Legends Nureyev, Gillespie Die : Jazz Trumpeter Sparked Be-Bop Revolution

John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie, the pouch-cheeked trumpet great who helped foment the 1940s be-bop revolution and whose mischievous stage antics belied a masterly grasp of the horn and a scholar’s dedication to his music, died Wednesday.

Gillespie, whose trademark black berets, dark glasses and goatee were imitated by many in a generation of postwar hipsters, was 75 when he died of pancreatic cancer at Englewood Hospital in Englewood, N.J.

His wife, Lorraine, said the trumpeter died in his sleep with one of his songs, “Dizzy’s Dime,” playing on a tape recorder. He had been hospitalized for about a month.

Sidelined last March after surgery for an abdominal blockage, Gillespie had since made only a few non-playing appearances after cutting an omnipresent swath through the jazz circuit’s smoky clubs, college halls and all-star festivals well into his 70s.

Los Angeles Times jazz critic Leonard Feather has called him “one of the most creative musicians of the 20th Century.’

Gillespie was a high-profile ambassador-at-large for his music, a popularizer who appeared on talk shows and children’s television programs to spread his gospel. He led several big bands on world tours under the aegis of the U.S. State Department. His slyly cryptic mannerisms and vocabulary of cool became an enduring part of American popular culture, replayed over and over in the personas of countless film and cartoon beatniks.

“There is a parallel with jazz and religion,” Gillespie, an ardent follower of the Bahai faith, once said. “In jazz, a messenger comes to the music and spreads his influence to a certain point, and then another comes and takes you further.”

But Gillespie’s musical achievements surpassed even his role as a jazz messenger. As a composer and instrumentalist, he helped forge the movement that grew into bop, playing with fellow bop pioneer and saxophone colossus Charlie Parker on a handful of fiery mid-1940s recordings that are among the most celebrated in the jazz canon. An imitator of swing trumpeter Roy Eldridge in his early years, Gillespie achieved an eminence matched only by Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis.

He was instrumental in splicing Cuban and Latin strains into jazz, and from there, into mainstream popular music. His ensembles were steppingstones for such jazz stalwarts as John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt. As the swing era trailed off into its long night of decline after World War II, Gillespie found glory as the last great big-band leader, overseeing a tight-knit unit that played bop at furious tempos before flaming out after several incendiary years.

“Dizzy Gillespie is the perfect jazz musician,” Andre Previn, former conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, once said. “He is a great trumpet player. He’s inventive. He swings and he has a sense of humor that jazz should have.”

Even the trumpet he played was unique. Gillespie always carried a trumpet whose bell turned up at a 45-degree angle--an odd positioning that he favored after someone accidentally fell on his instrument in 1953, giving it that odd twist.

Gillespie’s greatest strength as a stylist, The Times’ Feather once wrote, was his inexhaustible ability to hone and improve his brass technique.

“It was as if he had learned newer and more complex rules of syntax, and a seemingly limitless vocabulary, where his predecessors had spoken basic English. . . . Gillespie’s formidable technique and ideation continued to evolve until the early 1970s.”

Onstage, Gillespie was an impish, gleeful figure, scat singing, cracking up at his own jokes, waving his rump as other musicians jammed. At times, his normally mellow personality matched his high-register performances. In one incident that Gillespie joked about later, he was fired from Cab Calloway’s band for slashing at the bandleader with a folding knife. They had confronted each other backstage after Calloway accused Gillespie of peppering him with spitballs during a show.

Yet Gillespie maintained a teacher’s fascination and a fatherly protectiveness about the jazz revolt he led. Bandleader Teddy Hill, who gave Gillespie his first trumpet seat in 1937, described him as “dizzy like a fox” for his ability to delight an audience while challenging them with music they might otherwise have rejected.

“I’m extremely serious about the music,” Gillespie said. “But I think I have a definite commitment to do things and let people feel good and put them in the right vein to appreciate the movement.”

John Birks Gillespie was born Oct. 21, 1917, at Cheraw, S.C., the youngest of nine children of Lottie and John Gillespie, a brick mason and weekend bandleader. In a home strewn with musical instruments, the youth quickly won a rudimentary knowledge of the trumpet, trombone, piano and drums.

Soon after the death of his father in 1927, he organized his own band and won a scholarship to the Laurinberg Institute, a trade school for black students where Gillespie studied theory and harmony.

Just before graduation, Gillespie withdrew from the school to join his mother in Philadelphia. Gillespie recalled his arrival as that of a typical “country boy,” carrying his trumpet in a paper bag.

Within two years, nonstop practice landed him his first job with the New York-based Teddy Hill Orchestra. Gillespie’s style then mirrored that of Roy Eldridge, who had previously played in Hill’s band as star soloist.

In 1939, Calloway hired Gillespie to replace the ailing Doc Cheatham in his band’s trumpet section. Gillespie was so poor, bassist Milt Hinton said years later, that when he joined the band, Hinton had to loan him $5 “so he could have his (trumpet) mouthpiece replated. It was so worn he was ruining his chops.”

Gillespie was already seeing an Apollo Theater dancer who would soon become his wife. Lorraine Gillespie became Gillespie’s aide and bulwark, helping him run his short-lived record label and planning his peripatetic scheduling.

Like a secret revolutionary, Gillespie was soon working on his insurrection from within the traditional confines of Calloway’s touring band. “Diz’s biggest musical problem,” Hinton recalled, “was that he’d try playing things that he couldn’t technically handle. . . . Some of the older guys would look over at him and make ugly faces.”

Calloway scolded Gillespie frequently, and although the young trumpeter usually took his chidings in silence, he finally erupted in anger one night. A spitball came sailing out from the trumpet section and landed at Calloway’s feet during a performance. Although trumpeter Jonah Jones was the real culprit, Calloway accused Gillespie.

The two men argued backstage. According to Hinton, the bandleader slapped Gillespie. “A split second later, Diz had his Case knife out and was going for Cab.” The two men were restrained, but Calloway was cut on the hand as he tried to hold Gillespie’s knife back. He fired Gillespie on the spot.

Gillespie learned much from Calloway, perhaps most importantly the bandleader’s credo that serious music is often best leavened with humor. Gillespie also took Calloway’s penchant for scat singing and codified it into a hipster’s vocabulary.

Gillespie returned to New York, where he continued to work brief stints with orchestras, including ones led by Lucky Millinder, Benny Carter and Earl Hines. But Gillespie’s heart was in the late-night jam sessions he joined with other young Turks in such nightspots as the Onyx, the Three Deuces and Minton’s, where he met, among others, pianist Thelonious Monk and drummer Kenny Clarke.

But among all the musicians he met, Gillespie fused fastest with Charlie (Bird) Parker, a Kansas City native who had a similar checkered history as a swing musician. Both men played with Hines and then joined trombonist-balladeer Billy Eckstine when he quit Hines’ band to start his short-lived group.

Gillespie was unabashed in his debt to Parker, acknowledging he “learned rhythm patterns” from the saxophonist. Describing Parker as “the other side of my heartbeat,” Gillespie prized his association with him as “far above anything else that I have ever done musically in my career.”

Parker and Gillespie used the Eckstine band as a forge, a place to hone their solos and develop their advances in rhythm and harmony. What came out of their endless woodshedding was bop--an entirely new language of chord progressions in which snatches of old show tunes and blues vamps were turned inside out, spun backward and thrust forward in triple-timed riffs of blazing intensity and slowed-down passages of languorous beauty.

By 1945, Parker and Gillespie joined in a quintet that created bop’s most enduring records, combining on searing performances like “Groovin’ High,” “Hot House” and “Dizzy Atmosphere” and the delicate ballads “All the Things You Are” and “Lover Man,” accompanying a young Sarah Vaughan.

But as band mates, Parker and Gillespie’s collaboration was brief. As chronicled in Clint Eastwood’s film, “Bird,” a trip to Los Angeles proved disastrous, with Parker’s worsening drug addiction ending with his arrest and incarceration in a mental health facility at Camarillo.

The two men would perform briefly on later occasions, but for the most part, they went their separate ways. While Parker settled into quintet settings with trumpeters Miles Davis and Kenny Dorham, Gillespie proved more adventurous, organizing be-bop’s first and most famous big band.

A fiery unit that played swirling, bubbling horn parts around Gillespie’s soaring trumpet, the band was adept at full-tilt screamers such as “Things to Come,” “Emanon” and “Dizzier and Dizzier.” And there were the giddy scat classics, “Ool-Ya-Koo,” “In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee” and “Hey Pete, Let’s Eat More Meat.”

But most adventurous were the Latin-tinged compositions that Gillespie introduced with the aid of Cuban percussion master Chano Pozo. On “Manteca,” “Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” and “Algo Bueno,” Gillespie fused his intricate horn patterns with a polyrhythmic percussive foundation that has been a staple of jazz since the late 1940s.

But the same economic hazards that killed swing-era big bands also doomed Gillespie’s band. Such large units had become increasingly difficult to maintain on tour and, ironically, the ascendance of smaller bop groups made record companies less willing to pay premium contracts for the larger bands.

Gillespie launched his own label, Dee Gee, in the early 1950s. Using a succession of smaller groups, he produced a handful of sturdy recordings, among them “Tin Tin Deo” and “Birk’s Works.”

Although the 1950s continued to be a fertile period for Gillespie, he found himself taking a back seat to newer revolutionaries. By the late 1950s, Gillespie’s own pupil, Davis, launched his own, cooler revolution. Davis’ haunting modal experiments were a break with bop’s hotter scales. Then came the free jazz of Coltrane, who had played with Gillespie’s big band, and Ornette Coleman.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Gillespie appeared to settle into the role of elder statesman. He played trumpet on “Sesame Street” and chatted amiably with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” Ever the jokester, he ran as a write-in candidate for President in 1964, promising to alter the White House into the “Blues House” and making Davis head of the CIA. More than a dozen years later, he was jamming at the White House, egging President Jimmy Carter into joining him in an appropriate chorus of “Salt Peanuts.”

Despite the hardening of his public persona and the growing consensus among some critics that his trumpet prowess had begun to diminish, Gillespie remained capable of bravura performances. One critic, Francis Davis, insisted that Gillespie’s finest performances took place, not in the 1940s, but in the early 1960s, during which, Davis said, Gillespie “topped himself nightly.”

In the 1980s, Gillespie, who is survived by his wife, was as much a familiar figure in jazz clubs as he was on television and in larger concert venues. His bands again became populated with top-flight accompanists such as Jon Faddis and Sam Rivers, and although his shows emphasized the bop chestnuts, Gillespie often surprised audiences with long, complicated solos.

In his final years, he still set off on world tours and jazz cruises and even appeared as a disgruntled jazz expatriate in “The Winter in Lisbon,” a film for which he also wrote the soundtrack. He became a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1990 and was the subject of a brace of documentary films and television specials.

Born a Methodist, Gillespie converted to the Bahai faith and was a low-key proselytizer for its universal humanistic tenets. In person, he always seemed content, simply happy to be making music at whatever level of consistency he was able to muster at the moment.

“Whenever Gillespie moseyed onstage,” Francis Davis wrote after viewing a series of 1991 performances, “he instantly became the center of attention, and the other musicians seemed to huddle around him, as if waiting for their cues.”

A series of performances celebrating Gillespie’s 75th year had to be scaled back when he grew ill. But he was well enough to appear at some of the events, and, though still too sick to play, he acknowledged the cheers in typical good humor.

“A man’s life is interwoven into his music,” Gillespie once said. “You can’t help it from coming out.”

AN APPRECIATION: Leonard Feather recalls Gillespie as a beloved innovator. F1

Gillespie Records

This is a partial list of Dizzy Gillespie’s best-known and seminal records:

“Woody’n You” / 1944

“Groovin’ High” / 1945

“Shaw Nuff” / 1945

“Salt Peanuts” / 1945

“A Night in Tunisia” / 1946

“Oop Bop Sh’ Bam” / 1946

“Diggin’ for Diz” / 1947

“Manteca” / 1947

“Birk’s Works” / 1951

“Tin Tin Deo”/ 1951

“Con Alma” / 1957