. Dizzy was one of the very few major jazz figures of the era not to become embroiled with hard drugs, but he was a trend-setter in most other respects, both musical and sartorial. It was the trumpeter who popularised the famous beret and horn-rimmed shades which personified the bebop fashion parade, and much of the hip slang bouncing around New York’s clubs came into wider currency through his records (though the bebop argot would be exploited in even more relentless fashion by the fast-talking Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson and Slim Gaillard).
While on the subject of appearances, it was around this time that the trumpeter began to develop his unusual air-filled cheeks when he played, a stylistic quirk that made him look like a fully-inflated bullfrog. Air held in the cheeks is certainly not part of standard trumpet technique, but it worked just fine for Dizzy. He claimed African trumpeters from Nigeria and Chad adopted similar techniques, and that it was related to his particular embouchure (the position of the lips and muscles around the mouth when blowing). One consequence of playing that way was that
you have to have perfect time because you have to let the air out at exactly the right time. I don’t just pick up my horn and spit out notes. Clark Terry can do that. He can take
