Two Who Transformed Their Worlds : Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993)

THAT IS THE QUESTION: TO BE OR not . . . to bop. The problem, first stated by an English playwright of some note, was rephrased and repunctuated by John Birks Gillespie in 1979 and used as the title of a free-swinging memoir. To Be or Not . . . to Bop: hip, funny, silly, fractured, rhythmic — each word is like a snap of the fingers — pointed, pertinent, dizzy. Very Dizzy.

Did anyone ever call him John? When Dizzy Gillespie died last week at age 75, after a bout with pancreatic cancer, he was known the world over by his nickname. He was busted out of the Cab Calloway band in 1941 for excessive clowning, so legend has it; Calloway, no sobersides himself, could not have foreseen the full implications of the Gillespie handle. In any case, Dizzy required elbow room; he was preparing to break a mess of musical rules. Jazz, always loose, was about to be set free.

Bebop: a revolution in two syllables. It jumped off of swing into the high ozone, on the wings of two unlikely angels, Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Together, and with the collaboration of a tight core of players like Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and a few others, Dizzy and Bird drove jazz back into itself, straight through its heart and out again, sounding brand-new. Parker — the racked jazz saint and junkie genius — fit the hipster stereotype more than his good-timing, glad-handing buddy. But in matters of chops and talent, Gillespie played a supporting role to no one.

There have been three jazz trumpet players who could be called, with no second thought, great: Louis Armstrong, Dizzy and Miles Davis. Satch played a sweet, raucous sound that kept its roots strong in the gumbo of hometown New Orleans. Dizzy knew how to nurse a tune too, but his armor-piercing solos tore those roots right up and replanted them farther north, in the new welter of urban angst. But his music, always intrepid, remained fleet. It was spontaneous reinvention in rhythm, a kind of fun that tweaked the far edges but never crossed them.

“Dizzy was the catalyst, the man who inspired us all,” the great drummer Max Roach has said. “By the time he came to New York he was playing in all the Big Bands. He was the one who told us about a saxophone player in Kansas City named Charlie Parker or a bass player in Minneapolis named Oscar Pettiford.” Dizzy brought them all together to play at a fabled Harlem joint called Minton’s, where, after the regular sessions, strange scrambled rhythms and impossible harmonies would float toward the dawn. It was, indeed, a new day.

Bop was fractured, urgent, wired. It did not go down easy. In fact, its strenuous experimentation not only polarized the jazz audience but lost jazz itself much popular support. As if realizing this and trying to reach some sort of no-sweat accommodation, Gillespie turned up the volume on his personality. His goatee, heavy-black-frame specs and frequent beret became prototypical hepcat mufti. His voice, which sounded like a thunderclap wanting to purr, could be heard on cool novelties like Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac. His cheeks expanded so far past normal size when he played his horn that he looked, on the bandstand, as if he were on exhibit in an aquarium.

And the horn. It was as much a trademark as Armstrong’s handkerchief. Story goes that in 1953, Dizzy returned to a recording session and found that his trumpet had been sat upon, or fallen upon, or in some way molested. It was bent into a near-perfect 45 degrees angle. He played it anyway and liked what he heard; he used to say he could hear himself better. And that was pretty much the way he was heard, too, from then on.

The horn was no more a stunt than all his roguish jokiness though. The music flowed from a kind of high spirit, a purposeful passion that the horn symbolized and the silliness deflected. There was nothing slight or offhand about the way he played, or how he lived. Born in South Carolina in 1917, he began to teach himself trombone and trumpet two years after his father — a bricklayer by trade and a weekend bandleader by calling — had passed on; before he left his teens he was playing professionally with the Frankie Fairfax band and had got himself his nickname.

It was in those years too that he met the dancer Lorraine Willis, to whom he * would be married ever after. He steered wide of the sundry social temptations of the musical life and, in 1968, became a member of the Baha’i faith. Personally, Dizzy was on the square and strictly legit; he fronted the first jazz band ever sent on a subsidized tour by the State Department, referred to President Dwight Eisenhower as “Pops,” got Jimmy Carter to sing Salt Peanuts at the White House and copped one of those fancy medals from the Kennedy Center. He even ran for the highest office a couple of times himself (sample campaign lyric: “Your politics oughta be a groovier thing/ So get a good President who’s willing to swing”), announcing that he would make Malcolm X Attorney General. None of this prankishness or social acceptance blunted the edge of his music: he initiated, almost singlehandedly, what’s now called Afro-Cuban jazz, and as late as last year was still on the road, chops intact, wringing every note he could out of life.

He claimed he seldom listened to his records “because after you’ve played it, it’s all gone anyway.” When Dizzy laid it down, though, it changed tomorrow, and it will last forever. That’s bebop, and about that there is no question.