Our Friend Dizzy

As I write this, Dizzy Gillespie has been dead a few hours and KLON-FM is playing his recordings one after another. I’m sipping a red wine as close as I could find to the one he and I drank a lot of on a fall afternoon of listening and laughter in 1962 in his hotel room in Cleveland. I’m trying to summon the feelings of desolation and loss requisite when a friend and idol dies. 

But there’s so much joy in his music, so much of his irrepressible spirit, so much of his foxy wisdom and humor, that John Birks Gillespie won’t allow me to sustain grief for more than a few seconds. At the other end of the phone line, up in Ojai, Gene Lees tells me that after someone called with the news, he stopped working, couldn’t write; a man who’s written yards about Birks, who wrote a book called Waiting For Dizzy. 

I stare out into the rain, thinking about the next to last time I saw Diz in Los Angeles, backstage at the Universal Amphitheater following a middling concert by his quintet He was standing against a wall, relaxed, leaning on a broomstick loosely covered with bottlecaps, his famous rhythmstick. He shrugged and grinned. The shrug and the grin said, “What the hell, you can’t win ’em all.”

I think about the day I was walking down Broadway in New York and heard his unmistakable voice from the midst of the traffic roar. A car pulled up to the curb. Dizzy got out, bowed low and said, “Get in, please, you’re coming with us.” And we spent a crazy hour touring midtown Manhattan while Birks entertained everyone in and within hearing distance of the car with his descriptions of people, buildings and city life. Over the years, I had a least a dozen such experiences with Dizzy, and each of them had the warmth, spontaneity and unpredictability of his music. Multiply that by the hundreds, probably thousands, of people he treated with the same generosity and affection, and you begin to comprehend the dimesions of love and pleasure he created not only with his music but his being. 

The last time I saw him in L.A., at the Greek Theater, he had just led his big band through two hours of perfection. There were moments that night when his trumpet had the glory, the impossible virtuosity, of the strongest performances of his youth. This time backstage there was a bear hug and a little dance and he said, “Rams, you dog, if I’d known you were out there, I’d have tried to play something.” 

Daz McSkiven Voutzoroony, Slim Gaillard called him. Young trumpet players called him God. “It’s all in Arbans,” all in the famous trumpet exercise book, he used to say when he was asked about his technique. Right. And everything William Faulkner needed was in Webster’s dictionary. Birks and Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Oscar Pettiford, and a few others transformed jazz in the 1940s and the power of their transformation influenced American music in all of its aspects, from pop hits and supermarket Muzak to the tonal values and breathing habits of symphony trumpet sections. Gillespie’s mastery of rhythm has been an inspiration to players of every instrument, including drums. Show me a jazz drummer born after 1920 who doesn’t worship Diz and I’ll leave you to listen to some mediocre drumming. 

Driving home through the storm tonight, I played a new compact disc by a group of musicians including the young trumpeter Tom Williams. As Williams blew phrases Clifford Brown developed after hearing Fats Navarro, who learned from Dizzy, who studied Roy Eldridge, Louis Armstrong’s great successor, I reflected on the “end of an era” clichés we hear when a great person dies. The end of an era, possibly. But not the end of a tradition. Thanks, Birks. See you in the land of Oobladee.