Giant Steps

Bebop and the Creators of Modern Jazz, 1945-65

Kenny Mathieson

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857866172
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica jazz

A music journalist offers a lively history of modern jazz through its formative and most vital decades—from Charlie Parker to John Coltrane. In Giant Steps, Kenny Mathieson examines the most important figures in the creation of modern jazz, detailing the emergence and evolution of bebop through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. Using this as its starting point, Mathieson then delves into the developments of jazz composition, modal jazz and free jazz. The music of the great masters is examined in detail and will provide both a fine introduction for the large audience newly attracted to the music but unsure of their direction through it, as well as an entertaining and informative read for those with a more substantial background.

Dizzy Gillespie

Unlike Charlie Parker, who burned with incandescent brilliance and died young, Dizzy Gillespie carved out a lengthy career and became a respected elder statesman of the music, which is an unhip thing to do in jazz mythology. In the birth of bebop, though, his pyrotechnic brilliance was the perfect foil for Parker’s own, and was underpinned by a more thorough understanding of harmonic theory than many of his contemporaries routinely possessed. If Dizzy is assured immortality on the strength of his contribution to the emergency of bebop alone, his place in the history of 20th-century music will rest on a considerably wider achievement.

Dizzy also enshrined what many saw as a contradiction. Like Louis Armstrong, he was both a great innovator and a great entertainer, a man who did previously undreamed-of things on trumpet, but at the same time was ready and willing to mug furiously on stage, and, even worse, send up his own artistic inventions in songs like ‘He Beeped When He Should’ve Bopped’. His clowning antics have been held against him by those who saw them as either Uncle Tom-style servility or a betrayal of the sacred torch of musical revolution, but Gillespie was a natural showman as well as a brilliant musician, and is one of the select band of jazzmen who have become household names. Unlike Armstrong, he was no great singer and yet even on these novelty tunes his scatting was always highly inventive and musically sophisticated, a mixture of extraordinary skill and zaniness which is partly a reflection of his natural ebullience and partly a shrewd awareness of more practical necessities.

That combination of high artistic aspiration and street-smart commercial wisdom is reflected again and again in his life and work, and surely lies at the root of his complex personality. In later years, he became increasingly aware of the importance of his African roots and of the civil rights campaigns in America, and even ran for President in 1964 (and again, briefly, in 1972). Being Dizzy he did so under a ‘politics ought to be a groovier thing’ banner but behind the fun there lay a serious concern over the way things were run, especially from the perspective of black Americans.

Those qualities were formed early. As a child, he tells us in his memoirs, ‘mischief, money-making, and music captured all of my attention’, and he was to develop all three capacities in the course of his long life in jazz. He remained unapologetic about his antics throughout his career, from the zany dancing and novelty chants through to a routine which became a staple of his live shows, his announcement that he wanted to introduce the band, followed by his starting to introduce the musicians to each other. Dizzy was a natural comedian, and even though you knew it was coming, it was hard not to smile at his cornball schtick. In his autobiography, Dizzy – To Be Or Not To Bop, he claims there was also a more pragmatic purpose to his routines. (All quotations from Dizzy in this chapter are from that book, unless otherwise stated.)

People always thought I was crazy, so I used that to my advantage to attract public attention and find the most universal audience for our music. I fell back on what I knew. While performing modern jazz, I emphasized certain inimitable parts of my own style . . . Comedy is important. As a performer, when you’re trying to establish audience control, the best thing is to make them laugh if you can. That relaxes you more than anything. A laugh relaxes your muscles; it relaxes muscles all over your body. When you try to get people relaxed, they’re more receptive to what you’re trying to get them to do. Sometimes, when you’re laying on something over their heads, they’ll go along with it if they’re relaxed.’

He was born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, South Carolina, on 21 October, 1917, the youngest of nine children. His father was a part-time musician, but died when John was only ten. He began to teach himself trombone a couple of years later, then trumpet and cornet. His musical prowess earned him admission to the progressive Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina in 1933, where he played in the school band and continued to teach himself music, adding piano to his accomplishments. He quit school in 1935 and joined his family in Philadelphia, where he launched his professional career in a band led by Frankie Fairfax.

It was at this point that he acquired the nickname Dizzy, bestowed by another player in the trumpet section, Fats Palmer, on account of his habitual antics. That trumpet section later featured Charlie Shavers, one of the formative influences on Gillespie’s early style. Through copying Shavers, Dizzy also absorbed stylistic elements from the man to whom he owed the greatest debt as an influence at this formative stage of his career, Roy Eldridge. It was appropriate, then, that when he made his next move, to New York in 1937, he should end up occupying the lead trumpet chair in the Teddy Hill band, which Eldridge had held until earlier that year.

Indeed, Dizzy was allegedly hired largely because he could sound uncannily like Eldridge, notably in his speed and facility in the high register. His first recorded solo, on Hill’s version of ‘King Porter Stomp’ from a May session that year, bears out that suspicion. Gillespie has always acknowledged the debt, but what he went on to make of it was very much his own thing, as he developed an increasingly original musical conception over the next decade. As is always the way of it when something new happens along, some players put his harmonic innovations down to his playing wrong notes, but since he built one of the greatest careers in jazz on that foundation, I guess they must have been the right wrong notes.

Having established his presence on the competitive New York scene, including working with the Cuban band-leader Alberto Socarras, he was invited to join Cab Calloway’s successful outfit in August 1939, with a little help from another eminent Cuban musician, trumpeter Mario Bauza. These associations established an interest in Afro-Cuban music which would bear rich fruit in due course, but he was already developing into a formidable musician at this stage.

It has been argued that Lionel Hampton’s ‘Hot Mallets,’ cut on 11 September 1939 with a ten-piece all-star band which included Dizzy alongside swing era giants like Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, was the first recorded example of the emerging bebop style. That would certainly overstate the case, but it is another clear indication of the way Gillespie was moving; Hampton, who was then working regularly with Benny Goodman, recalled the circumstances in his autobiography, Hamp.

Diz was just coming up then. I’d heard him for the first time at the Apollo Theater a few days before. I went to the Apollo a lot – we all did. That was where you heard real black music. I was sitting behind the stage, and I heard this guy playing trumpet in a different style than I or anyone else had ever heard before. It was the new bebop style, and I said, ‘Man, I got to get this guy on my next recording session’. Some say that it was on those recordings we made, especially ‘Hot Mallets’, which I wrote, that early bebop was first recorded.

The two years the trumpeter spent with the Calloway orchestra were important ones, but his relationship with his employer turned sour when, in a famous incident, Calloway accused him of throwing a spitball at him on stage. It escalated into a backstage confrontation, and an indignant Dizzy, who was genuinely innocent on this occasion, pulled a knife and cut his accuser, which seems as good a way as any to lose a job. It could have been an even more serious matter.

He put his hands up in my chest and pulled me up, getting ready to hit me. He didn’t know I was getting ready to kill him. Oh, yes, I nicked him. He turned me loose, quick. When he saw that blood, nobody had to tell him to turn me loose. Milt Hinton grabbed my hand to keep me from really injuring him. I coulda killed him, I was so mad. It was a serious fight, a very serious thing, and somebody could’ve gotten really hurt because I’m a firm believer in non-violence when it comes to me.

Musically, though, the most significant events of his years with Calloway were happening elsewhere. Teddy Hill had disbanded his outfit (following, according to Dizzy, a falling out with the mob-backed promoters at the Savoy Ballroom) and in 1940 became the booking agent for a Harlem nightspot named Minton’s Playhouse, where he instituted a series of after-hours jam sessions. The musicians who gravitated to these sessions at Minton’s (and the slightly later scene which emerged at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House) were the ones with the most progressive ideas on the contemporary jazz scene of the day – Dizzy himself, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian and numerous others, including many of the major soloists of the swing era.

Of those swing era soloists, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young had the greatest influence on the emergence of bebop. In his exemplary study of the social and musical roots of the music, The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVeaux looks in detail at Hawkins’s contact with and influence on the bop generation. As part of that examination, he considers the respective qualities which Hawkins and Young bequeathed to bebop.

Coleman Hawkins’s music was built on the principles of continuity and certainty. The certainty derived from the precision with which he understood the workings of tonal harmony. Each note of his improvisations finds its place within the framework of tonal relations implied by the tune . . . The appropriate rhetorical mode is thus continuity: an earnest, relentless building of intensity.

Bebop relied on these principles as well – at least as the underlying thread for most passages. But more broadly, it made striking use of the contrary principles of ambiguity and discontinuity. These qualities are notably absent from Hawkins’s music but salient in the music of Lester Young.

Hawkin’s approach ‘represents a narrowing of the possibilities open to a soloist’, since the ‘tendency is always to fill in, to flesh out, to maintain the illusion of harmonic movement even where it is absent’, while Young takes an opposite tack, preferring ‘to reduce the harmonic implications, often to the point of appearing to ignore harmonic movement altogether’, a strategy which created both an ambiguity in harmonic relationships, and allowed a greater rhythmic freedom.

An illustrative aside which provides a colourful description of Young’s attitude to harmonic movement is recounted in a memoir by pianist Bobby Scott. Scott recalled arriving at a club where Young was playing to be greeted by the saxophonist with the following complaint: “Oh, Socks, baby, I’m glad to see you here! This boy playin’ piano plays very well. But he puts eight changes where there ought to be two! You know me, Socks. Somethin’ like “These Foolish Things”, I mean, I like the E-flat chord, the C-minor, the F-minor seventh, the B-flat nine. You know. Shit. I can’t play when there are eighty-nine motherfuckin’ changes in the bar!”

Hawkins was the dominant model for the bebop players, but both he and young had their part to play in the evolution of the style, as DeVeaux suggests.

The bebop pioneers were, on the whole, too deeply invested in the orthodoxies of the time – the ‘progressive’ fascination with chromatic harmony, the professional advantage associated with overt displays of virtuosity – to model their style directly on Young’s understated approach. (It was not until considerably later, in the 1950s, that a younger generation of musicians would do so.) Nevertheless, they saw in Young’s example a way of extending the legacy of Coleman Hawkins and other harmonic improvisers in new and unexpected directions.

Minion’s became a forcing ground for the subsequent evolution of bebop. Many stories have been circulated about the exclusivity of the scene there. It has been said, for example, that Dizzy, Monk and Clarke operated a system designed to exclude white musicians from proceedings. If there was a bar in operation, however, it was not a matter of colour: the musicians have admitted many times that they would call tunes with difficult or unusual changes in order to weed out those players who could not handle the musical demands made on them. In an interview with this writer in 1989, Gillespie answered the charge that Monk in particular would try to scare off newcomers with his music by asserting that ‘the music wasn’t meant to keep nobody away, man, it was just plain hard’.

Trumpeter Johnny Carisi was one white regular able to hang in with the challenges, and as such was always welcome on stage, while the most notorious denizen of Minton’s was an apparently awful but unshakeably persistent black saxophonist from Newark known as The Demon, whom Dizzy dubbed ‘the first freedom player – freedom from harmony, freedom from rhythm, freedom from everything’.

Nonetheless, it would be foolish to ignore the racial dimension implicit in the developments at Minton’s. From the outset, black musicians had made the major creative explorations in jazz, while white musicians had won wider recognition and better rewards, usually on the back of those musical innovations. In 1917, the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz records, drawing on black forms (and in an even more ironic twist, it is said that trumpeter Freddie Keppard turned down the chance of that historic landmark because he was afraid other musicians would steal his ideas); in the 1920s, it was Paul Whiteman who was crowned King of Jazz, not Armstrong, Oliver, or any of the New Orleans pioneers; in the swing era, it was Benny Goodman who was dubbed King of Swing, not Duke or Basie or Fletcher Henderson or Jimmie Lunceford.

That pattern extended to jobs – the white bands played the best residences in the best hotels. The accumulation of bitterness implicit in all this bubbled under in the scene around Minion’s, which was less commercially-directed than on 52nd Street, and where many of the musicians saw themselves as engaged in creating a music which those outside of the circle could not readily imitate (a process which Charles Mingus characterised as the innovators being ripped-off by copyists ‘singing their praises while stealing their phrases’), or could only do so if they had the ‘chops’ and musicality to handle its ferocious challenges. The inner circle of bebop was also based on drug use to a large extent, but at root it was down to ability and had a brutally competitive edge, a point made by the bop pianist Hampton Hawes (whose own contribution to the music will be considered in a future volume). In his autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, the pianist recalls his first experience in New York in the 1940s.

One night at Minton’s, a club in Harlem where there were all-night sessions, somebody recognized me and said, ‘There’s a cat from California supposed to play good, let’s get him up here’. Now at that time there were a lot of East Coast musicians who thought it slick to try to shoot down anyone new on the scene who was starting to make a reputation. It was like an initiation, a ceremonial rite (chump, jump or I’ll burn you up, you don’t know nothin’), calling far-out tunes in strange keys with the hip changes at tempos so fast if you didn’t fly you fell – that’s how you earned your diploma in the University of the Streets of New York.

For a week I had watched these cats burning each other up, ambushing outsiders, fucking up their minds so bad they would fold and split the stand after one tune. Surprised by their coldness because they were so friendly off the stand. I peeked that I wasn’t quite ready, maybe they could get me; you don’t want to be a poopbutt but sometimes it’s better to pass, wait for a better hand. I knew I wouldn’t flop, but neither would I win acclaim. No point in selling tickets if you don’t have a show.

The challenge lifted me a few notches – I knew I had to go out and tighten my hand – and when I came back that way a couple of years later, strung out, five albums under my belt and a lot of playing with Bird, I was ready for them; they couldn’t make me feel funny anymore and left me alone after that. A drummer paid me the ultimate compliment after a set: ‘We been hearin’ about you out on the coast, you a bad motherfucker’. My days of being scared and nervous – at least about music – were over.

It’s too bad it had to be that way, cutting friends up to make them feel inferior so they could get better. That isn’t what music is about. You play for love and for people to enjoy. It’s okay to show a few feathers, you got to have pride in yourself, but you shouldn’t have to wear boxing gloves and spurs; this ain’t no cockfight or main bout at Madison Square Garden. We’re all brothers, aren’t we? – came up the same way, earned our diplomas listening, picking up, hanging out, nervous, some of us getting busted?

Even Hawes, however, then capitulates to the remorselessly Darwinian logic of the process at work. In a society where the ever-present taint of racism denied their achievements both as people and as musicians, and in which criticism of the new music also flowed from opposite poles of the black community (the older style traditional and swing musicians who put down the new music on one hand, the growing ‘respectable’ black bourgeoisie who were plain anti-jazz on the other), it provided an informal but highly codified means of allowing excellence to ride to the top, at least within the music’s own internal hierarchy. Hawes goes on to finish: ‘Yet when I think back, the system did serve a purpose. Blacks in those days had to bear down hard to handle the shadow that was always haunting them, and the constant challenge was the pressure cooker in which you earned recognition and respect. In the process, the music grew leaner, tightened up; the ones who didn’t have it, who couldn’t contribute, fell away.’

The environment which forged bebop was a tough one, but it meant that the music evolved as a meritocracy rather than a closed shop. That element of competitive muscle-flexing probably played its part in determining both the strengths and weaknesses of the emerging form, with its emphasis on virtuoso soloing, advanced harmonic understanding and crackling tempos, and its underlying structural paucity (the characteristic bebop tunes were simply blowing vehicles on a set of often very familiar chord changes, one of the things which would eventually prove to be a major limitation). Gillespie and his cohorts at Minton’s and Monroe’s were at the heart of that evolution. The musicians would play whenever their paying jobs permitted, and the sympathetic respective proprietors, Henry Minton and Clark Monroe, would often provide food, but no fee. Only the house band, which was led by trumpeter Joe Guy at Minton’s, and included Monk and Clarke, was paid, and the sessions were carried on in defiance of union regulations against sitting-in. The rest of the musicians had to be on their guard against hefty fines for playing without a contract if they were caught by union ‘walkers’, whose job it was to keep tabs on the after-hours proclivities of the members (and as the first black delegate to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, Henry Minton was in a more privileged position in that respect, although Gillespie was not alone in seeing the union as ‘just a dues collector’ with little of real benefit to offer the jazz musician). As he wrote in his memoir:

What we were doing at Minton’s was playing, seriously, creating a new dialogue among ourselves, blending our ideas into a new style of music. You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other. We had some fundamental background training in European harmony and music theory superimposed on our own knowledge from Afro-America...