like, in a little twist that over the years has left a mark there. A lotta people walk up to me and say, ‘You got half a mustache, half a mustache, that’s weird. You’re a weird dude’.
If the trademark pouches (a physician officially bestowed the name Gillespie’s Pouches on the condition in 1969) were there in the late 1940s, they were still puffed grotesquely around a conventional trumpet. The famous upturned bell did not arrive on the scene until 1953, when Dizzy’s horn was accidentally damaged during a birthday party for his wife, Lorraine. The party was held in Snookie’s in New York, and while Dizzy had gone round the corner to be interviewed for a radio broadcast, one of the comedy team Stump ’n’ Stumpy contrived to push the other over his horn where it sat on its stand, bending it out of shape so that the bell pointed skyward. Dizzy reports that Illinois Jacquet immediately quit the scene, saying ‘I’m not gonna be here when that man comes back and sees his horn that way. I ain’t gonna be here when that crazy muthafucka gets back’. So as not to spoil the party, Dizzy jokingly played the horn, and although it sounded strange, he liked both the way in which ‘it came quicker to my ear’ and the softness of the sound. He had the horn straightened, but subsequently approached the Martin company to build him one with the bell angled at forty-five degrees. It became a much more lasting visual trademark than the berets and horn-rims.
That was still six years in the future when the new residency at The Spotlite began, though, and however misinformed the publicity the beboppers attracted (both the prestigious Time and Life magazines ran patronising and misleading features on the new music), it was beginning to generate a lot more interest in what the musicians were actually up to down in the jazz dens of 52nd Street. Consequently, Dizzy was able to launch his second big band in more auspicious circumstances this time around. Both he and Walter Fuller worked hard to develop a distinctive feel for the music which would clearly signal this as being Gillespie’s band, down to arranging ensembles for the trumpet section in the manner of Dizzy’s solos and restricting use of vibrato in the saxophone section to the first horn only, creating a harder-edged sound than that typical of the lusher swing-band reed sections. The band opened to considerable attention, and it’s not hard to imagine the impact they made in the small confines of The Spotlite, graphically described by Fuller.
That night, about ten o’clock, all these people were coming in, and Monroe had ballyhooed up the opening, ‘DIZZY GILLESPIE’S BIG BAND’, and put a big sign in front of the club . . .
By this time he had people who liked him, they’d been seeing him on the Street and everything, so they all came there to see what the hell he was gonna do. And, man, he hit into that opening. Well, they weren’t expecting that noise, the whole band, a little club, and this first thing started with the whole band hitting one note. And Dizzy brought his hand up, and everybody jumped. And by the time they landed on their feet, thinking it was over – no, he hit another one – another one – another one! And old Max was going, took off with the shit . . . The cats were something, man.
Fuller also introduced Parker to the band on his return to New York, but it was to be a short-lived liaison. He brought the altoist in for a gig at the McKinley Theatre in the Bronx, but he
came in the place and had his shit in him and sat there all through the whole thing till his solo comes, and when his solo comes, Bird put his horn in his mouth and . . . ‘doodle-loo-deloodle-lo’. And Dizzy, on stage with people in the audience, said, ‘Get that muthafucka off my stage!’ Because he didn’t want the whole band to be tagged as a bunch of junkies, you know. He wouldn’t let me put him in there anymore; he just wasn’t gonna have that. Because Bird would always get high, man, and then start to nodding right up on the bandstand. And you’re playing the whole thing with no first saxophone player.
This time, the big band was successful enough to allow Gillespie room to develop his ideas in that expanded context. The band broadcast from The Spotlite that year, but by the time they made their first official recordings for RCA Victor in August 1947, the trumpeter was introducing another significant element into the mix. That first session included John Lewis’s ‘Two Bass Hit’, Tadd Dameron’s ‘Stay On It’, Dizzy’s adaptation of Babs Gonzales’s novelty vocal hit, ‘Oop-Pop-A-Da’ (which was initially issued without a composer credit for its legitimate source, but later amended to give credit to Babs Brown, Gonzales’s real name), and the ‘I Got Rhythm’ contrafact ‘Ow!’ Shorn of the two-bar tag at the end of its 32-bar AABA structure and fitted with a new melody, and often altered harmonies as well, George Gershwin’s chord progression on ‘I Got Rhythm’ became the base for literally countless jazz compositions and improvisations, to the point where a jazzman could simply call for ‘the Rhythm changes’.
By the time the band hit the studio again in December, however, a vibrant new colour had been added to their palette. Dizzy was a prime mover in the creation of Afro-Cuban jazz (sometimes referred to as Cubop), and his principal collaborator in the enterprise was the percussionist Chano Pozo. Mario Bauza introduced Dizzy to the conga player, who spoke very little English, in 1947, and he became the catalyst for the trumpeter’s absorption of specific Cuban folk and popular idioms into the band’s music.
Chano taught us all multirhythm; we learned from the master. On the bus, he’d give me a drum, Al McKibbon a drum, and he’d take a drum. Another guy would have a cowbell, and he’d give everybody a rhythm. We’d see how all the rhythms tied into one another, and everybody was playing something different . . . He’d teach us some of those Cuban chants and things like that. That’s how I learned to play the congas. The chants, I mix up. I don’t know one from the other, really, but they’re all together . . . They’re all of African derivation.
Pozo’s grip of jazz rhythm and structure was, in Dizzy’s testimony, a lot less secure, and yet the fusion which emerged from their combined efforts to overcome cultural, linguistic and musical barriers produced one of Dizzy’s most successful records, ‘Manteca’ (in which Walter Fuller is credited as co-composer with Gillespie and Pozo), and the equally celebrated paired compositions ‘Cubana Be’ and ‘Cubana Bop’ (written by George Russell and Dizzy), among others.
But it was to be a short association. Pozo, described by Al McKibbon as ‘a hoodlum’, was shot dead in a bar in Harlem on 2 December 1948, in mysterious circumstances which have been linked with the shadowy underworld of the Cuban sects. Some people say the percussionist had been talking a little too freely about his sect’s secret rituals. Other versions cite a narcotics deal as the root source of the shooting, claiming that Pozo challenged a dealer over a bad sale, and was shot in the exchange. Dizzy confirms McKibbon’s assertion, if a shade less bluntly.
Chano personally was a roughneck . . . Even in Cuba, Chano was known to be very high strung. He travelled with a long knife too . . . He was shot twice; the second time he didn’t get up. The first time he was shot in Cuba, sometime in the early forties. He went into the publisher’s office. Chano went in there with his knife and grabbed the guy and said, ‘I want my money, I want my royalty’. He went in for his royalties, and the guy reached in his drawer and shot him. The bullet lodged near the spine and they couldn’t operate because it was too close to the spine. He was pretty rough. That bullet next to his spine used to hurt him whenever the weather would get too cold. He used to sit on one half of his ass; he would be hurting on the stage. Chano had a reputation, and he got killed, later, on his reputation but not before he contributed to our music and helped carry it, out to the world overseas.
Whatever the cause, Chano Pozo’s death brought a premature end to his key role in the development of Afro-Cuban jazz, but his legacy is reflected not only in Dizzy’s music, but in much popular music of the 1950s and 1960s, albeit in a sadly watered-down fashion. The music he made with Gillespie was the first to integrate real Afro-Cuban polyrhythms within a bop idiom. It remained a significant element in the trumpeter’s music throughout his career, and was still prominent in his final band, the United Nation Big Band which he led in the late 1980s, featuring contemporary Latin musicians like singer Flora Purim and percussionist
