Alyn Shipton

Groovin' High This page intentionally left blank Groovin' High II The Life of Dizzy Gillespie II Alyn Shipton OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1999 by Alyn Shipton First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1999 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2001 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shipton, Alyn. Groovin' high : the life of Dizzy Gillespie / by Alyn Shipton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-509132-9 (Cloth) ISBN 0-19-514410-4 (Pbk.) 1. Gillespie, Dizzy, 1917-1993. 2. Jazz musicians—United States— Biography. I. Title. ML419.G54S55 1999 788.9'2165'092—dc21 [B] 98-27684 Excerpts from To Be or Not To Bop by Dizzy Gillespie. Copyright © 1979 by John Birks Gillespie and Wilmot Alfred Fraser. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House. 10 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Preface, vii Dizzy Gillespie on CD, xi 1 The Boy from Cheraw, 3 2 Philadelphia and the First Bands, 21 3 Teddy Hill and Edgar Hayes, 33 4 The First Records, 50 5 Cab Calloway and the Dawn of Bebop, 57 6 The Calloway Recordings, 76 7 Horn for Hire, 87 5 From Earl Hines to 52nd Street, 107 9 Billy Eckstine, 128 10 Bird, Big Band, and Berg's, 140 11 1945—The Records, 158 12 The Big Band, 1946-50, 179 13 The Big Band Records, 211 14 Dee Gee, Paris, and Massey Hall, 229 15 International Soloist, 253 16 The 1950s Big Bands, 275 17 Gillespiana, 293 18 Dizzy for President, 320 19 Giant of Jazz, 335 20 Old Man Time, 351 Notes, 365 Bibliography, 395 Index, 399 This page intentionally left blank Preface Jazz is a music full of thrilling sounds. It can also span the full breadth of human emotion from exhilaration to profound sadness, from love to alienation, from celebration to commiseration. All the greatest jazz musicians have had the ability to touch their listeners in one or more of these areas, but, for me, Dizzy Gillespie's music has managed to inhabit all of them, while simultaneously conveying more of the sheer joy and excitement of jazz than that of any other musician. There are countless such moments in his recorded output, from his sure touch on his very first recorded solo in 1937, Teddy Hill's "King Porter Stomp," to the brief cameos with his United Nation Orchestra half a century later, where his horn elbows its distinctive way between his proteges and friends to make his last great statements. In researching this book, I have tried to listen to as much as possible of his recorded legacy, which is never less than impressive, and, even in those periods when his career flagged a little, full of moments of surprise and delight, part of an extraordinarily prolific output at the highest level. I have talked to many of his friends and musical associates from all periods of his life and feel I have come to know many aspects of this complex and brilliant man. "Why should another book on Dizzy be needed?" I was often asked, during the time this was being written. After all, his own autobiography, which is full of brief contributions from those who knew him, has often been hailed as a landmark in oral history, and there are numerous other biographies such as those by Raymond Horricks, Tony Gentry, and Barry McRae, or the lavish photo-books by Lee Tanner and Dany Gignoux. In other languages there are yet more books, by Jiirgen Wolfer, Laurent Clarke, and Franck Verdun. The answer is that to some extent all these books (which mostly appeared during Dizzy's lifetime) took their cues from him as to the shape and pattern of his life. For example, if Dizzy said that he had heard Roy Eldridge on the radio in Cheraw as a boy, who was to deny it? Yet when I found out that this must have been impossible, that Roy had not broadcast during the years Dizzy was still in South Carolina, I began to realize that, without in any way detracting from Dizzy's immense viii II Preface achievement, there was more to be discovered about the influences on him and the path that led him to be a key member of the generation that revolutionized jazz in the 1940s. Dizzy was always modest about his own contribution to bebop. Partly in deference to the memory of Charlie Parker, he always stressed Parker's input at the expense of his own. I have attempted to show how Dizzy's contribution was in many ways more important. By being the one who organized the principal ideas of the beboppers into an intellec- tual framework, Dizzy was the key figure who allowed the music to progress beyond a small and restricted circle of after-hours enthusiasts. This was a major element in his life, and virtually everyone to whom I spoke stressed Dizzy's exceptional generosity with his time in explaining and exploring musical ideas. Modern jazz might have happened without Dizzy, but it would not have had so clearly articulated a set of harmonic and rhythmic precepts, nor so dramatic a set of recorded examples of these being put into practice. Dizzy's other achievements are many and hard to quantify, but I have been struck by how he was the main pioneer of the transfer of bebop to the big band environment and how he stayed with the idea against financial and commercial odds. Something of the large band environment in which he grew up remained with him throughout his life, and his final years were marked out by the successful triumphs of yet another generation of large ensembles. For over half a century, his life and work were supported by his long and stable marriage to Lorraine Gillespie, and the world owes her a great debt for astutely managing much of his career. I have not attempted to gloss over other sides of Dizzy's character, but this is always in the knowl- edge that Dizzy (as he told Nat Hentoff) "was willing to do what I did for her—walk the straight line." The other main attribute that has arisen in anecdote after anecdote and interview after interview is that Dizzy was a genuinely funny man. I hope that this also comes across in the text, although spontaneous wit never transfers easily to print. Some biographers fall in or out of love with their subject as they progress—I am more convinced than ever that I have been privileged to examine the life of one of the great human beings of the twentieth century. No book such as this can be undertaken without the aid of others, and I should like to thank everyone who has helped me along the way. In particular I would like to single out John Chilton, who over the years that I have been his editor at various publishers has shown me by example what it means to be a jazz researcher and has consistently been a source of ideas, encouragement, and assistance. Equally, for the last ten years I Preface II ix have enjoyed working with Derek Drescher at BBC Radio 3, who first encouraged me to investigate Dizzy's life for a memorial series of doc- umentaries in 1993, which was the genesis for this book and the source for many of the interviews in it. Derek also produced my subsequent series on Cab Calloway and helped in obtaining permission to use material from further BBC interviews, a national treasure of oral history. In my earlier book on Fats Waller I was indebted to Franz Hoffman in Berlin for his diligent research in the U.S. black press. I am again grateful to him for assisting me with material from Jazz Advertised and Jazz Reviewed, his two ongoing research projects, and for his specific investigations into Dizzy's career. Howard Rye has been a good friend and publishing colleague on a number of books, and I am grateful to him for commenting on drafts of several chapters. Chris Sheridan has also kindly shared research information with me for his forthcoming Green- wood Press bio-discographies of Milt Jackson and Thelonious Monk. He and Howard Rye, together with my father, Donald Shipton, did an enormous amount of work in establishing a full recording chronology of Dizzy, which helped to sort out many aspects of his career but has had to be excluded (on grounds of sheer size) from the final book. I should also like to thank Sheldon Meyer, my editor at Oxford University Press and my role model as a jazz publisher, for all his insightful suggestions on the draft manuscript. Thanks are due to the following musicians for their assistance: Benny Bailey, Danny Barker, Ray Brown, Dave Brubeck, Ray Bryant, Jeanie Bryson, Ian Carr, Al Casey, Doc Cheatham, Buck Clayton, Alan Cohen, Hank Crawford, Bob Cunningham, John Dankworth, Dr.

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