In a book about the real jazz you wouldn’t reasonably expect to find anything about Dizzy Gillespie, but I’ve included him to make a point. The point could be of interest to people who feel that the music began to decline roughly around the time it began to be recorded. It’s only fair to confess, though, that I lost interest in the movies when they started to talk.
In Philadelphia in 1940 or 1941—just before I got drafted, anyway—I had a concert going on in the Academy of Music. I don’t remember who was playing, but it must have been an authentic New Orleans jazz band, with maybe a Chicagoan or two thrown in. I’m sure Joe Sullivan was on piano. A local entrepreneur named Nat Segal, who owned a club called the Downbeat in South Philadelphia, asked me if I would, as a favor to him, permit a young trumpet player and a girl singer to participate. In those days there weren’t any major music controversies going on in the business. We were still saying, in our sublime ignorance, “It’s all jazz.” So I agreed to have Nat’s people on stage briefly, to give them an opportunity to be exposed to the concert audience. The skinny little girl singer, whom I judged to be about sixteen, told me her name was Sarah Vaughan. And the trumpeter, whom I had met before in Minton’s in New York where he had seemed to be only fooling around with the other musicians on the stand, Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker and, I think, Slim Gaillard (it’s hard to remember for sure—after all, it was more than forty years ago), was Dizzy Gillespie.
So, anyway, he played in one or two sets at the Academy, and he still seemed to be just fooling around. I talked to him for a while backstage, and it struck me that he was far more personable and intelligent than most of the musicians I had been associated with in the world of authentic jazz. On reflection, I admitted to myself that most of these younger musicians playing that strange music they were calling “be-bop” were superior folks, generally better educated, more civilized. Their manners were better, they were more polite, more considerate of each other. I found what they were playing very boring, and the more I heard it and understood it, the less I liked it. I said all that to young Dizzy, and he said, “Everything moves along, man. It’s not a question of whether it’s better or worse, it just keeps movin’. There’s no reason musicians, especially young ones, shouldn’t experiment with the instruments—find out how far they can go.”
A few years later, I’d go far enough into it to actually produce a Lenny Tristano concert, featuring such newcomers as” Fats Navarro and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. I made a record session with Percy Heath (long before the “Modern Jazz Quartet”). And at last I confronted the fact that while I enjoyed working with these really very nice people, I just couldn’t stand what they were playing. That was what got me off on the whole complex business of jazz theory, about which I’ve written at length. All of my predictions about the music business—like how the public would never go for long playing records, how Stan Kenton was too complex ever to be a commercial success, and how the public would be sick of the Beatles in two months—didn’t work out. But I was right about be-bop. It was a musical deadend. I hoped when it was over that some of the excellent musicians it produced would turn their attentions to genuine jazz, but that never happened.
Five or six years later, Dizzy and a group were booked into one of Frank Palumbo’s places. In order to publicize his appearance I took him around for radio interviews on various disc jockey shows and then up to a school called “The Twentieth Century Institute of Music,” which was run by some friends of mine, Bernie Lowenthal and Art Singer. Naturally, all the students, mostly studying on the G. I. Bill, were so impressed by Dizzy’s friendly, gentle manner that they flocked down to the place to see him perform.
I remember saying to him, “Well, you’re still doin’ it.”
He smiled and said, “If you’re not doin’ it, you’re not doin’ anything.” After that I’d see him from time to time in Felix Valdera’s Para- mount Record Shop or at a benefit where I might be doing some emceeing or at a jazz festival.
But I heard him play jazz one time, which I’ll always remember. It was in 1980 and I had just published my biography of Eubie Blake. B. Dalton and Company gave a closed autographing party for the benefit of the New York Public Library in their Fifth Avenue store. Eubie and I were there to autograph the book, and Dizzy had just written his own autobiography. The place was alive with author-celebrities—Leroy Neimann, caricaturist Al Hirshfeld, Rona Jaffe. There were also a lot of very rich folks, donors to the library, and so on. I was surprised to see Larry Adler, who lives in London now. Eubie, of course, never could get away from any place without performing, and he asked Dizzy if he had his horn with him so they could play together. Dizzy said he didn’t live too far away and that he’d be back in a few minutes with his horn. When he returned, he and Eubie began to play “Memories of You.” To our surprise, Larry Adler produced a harmonica, which I swear didn’t measure more than an inch and a half in length, and joined in. Well, it was jazz. Genuine, hot, and authentic. Gillespie did all the things a great jazz trumpeter is supposed to do. The crowd, aware that what was going on was an unusual event, responded with uncontrolled enthusiasm. Eubie, at ninety-seven, was in his usual euphoric condition while playing his own music, and the idea of playing in public with Dizzy and Larry tickled him. I told Dizzy afterwards that it was nice of him to have gone and gotten his horn. He said he wouldn’t have missed the honor of sitting in with Eubie.