Dizzy Gillespie Memories

Dizzy Gillespie, artist Marc Klionksy, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

Today is the great jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s birthday. Some years ago, I wrote a young adult biography about him (Chelsea House Publishers, out of print), met and chatted with him, and attended one of his final performances at the Blue Note in New York. But we’d crossed paths before. In college, he stopped by to offer a week of master classes, and though I’m not a musician, I sat in for one of his sessions. A long time ago, but my lasting impression is of a scholarly gentleman, with the battered lip all trumpeters have, somewhat wearily but gamely nudging us teenagers to hear better, to dare more, and to recognize the higher calling that improvised music affords.

A couple years later, visiting New York with my girlfriend Maura, we went to a Gillespie performance at the Bottom Line. Across from us at one of the club’s long tables near the stage, our knees nearly touching, sat an unmistakable Joni Mitchell and a man in a business suit that I guessed was her friend and agent David Geffen. We nodded to them but didn’t ask for autographs or selfies. We were learning, even before moving to the city, not to bother the celebrities who abound there. Anyway, the band began to play, fast and furious, Gillespie in peak form, pacing the stage, lifting that bent horn of his to pierce and direct the Latin-influenced poly-rhythms he’d brought to jazz. And then, mid-tune, Mitchell pushed her chair back, stood up, and began to sing some ululating scat yodels, her eyes closed, angelic face lifted to the heavens. At that time, she was deep into jazz. Maura, who had all of her albums, had been frowning over her odd, new jazz-influenced double lp Don Juan’s Restless Daughter (with that controversial cover of Mitchell in black face).

Who knows if Gillespie recognized her or not, but he was not amused by her musical intrusion. Looming above us, he lowered his trumpet, shot her a glare that looked like disgust to me, and stomped back to the other side of the stage, blasting loud triplets that drowned out her voice. She seemed stunned, like she’d been slapped, shrank back into her chair and buried her head in Geffen’s chest. I felt bad for her, tried not to glance over the rest of the show, and ever since I’ve wondered what happened there. Surely, she’d hoped he’d appreciate her contribution. After all, she was a mega-pop star at the peak of her fame. But there’s pop and there’s jazz. And always weirdos in an audience who can disrupt the work. I’ve always thought that Gillespie knew who she was and laid down a marker, pointedly saying respect your boundaries. But like I said, who knows?

When I chatted with Gillespie at the Blue Note, fifteen years later, I thought about that night but didn’t bring it up. No way he’d have remembered that fly speck of time in his storied career. I’d completed my book, had not even considered trying to interview him while writing it, but wanted to give him a copy. Club management comped my front row table, invited me upstairs during intermission, and I climbed the narrow stairs to a cramped room where the great man sat surrounded by his bandmates. Gillespie looked tired, and though I didn’t know it then, he was not well. He would pass the next year. And here I was intruding on his few moments of rest between sets. He accepted the book, examined the painted portrait on its cover (drawn from a famous photograph of a young Gillespie in beret, head cocked, embracing his trumpet), looked skeptically at me and shrugged. I don’t remember anything we said. It wasn’t a lot. I probably blathered about how youngsters would learn about him blah blah. It dawned on me as I descended the stairs that he may have seen the book as one more writer and publisher making money from his name, nothing coming back to him, same old story. But I don’t know. And I’m glad, whatever the case, that I was able to give him the book.

The band came back down to the little stage and jammed hard. Gillespie’s protégé Jon Faddis hit the high notes, Gillespie nodding beside him, proud, listening, adding toots like sprinkled spices into the mix. And then he held up his hand, the band stopped on a dime, and he pointed his trumpet over to the bar near the front door. There stood another champion, also a child of the cotton fields of South Carolina who had fought his way to worldwide fame with sheer talent and pluck. Gillespie said, “Oh my. Joe Frazier is here. That’s a motherfucker!” Frazier, one of the coolest looking cats I’ve ever run across in his sharp three-piece brown suit, leaned an elbow on the bar. He lifted his bourbon tumbler towards the stage, Gillespie shook his head so hard that his famously floppy jowls shook, and the drummer kicked into a new one.

The Gillespie biography is my only book that has won any prize, the New York Public Library’s Best Young Adult Non-Fiction award. The night of the ceremony the city was blizzarding. I disappointed my editor by failing to dare the walk to the subway uptown, but it was a mess out there, man. Gillespie died a few days later of pancreatic cancer, age 75. Music from that final month-long stand at the Blue Note has been released in a three-lp set titled Triple Play. As Gillespie said of Frazier, it’s a motherfucker. I’d also recommend to you his fascinating autobiography, To Be or Not to Bop, from which much of my book was lifted.