Dizzy Gillespie: the deep sound of joy
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Dizzy Gillespie: the deep sound of joy NatHentoff Some people, just by coming into the room, make you feel good. Fats Waller was like that. And so is John Birks "Dizzy"...
...To call him a virtuoso is only to begin to indicate how greatly he has expanded the capacities of the trumpet...
...By now, he commands his horn with total authority...
...During one of his State Department-sponsored tours abroad as an "ambassador" of democratic jazz, Dizzy was scheduled to perform at an embassy lawn party in Ankara...
...Dizzy also has little patience with what might be called anti-egalitarian protocol...
...And so is John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie...
...At racism...
...Dizzy is now sixty-three, and he Nat Hentoff writes regularly about music for The Progressive...
...It's been a long time since I've heard so natural a fiddle presence...
...He has become a stern editor of his improvisations...
...Long unavailable, the album Jazz Critics' Choice (Columbia Jazz Odyssey PC 36807) has been released again...
...Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Max Roach, comers on all instruments...
...And the music encompasses bluegrass, gospel, Irish dance tunes, and even a quite riveting recitation of William Butler Yeats's "The Host of the Air" (what might be called the erotic collective unconscious...
...One of Jefferson's newest, On Stage (Concord Jazz CJ-143), is a reminder that, contrary to Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn, jazz is by no means primarily a young man's game...
...He saw, jammed outside the walls, a throng of street urchins who were being refused entrance...
...It's also his extraordinary generosity of spirit...
...From the beginning of time...
...In two respects, he is different...
...Meanwhile, Dizzy has so much more to hear and play: "All of the music is out there in the first place, all of it...
...A good way to start—or enhance—a collection...
...Dizzy simply refused to play until they were let in...
...He is in no way ingenuous, but he is a very open man...
...Tom McCreesh is a lively, vibrant fiddler: Tom Campbell plays full-bodied, loping bass...
...Wanting to learn more about the scales and rhythms, Dizzy invited the charmer, and his snake, to his hotel room...
...and Walt Michael alternates between the hammered dulcimer and guitar...
...It may not be negotiable in currency, but who, having it, would want to trade in this elan for anything else...
...It turned out to be a much more impressive treasury than one might expect from jazz critics...
...For all the deep joy in his music, Dizzy can be consumed with rage...
...Or better yet, the label might simply commission Merle Haggard to put together his favorites...
...plays with at least as much delight and intensity as when he, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and other Jacobins turned jazz upside down in the 1940s...
...Front Hall Records (RD 1, Wormer Road, Voorheesville, New York 12186) specializes in folk music...
...But with these stunning skills has come even more self-discipline...
...Carl Jefferson, owner and principal producer for Concord Jazz, also takes admirable care with the sound of his sets, and the result is a real—not hyped—sense that the musicians are right there in your room...
...On the same tour, in Karachi, Dizzy was entranced by the reed-playing of a local snake-charmer...
...Or, as he puts it, "It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play...
...A kind of Magna Carta, at the time, for jazz musicians...
...Dizzy dismissed the complaint: "The man's a musician, isn't he...
...His time (as jazz musicians call the essential pulse of the music) is wondrously secure, but always full of surprises because he listens to rhythms from everywhere—from the Afro-Cuban to patterns shown him by Rumanian gypsies...
...And so he has continued to be...
...There are perils in trying to sound authoritative in many idioms, but one of the relatively few times it works is in Michael, McCreesh & Campbell/"The Host of the Air" (Front Hall FHR-023...
...Almost thirty years ago, in New York, I met Dizzy on the street and he was a combustible combination of anger and elation...
...Dizzy has somehow survived in a field with an imposing mortality rate without having encased himself in protective armor...
...A particularly invigorating illustration of Dizzy's easeful brilliance, wit, and lyricism is Dizzy Gillespie at Montreux, 1980 (Pablo D2308226...
...and that leads, most of the time, to a certain amount of eclecticism...
...There they played duets until they were interrupted by the hotel manager, who protested vehemently that people of the1 snake charmer's class were not ever allowed in that hotel...
...All in all, it's the kind of music that would make a convivial gathering all the more so...
...All sing—with refreshing lack of quasi-antiquarian self-consciousness...
...Now, Columbia ought to initiate a similar project involving critics and historians of country and western music...
...A word of praise to the engineering staff of the Bottom Forty Recording Co...
...All you have to do is try to get a little piece of it...
...Choice cuts In 1964, Columbia Records asked a pack of jazz critics, including this one, to pick one of their favorite sides from Columbia's capacious jazz archives...
...you work for me...
...Among the singular pleasures: Teddy Wilson's "Blues in C-Sharp Minor," Lester Young's "Oh, Lady Be Good," Bessie Smith's "Baby Doll," Duke Ellington's "Blue Light," Miles Davis's "So What...
...With Toots Thielemans on guitar and drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie (master of powerful off-beat "soul" accenting), Dizzy ranges from "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" to "Manteca" in a performance that gloriously distills a rather large part of the history of jazz, from the blues to now...
...Mostly current, younger practitioners...
...The session is a model of mellow, continually imaginative improvising that is one dividend of the jazz life...
...At seventy-two, vibraphonist Red Norvo swings with flowing zest, and his ideas are even more limber and unexpected than they were when he and Mildred Bailey co-led a number of classic selections...
...Equally airborne are pianist Hank Jones, guitarist Tal Farlow, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Jake Hanna...
...In addition to all his recordings, Dizzy has made an invaluable contribution to jazz history in his memoirs, To Be or Not to Bop (Doubleday), one of the three or four essential books so far on the nature as well as the history of much of this music...
...And at the exploitation of musicians by bookers and club owners...
...He hadjiist delivered a short, biting lecture to his white booking agent, and its climax had been: "I don't work for you...
...He doesn't make you aware that you're gonna get a lesson," says bassist Paul West...
...Because of his character and his personality, he's dropping stuff on you all the time, and all you have to do is be open and receive it...
...What Dizzy has to teach are subtle ways of phrasing, continually fresh ways of shaping and selecting harmonies, and above all, the bottomless art of swinging...
...I don't care how great you are, you only get a little piece of it...
...I came here," he informed the official ambassador, "to play for all people...
...Years back, at the dawning of bop (modern jazz), Dizzy was already an informal instructor and encourager of players even younger than he...
...It's not only his infectiously humorous (often deadpan) sense of universal absurdities...
Vol. 45 • April 1981 • No. 4
