Gillespie, Dizzy

Source:

 African American National Biography

Gillespie, Dizzy

(21 Oct. 1917–6 Jan. 1993),

jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader, was born John Birks Gillespie at Cheraw, South Carolina, the ninth and youngest child of James Gillespie, a brick mason, builder, and amateur musician, and Lottie Powe, a laundress. The earliest musical influences on Gillespie were the sounds of the town band, in which his father played and whose instruments were stored in the family home, together with the singing and hand clapping of the parishioners of the Sanctified Church a few doors away from his house. James Gillespie was cruel and sadistic, regularly beating his sons, but he died from an asthma attack when Gillespie was ten. Not long afterward, he was formally introduced to playing music by Alice Wilson, a schoolteacher at the Robert Smalls School in Cheraw. Growing up as the youngest child of a large single-parent family, Gillespie developed an early penchant for mischief, but music was a stabilizing influence in his life. After first playing trombone and then settling on trumpet, Gillespie joined a local amateur band of young musicians, playing for social events in and around Cheraw. He eventually won a music scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute in Laurinburg, North Carolina.

Although the music tutor there, Philmore “Shorty” Hall, was a proficient trumpeter from Tuskegee College, Alabama, he had little time to pass on his knowledge to Gillespie, who consequently was largely self-taught, sharing his diligent trumpet practice routines with a cousin, Norman Powe, who later became a professional trombonist. In due course Gillespie also became a competent pianist, using the piano to help him understand harmony and developing the trick of playing the trumpet with his right hand while accompanying himself on the piano with his left.

Dizzy Gillespie performs at the Famous Door in New York City, c. June 1946. Gillespie's most memorable and widely performed composition is “A Night in Tunisia.” (© William P. Gottlieb; www.jazzphotos.com.)

view larger image

Gillespie left the institute before graduating in 1935 and moved with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he joined the big band of Frankie Fairfax. This gave him a thorough musical apprenticeship, including touring throughout Pennsylvania and travels on the territory band circuit of the South and Southwest under the temporary leadership of the drummer Tiny Bradshaw. During his time in Fairfax's band, Gillespie acquired the nickname “Dizzy” for his occasionally outlandish behavior and frequent practical jokes, and he soon became popularly known by this name alone.

His contemporaries described Gillespie's early solos as redolent of Louis Armstrong, but his trumpet-section colleagues Charlie Shavers and Carl Warwick introduced him to the stylistic innovations of Roy Eldridge. These became the dominant influences on Gillespie's playing, which he refined by studying Eldridge's work from records, broadcasts, and occasional live appearances in Philadelphia. In 1937 Shavers and Warwick persuaded Gillespie to move to New York City to join Lucky Millinder's orchestra, but when this plan fell through, Gillespie joined Teddy Hill's band and almost immediately set sail for a European tour that took him to France and Britain. Before leaving, Gillespie, at age nineteen, made his first records; his solo on Hill's “King Porter Stomp” reveals a remarkably mature player, already developing a style distinct from that of Eldridge.

During the Atlantic crossing, the trumpeter Bill Dillard coached Gillespie in the art of section playing. After appearances at the Moulin Rouge in Paris and the London Palladium, he returned to New York a seasoned big-band musician, continuing to work with Hill and with Edgar Hayes, Al Cooper, and the Cuban flutist Alberto Socarras. In 1939 he joined Cab Calloway's orchestra, one of the most high-profile bands in jazz. This move brought Gillespie's playing to the attention of a large public. He not only recorded many solos with Calloway but also contributed arrangements to the band, including the innovative “Picking the Cabbage,” which prefigured some of the rhythmic and structural devices he was to use in such later compositions as “A Night in Tunisia.”

However, Gillespie found the endless routine of backing up Calloway's singing and dancing, and the relatively limited musical vocabulary of the majority of the music, to be highly restrictive. He fooled around onstage and played ever more daring solos that ventured into new harmonic directions, delivered at dazzling speed. Calloway disliked this “Chinese music,” and matters came to a head in September 1941, when Calloway accused Gillespie of throwing a spitball on stage. Gillespie—innocent for once—responded by drawing a knife and stabbing his bandleader in the rear end. He was immediately fired.

Gillespie was one of a small number of African American musicians actively seeking to expand the vocabulary of jazz. In June 1940, in Kansas City, Gillespie had met Charlie Parker, thus beginning their highly productive collaboration. In New York, Gillespie, Parker, and other young innovative players, including the drummer Kenny Clarke, who had worked with Gillespie in Hayes's orchestra, and the pianist Thelonious Monk, would jam after hours at such Harlem clubs as Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House. These informal and experimental jam sessions allowed the musicians to play in small groups where they could develop their own personal styles and where they began to move jazz itself in a new direction. Unfortunately, because of a strike by the American Federation of Musicians in the early 1940s, these earliest forays into what came to be known as bebop are largely unrecorded.

The relationship of Parker and Gillespie developed further when both men played in the big band led by Earl Hines, during the first nine months of 1943. Together, Parker and Gillespie became figureheads of the new bebop movement, which drew together several revolutionary elements. Among their innovations they employed unusual, often dissonant harmonies, such as ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths, as well as habitually flattening some regularly used intervals, such as fifths and sevenths. They also used brief thematic formulas to construct long, flowing melodic lines, often delivered at high speed, which ran over the conventional four- and eight-measure phrase lengths of popular songs, and they introduced cross-rhythms and uneven accents to the playing of rhythm accompaniments. If Parker was the mercurial, short-lived genius whose inspirational playing was the heart of the new style, Gillespie became its head, documenting their repertoire of new tunes, arranging and voicing them for small and large ensembles, and tirelessly teaching his contemporaries the necessary harmonic and rhythmic structures. As improvisers the two were evenly matched, and Gillespie described Parker as “the other half of my heartbeat.”

Gillespie first brought bebop to Fifty-second Street in New York, leading a band at the Onyx Club from late 1943 until early the following year. With Parker temporarily home in Kansas City, Gillespie worked with the saxophonists Lester Young, Don Byas, and Budd Johnson to develop the style. Later in 1944 he joined Billy Eckstine's orchestra, which marked an early attempt to transfer the new ideas to a large ensemble. However, it was the quintet that Parker and Gillespie led at the Three Deuces in New York, from the spring until the late summer of 1945, that cemented the principles of bebop, and the recordings they made together at that time capture the inspirational brilliance of their playing. Their repertoire included “Dizzy Atmosphere,” “Groovin' High,” and “Salt Peanuts.”

After a short-lived attempt to launch his own big band in mid-1945, Gillespie went with Parker to California, a visit marred by Parker's growing drug dependence and unreliability. Gillespie returned to New York, subsequently launching a successful big band, which he led until the end of the decade, making numerous recordings and traveling to Europe in 1948. This group demonstrated how to transfer bebop to large groups successfully and introduced several new concepts, including the use of modal structures and Afro-Cuban rhythms, notably on “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop,” a composition by Gillespie, the theorist George Russell, and the band's Cuban percussionist, Chano Pozo.

Gillespie's repertoire of songs became big-band standards, including “Things to Come” and “Algo Bueno,” as well as lighthearted vehicles for the scat singing of Dizzy and the vocalists Joe Carroll or Kenny Hagood, such as “Oop-Pop-a-Dah.” Most significantly, Gillespie's ebullient personality, ready wit, and show-business experience made this difficult new music palatable to large audiences, helped by the eccentric visual image he adopted, sporting a beret, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a goatee. Lampooned in the press, his fashions were adopted by many of the band's fans.

In the early 1950s Gillespie's big band ceased to be economically viable, and his wife, Lorraine Willis, whom he had married in 1940, encouraged him to abandon it. He temporarily experimented in rhythm and blues and with his own record label, Dee Gee. This was an unsuccessful period for him musically. Then, as the 1950s developed, his regular quintet with the pianist Wynton Kelly and the baritone saxophonist Bill Graham became a regular feature of the touring circuit, visiting Scandinavia, Germany, and France as well as traveling widely in the United States. In 1953 Gillespie took part in a celebrated reunion with Parker at Massey Hall in Toronto.

Gillespie continued to develop as a soloist, appearing from 1954 in Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts and on record for the entrepreneur Norman Granz, who was instrumental in helping Gillespie re-form his big band. This was when Gillespie adopted his trademark upswept trumpet, its bell angled upward at a forty-five-degree angle. Combined with his unusually puffed-out cheeks, he became one of the most visually distinctive figures in music.

Following tours on behalf of the U.S. State Department to the Middle East and South America, Gillespie kept his new big band going through 1956 and 1957, thereafter only returning to larger ensembles sporadically and preferring to tour regularly with his quintet. During the early 1960s Gillespie formed a productive partnership with the Argentinean composer Lalo Schifrin, performing Gillespiana, a five-movement suite for trumpet and big band, at Carnegie Hall in March 1961. Schifrin worked as pianist in Gillespie's quintet and composed for the small group and larger forces, including “New Continent” in 1962.

By this time Gillespie was beginning to be regarded as a father figure of the jazz trumpet, gradually assuming the role that Louis Armstrong had previously enjoyed. Gillespie's solo touring for Granz and his group's appearances on the burgeoning festival circuit ensured his worldwide popularity. This became the pattern of his life for the next two decades: consistent touring with his quintet, solo appearances on disc and in all-star bands, and extension of his ambassadorial activities. The latter included, on one hand, being among the first American jazz players to visit Castro's Cuba and, on the other, appearing on The Muppet Show.

In his final years Gillespie adopted the tenets of the Baha'i faith. His last major musical venture in 1988 was to found his United Nation Orchestra, a big band that brought together musicians from North and South America and the Caribbean. After final quintet appearances at the Blue Note in New York during the summer of 1992, he became unable to play following the onset of pancreatic cancer. He died in Englewood, New Jersey, where he had lived for many years. He was survived by Lorraine and by his daughter, Jeanie Bryson, born in March 1958 to the songwriter Connie Bryson.

Gillespie's role as one of the principal architects of modern jazz has tended to be overlooked in favor of the achievements of Parker, who died in 1955. Gillespie's technical innovations in the speed and range of the trumpet, his codification of the harmonic structures and repertoire of bebop, and his role as mentor to generations of younger players made him an equally significant figure. In particular, he encouraged the careers of the trumpeters Lee Morgan, Jon Faddis, Claudio Roditi, and Arturo Sandoval and brought jazz to a vast international audience.

processed xml | source xml