Gene LeesLees P.O. Box 240 Ojai, Calif. JJazzletterazzletter 93024-024-O93024-0240 :DecemberDecember 1992 Vol. n11 .NaNa 12 Birks Missed Most, Bar None Middle of the night: John Birks Gillespie was an unpretentious man. He said shyly, Middle of a dream. when I commented that Art Farmer and many others considered Please let things be him one of the great teachers, that he didn'tdidn’t think he knew much What they seem: but what little he did know he was willing to share. It is almost universally felt that while Charlie Parker'sParker’s West 48th, rhythmic and harmonic extensions of the jazz vocabulary defineddefmed Then seven higher. the music'srnusic’s second half century, Dizzy was the great dissemina­dissemina- Warm, not cool: tor and teacher. This has relegated him to a second rank. My heart'sheart’s on fire.fire. AQ But it is obvious why Parker has been accorded the higher ,er. er. The myth-makers love tragedy and blighted lives. Pity Hello, Ben! frees them to indulge in unenvying and immoderate admiration. Hi there, Bean! When they were both alive, I wrote that if Ernie Kovaks, who JoJo and Zoot lived a rational and successful life ((or or at least gave that impres­impres- And Brooks and Gene! sion), were to die, he would be forgotten, but Lenny Bruce would be mythologized. Why? Lenny was a junky. Bill Evans Hey, there'sthere’s Gerry. is being mythologized for the wrong reasonsreasons. Billie Holiday has ·· There'sThere’s Clark TerryTerry. undergone this morbid canonization. Bix Beiderbecke is remem­remem- Yeah: C.T. bered more as a figurefigure of tragedy than as the musician he was. And W.C.w.c. It happenedto Bird. Dizzy called him Yard, by the way. And Dizzy'sDizzy’s friends all called him Birks. ·D Alec ..... Ruby In such cases it is possible to praise from a great height, the Rocky .... Jim .,.. height being pity. This is puritanism at its most virulent. The (I know lady: praise of Bird often involves a covert element of condescension. You'reYou’re with him.) The underestimation of DizzyDiuy Gillespie is its inversion. Because Dizzy'sDizzy’s life was not tragic, he is perceived inaccu­inaccu- Goodbye, faces rately as the lesser musician, Bird'sBird’s amanuensis and musical Filling space .... Boswell, as it were. Phil Woods, Art Farmer, and others have Guitars .... basses . .... A>inted_inted out that Dizzy'sDizzy’s musical vision embracedembra<:ed the Cuban, the Goodbye, Place. '~razilian,Qazilian, the African, and indeed anything he heard. Dizzy was once seen "sitting in" with a snake charmer in In4ia.India. Even Dizzy would turn up there now and then, though of "Dizzy brought the rhythm into it,ttit,” Phil Woods said, refer­refer- course he spent most of his life on the road, which is why Phil ring to the vast reservoir of Latin propulsion that Dizzy tapped, Woods called him Sky King. infusing jazz with its influence.influence. As Birks pointed out to me, I do not believe jazz is a moribund art. On the contrary, it almost all his compositions have a Latin cast to them. Consider is quite healthy. But one thing has changed: its founding figures,figures, Lorraine, Tin Tin Deo, and Con Alma, which is one of the the great explorers who charted its terrain and defineddefined it, are all most gorgeous tunes in the repertoire, partly because of the gone, with the towering exception of Benny CarterCarter. ·Armstrong, character of the bass line. LorraineLorraine, , by the way, is bishis widow. Bechet, Beiderbecke, Teagarden, Tatum, Hawkins, Hines, Cole, There is a scene at the end of John Huston'sHuston’s Moulin Ellington, Prez, Goodman, Parker, Strayhorn, Herman, Kenton, Rouge wherein the dancers and singers of his youth gather as Basie, Bud Powell, Monk, Bill Evans. Now Dizzy. · ghostly visions around the bed of the dying Toulouse-Lautrec. I was inconsolable the day of i:>izzy'sDizzy’s death, even though I sometimes see in my mind the people who gathered at the bar Oscar Peterson had warned me it was coming. I turned to of Jim and Andy'sAndy’s on 48th later (later 55th) in New York: Ben Benny Carter, who was bereft, though with his indestructible Webster, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Hank d'Amico,d’Amico, Jo Jones, Jack dignity and control. Benny said on the telephone, "He"I-Ie was one Whittemore, Judy Holliday, Nick Travis, Woody Herman, of those people I thought would always be there." Coleman Hawkins, Lockjaw Davis, Alec Wilder, Willie Dennis, Television, and much of the print press, mishandled Dizzy'sDizzy’s and more. The necrology is long. death. They emphasized his antic humor and the uptilted horn Willis Conover, another of its habitues, wrote a poem about · and missed the point. Every once in a while in conversation it. Willis said he dreamed it. Dizzy would stop kidding and drop his voice. His tone would W 2 become serious, and you knew that what he was about to say Greeks. England is imprinted with the influenceinfluence of India, as would be worth remembering. He once told me that if clowning France is marked byherby her colonial periods in North Africa and would put an audience in a mood ofreceptivityofreceptivity to the music, he lndo-China. Indeed, even a failed effort to conquer can alter a intendedintendedrto :to do it. lt,hadIt had another purpose,ptµ1>0se, one you would never nation'snation’s- . character. Every time ·thethe United-StatesUnited.States loses a war, its suspect: 13irksBirks told me .he -nevernever walked onto a bandstand oror · cuisine improvesimproves and diversifiesdiversifies as it patriates the brides of its stage without being nervous. His clowning had a third purpose: ·armiesarmies and the loyalists of its client dictatorships. Enslavement, to rest bishis chops. .ManyMany of the·the brass players of bishis and the : · however, is the surer way to cultural miscegenation and conse-*conse~ previous generation sang. So Birks would sing, and horse quent inadvertent -enrichment.enrichment. around, still more in the later years, because his lip was losing The most conspicuous example of this principle has been the its endurance. But even toward the end, he could play blazing L( influenceinfluence of the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas, a jazz. He had a way of throwing one leg forward as he raised the . practice begun by the Portuguese, taken up by the Spanish, horn to his mouth that reminded me of a Reggie Jackson leaning \\French, French, and the British who --to their eternal credit -- were the into a pitch,pitch,.totally totally focussed. Dizzy'sDizzy’s cheeks would p,uffpuff out, first to abolish it. The African peoples affected all the cultures lifting the glasses on his nose, and .... stand back. that conquered them, in everything from cuisine to social mores_mores = For the most part the news media concentrated on the to music. Though there are conspicuous differences between t1'j cheeks, the beret, the bop glasses, and the horseplay, cautiously musics of Cuba, Brazil, Martinique, and the United States, a stopping short of calling him what he was: one of the musical characteristic swing marks them all, as Dizzy made us aware. geniuses of our time. The New York Daily News, however, got Probably the purest African influenceinfluence was in the mountains of it right, for the good reason that the man who wrote its editorial, Cuba, according to composer Chico O’Farrill,O'Farrill, who was born in Terry Teachout, is a former jazz musician. It said that for all Havana. Isolated from the world, their batteries of drummers the clowning and fun, "it is the music that will be remembered, played something that was probably more purely African than for Gillespie was one of a handful of musicians who changed the could be found in Africa itself, just as the folkfollc music of remote face of jazzjan .... No one who heard his knife-sharp sound cleave Appalachian areas retained its English quality. That has gone the stale air of a smoky nightclub or a crowded concert hall will now, in consequence of Castr0’sCastro's drive for universal literacy and ever forget it. It was full of joy -- the brazen, irresistible joy of the ubiquity of the portable radio. In 1962 I visited an Indian a true virtuoso. village up a tributary of the Demerara River in then-British ‘Rare•Rare is the revolutionary who sees the fruits of his youthful LGuiana.?~ana. It was in a clearingcle~g surroundeds~rounded by dense jungle. The passion come to flower.flower. Dizzy did ... ... At ..... 75, the elder · indigenousmdigenous people were listeninglistemng to rock-and-roll on small statesman of bebop was still equal to the cut and thrust of a jam radios. session. His death was no surprise: he had been ill for months. In the United States, the African people developed a vocal-vocal­ Even so, it left bishis friends and fans feeling oddly empty, the way instrumental music we have come to call the blues. Where the you feel when a beloved old building is torn down at last, leaving term itself originates, I have no idea, but as a synonym for a ragged hole in the skyline that nothing can ever fill."fill." melancholy or depression it is obviously very old in the English In addition to all that Dizzy Gillespie was one of the most language. My grandmother, who was English, used it, anyan~ generous and gentle men I ever knew. have seen it in a letter written to his family back east from a bar' I have avoided publishing obituaries, and this isn'tisn’t one.