Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 8, 1993 TAG: 9301080364
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD HARRINGTON THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
BE-BOP'S MAIN MAN
To hear Dizzy Gillespie was to see him: the bent-bell trumpet moving to lips surrounded by those impossibly puffed-out cheeks. He was the personification of be-bop, the vanguard jazz style he and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker invented in the mid-'40s. Gillespie became be-bop's quintessential figure in 1948 after a Life cover story - with his wispy goatee and horn-rimmed glasses, his penchant for berets, caps and fezzes, the upturned horn and a perpetually colorful persona, he was dubbed the clown prince of jazz.In fact, he was always a king, not only in America but around the world. In Nigeria in 1989, he was ordained an honorary tribal chief, "the Basheere of Iparu." Gillespie loved that, perhaps more than the dozens of honorary degrees and awards he accumulated over the years. In a 1990 interview before he received a Kennedy Center Honor, the title rolled raspily off Gillespie's tongue, ever so slowly and gleefully: "the Baaaaashhhhheeere of IIIIIIppaaaaarruuuuu!" It was spoken with the grace of a man who remained young at heart and at art, who saw no need to divorce creativity from entertainment. It produced a bubbly smile of satisfaction, one that swept across that warmly weathered face many times in the course of the day.
Until his death Wednesday at age 75 from pancreatic cancer, Gillespie was also the last living be-bop giant. He survived his keystone companion Parker by 38 years, and pianist Thelonious Monk by 10. Because of Parker and Monk's intense, moody (and self-destructive) nature, be-bop desperately needed a genial front man, and no one was better suited for the role than Gillespie. As warmly extroverted as the other two men were introverted, Gillespie melded his technical virtuosity and harmonic adventurousness with ingratiating showmanship to become the single most effective advocate for public acceptance of the new music.
"It's possible people might know me and not know my music," Gillespie said in 1987, when Wolf Trap mounted a 70th birthday celebration. "But once I let my jaws go, the world knows."
And the world reveled for decades, appropriately blown away by Gillespie's blistering inventions, the melodic warmth and comic spirit that made him the world's most famous - and most revered - jazz musician. And the busiest, of course. Although inactive for most of last year due to various illnesses (he last performed in public at a Seattle nightclub in late February), Gillespie was still practicing and recording. He toured up to 300 nights a year well into his seventies.
When he died, Gillespie was sleeping peacefully in a chair next to his hospital bed as a recent compilation, "Dizzy's Diamonds," was being played on a stereo. It featured recordings made between 1954 and 1964 with (among others) Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell Sonny Rollins and Parker.
Gillespie wrote or co-wrote many songs that became jazz standards, including "Night in Tunisia," "Groovin' High," "Manteca," "Salt Peanuts," "Con Alma" and "Woody 'n You." It's a measure of his stature that 50 years later, these are the standards by which today's musicians are measured. "We've lost one of the true giants, not just of music but of humanity," said trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, one of Gillespie's most fervent proteges.
Gillespie's legacy was aural, merely underscored by the visual and the comedic. He was dubbed "Dizzy" for an offbeat, irreverent and incessant sense of mischief that emerged in childhood and never disappeared, but as far back as 1944, an astute critic dubbed him "Dizzy like a fox." Good humor sometimes obscured Gillespie's deep intelligence, but when he talked about music, either informally or in his perpetual role as a teacher, it was with the passion of a man who was never fully satisfied by his muse.
Within the close-knit community of musicians - and not just those working in the jazz idiom - Dizzy was one of the most loved figures of all time.
Born in South Carolina, John Birks Gillespie grew up in a house crowded with siblings (eight) and instruments (his bricklayer father was an amateur musician). At 15 Gillespie settled on the trumpet and, self-taught, spent the first year playing only in the key of B-flat. It was at the Laurinburg Institute, an industrial school for blacks, that he finally learned to play in all keys and began his lifelong exploration of harmony and theory.
When the family moved to Philadelphia in 1935, Gillespie was already accomplished, though tending to copy his idol, Roy Eldridge. Ironically, in 1937 Gillespie replaced Eldridge in Teddy Hill's band, the beginning of a big band apprenticeship under Cab Calloway, Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine, where he first teamed up with Parker.
The Eckstine band - which included Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey and Sarah Vaughan (all of whom died in 1990) - became be-bop's prime incubator and it was here that Gillespie started developing a more personal style evidenced in his tone and his increasingly adventurous solos. Saxophonist Parker had been doing parallel experiments with new rhythmic and harmonic concepts, and in the '40s they gravitated to New York's fabled 52nd Street club zone and virtually invented a new form of music that modernized and polarized at the same time. While it excited many musicians and led them - via new chord progressions and substitution chords based on the higher intervals of the scale - to reconsider their basic options, it irritated many of the critics of the day. Some of them dubbed the free-flowing articulation and frenetic invention, the unbelievable, literally breathtaking runs and double- and triple-time passages "Chinese music."
Parker died in 1955 but Gillespie kept his name as alive as his music, crediting Parker with establishing the identity of be-bop. "The style of the music was created by Charlie Parker, all of us know that," Gillespie insisted in 1987. "The style of our music is based on the way that he played."
Having primed the be-bop pump in the early '40s, Gillespie continued to explore, refine and advance his music. His late-'40s big band, the first to project the complexity of be-bop onto a larger canvas, was extremely influential, not only on other contemporary bands but on television and movie scoring. The Modern Jazz Quartet emerged from this band, its chamber jazz format designed to give that hard-charging unit a chance to rest. But Gillespie's big band never achieved economic stability before disbanding in 1950, though he has continued to experiment with larger ensemble projects.
Despite his brilliance, there were no gold records hanging on the walls of Gillespie's Englewood, N.J., home: The rewards in jazz tend to recognition rather than recompense. If Gillespie had been paid by the mile, however, he'd have been as rich as his pal Bill Cosby.
"I wish I were as warm as he is," Gillespie joked two years ago before the Kennedy Center Honors, where Cosby was his inductor. Then he laughed that familiar way, more pleased for Cosby's success than displeased by his own fortunes. "Of course, it's hard as hell not to be warm when you're sitting on the 10 million dollar bill in your back pocket!"
\ A Dizzy Gillespie discography\ \ "Teddy Hill and his NBC Orchestra" (1937)
"The Men from Minton's" (1941)
"Billy Eckstine and His Orchestra" (1944)
"Dizzy Gillespie Sextet" (1945)
"Dizzy Gillespie, Vols. 1-2" (1946-9)
"Body and Soul," Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra (with Sarah Vaughan) (1949)
"Dee Gee Days, the Savoy Sessions" (1951-2)
"Jazz at Massey Hall," Quintet of the Year (1953)
"Trumpet Kings" (with Roy Eldridge) (1954)
"Groovin' High" (1955)
"Dizzy Gillespie: World Statesman" (1956)
"The Greatest Trumpet of Them All" (1957)
"Manteca" (1958)
"Birk's Works" (1958)
"Portrait of Duke Ellington" (1960)
"Dizzy on the French Riviera" (1962)
"Carnegie Hall Concert" (1962)
"The Essential Dizzy Gillespie" (1964)
"Swing Low Sweet Cadillac" (1967)
"Giants of Jazz" (1972)
"The Giant" (1973)
"Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods" (1975)
"Dizzy Gillespie Jam - Montreaux '77" (1977)
"New Faces" (1985)
"Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra" (1986)
"Dizziest" (1987)
"Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra" (1988)
"Small Combos" (1988)
"Max and Dizzy: Paris 1989" (with Max Roach) (1990)
"Live at the Royal Festival Hall" (1990)
"Bebop & Beyond Plays Dizzy Gillespie" (1991)
"The Winter in Lisbon" (1991)