The Nation's Pulse / Cool Diz and Me
Gold, Victor
1 t wasn't easy being a Dizzy Gillespie fan at the University of Alabama in the late 1940s. Race had nothing to do with it. The problem was getting the records. Be-bop, take my word for it, wasn't a...
...Shorty here has the last Confederate flag ever flown...
...It was the mecca, if not the cradle, of progressive jazz...
...On the way home, our oldest, Paige, 9 at the time, had a question...
...What was I supposed to do, sitting front-and-center with the Stars and Bars on my khaki sleeve...
...Never too young," said Dizzy, joining us at the table...
...It was there, on my twenty-third birthday, that I first met Dizzy...
...Well, not really...
...Daddy," she asked, "was he serious...
...I don't think so, I answered, but with the Diz you never really knew...
...though my introduction, as I recall, was somewhat awkward...
...Sorry we're late, he said, but it can all be explained...
...He and the group had been playing a benefit performance in Harlem, co-sponsored by the NAACP, B'nai B'rith (a beat), and the Alabama Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan...
...Well, now," said Gillespie, summoning Shorty, Birdland's midget m.c,, to his side...
...Honey, I answered, you just met the man who invented cool...
...And there I was, second row front, thanks not to any lavish gratuity but by the mere circumstance of wearing a uniform...
...Looking straight at me (whom he unfortunately mistook for the jackass), he asked, all innocence, "Ohhh...
...He didn't disappoint that night, opening with a picaresque disquisition on the roots of jazz, how it drew inspiration from the church, etc...
...Most things, maybe, but not the Diz...
...Presenting yourself in khaki could bring free entry at the Polo Grounds and choice tables not only at Birdland but also at late-night celebrity hangouts like Sardi's and Lindy's...
...Somebody here from Alabama, Mississippi...
...A lot of notes have passedover that bridge...
...In later years, my classmate and fellow Gillespie fan Walter Emmett Perry would make up for our cultural deprivation by traveling to the Newport Jazz Festival, where he would sit on the lawn, soak in the chords, and, on being recognized as a Southern outlander, answer such questions as "No s--t, man, are you really a member of the Alabama legislature...
...A dozen years later, at Charley Byrd's jazz mill in suburban Maryland, I reminded Dizzy of the incident...
...The eyebrow arched again...
...Actually, only put his hands together once or twice before remembering he wasn't in Tuscaloosa...
...Dizzy arrived fifty minutes late, brow arched and beret at a rakish angle—that, not the tilted trumpet bell, was his shtick in those days...
...An El Dorado comin' after me, Comin' for to carry me home...
...I nodded, yes (since it was clear I was going to see it anyway...
...Maybe in a few years...
...My own chance to make up for lost time came in the autumn of 1951, when, as a member of the 31st Infantry ("Dixie") Division called up for "police action" in Korea, I was happily misplaced for six weeks at Fort Slocum, New York, forty-five minutes from Times Square...
...Show it tohim, Shorty," said the Diz...
...Civic duty...
...It was clear, between his rambling observations on the State of the Union and the relationship of the Bahai religion to his music, that what had really drawn him to the table was the kids...
...So you see," he added, fingering his trumpet valves, "we're lucky to be here at all...
...but in my case, upscale metaphysics was the last thing I had on my mind...
...Maybe, he suggested, one of the girls would like to sit in: "The group needs some variety...
...Then, Henny Youngman–like, he interrupted this neo-Baptist rendition of the old spiritual to take up again the subject of life and labor in the Old South, in some way referring to Alabama and Mississippi...
...Birdland," he said, stroking his gray-flecked goatee...
...T he session at Byrd's was a matinee, one of those rare occasions to catch a jazz giant in daylight, and I'd taken my kids to see, for once in their Washington-bred lives, an American original who wrote and played his own material...
...Nothing personal, just a crowd warmer, but happily the lights went down and I disappeared into bop, Bourbon, and New York anonymity...
...Is he," she wanted to know, "what you call 'cool...
...Another (beat) while we waited for the arched brow to drop...
...You come to the right place...
...Carried home, I'm certain, in a sleek, two-toned, long-finned El Dorado...
...on which cue Shorty drew out a white pocket handkerchief, almost as long as he was high, and slowly flapped it in my direction...
...Hank Williams and Frankie Laine were more like it...
...A little young, I said...
...Swing low, sweet Cadillac, Comin' for to carry me home...
...Understand, my father instructed me early on never to run from what you are, so I nodded yes, though hardly as a matter of principle...
...But now, alas, he's gone, and there's one less giant from the golden era of my youth to roam the earth and reassure me, through his music, wit, and warmth, that everything I grew up with in those pre–Baby Boom days isn't going to hell...
...at which mention, one of my jackass friends at the table broke into applause...
...About the time I, along with other members of the audience, was looking for a pencil and pad to start taking notes, he broke into an updated version of "Swing Low": I looked over Jordan and what did I see, Comln' for to carry me home...
...You want to see it...
...Every evening I'd drive into the city, park in the Bronx, and catch the subway into town, where Birdland waited on 52nd Street...
...Not him...
...Tell him, "No, East Passaic...
...And there I was, forty-five minutes with Dizzy Gillespie, one-on-one...
...What drew me to progressive jazz was Gillespie's wit and the put-on style of his music...
...We'd arrived an hour early, just as the group was setting up, and the man himself, spotting 6-year-old Stephen's gaze at his upturned trumpet, came down from the stage to ask whether he'd like to "sit in...
...Anyway, Birdland...
...Be-bop, take my word for it, wasn't a big inventory item at the music store in downtown Tuscaloosa back then...
...Oddly, although it had been one of the formative moments of my young life, he didn't recall it...
...Johnson, and Thelonius Monk were playing in those years drew members of my generation because it was "the music of shattered experience...
...It was, however, applause enough to attract Dizzy's notice...
...New Yorkers in the forties and fifties were notoriously soft when it came to the "boys in service...
...Swing low, sweet Cadillac, Comin' for to carry me home...
...ow it may be true, as an existential critic once wrote, that what Dizzy, Charlie Parker, J.J...
...He's headed the other way...
Vol. 26 • March 1993 • No. 3
