The History of Jazz (46 page)

In the Eckstine band, Stitt had worked with trumpeter Fats Navarro, a Florida native who was another up-and-coming master of the bop idiom. Navarro managed to incorporate the intricate improvisational lines of Gillespie into a more controlled style. His was a music of contradictions. His tone was sweeter and smoother than Gillespie’s—with greater use of the tongue in articulating notes, in contrast to Dizzy’s more slurred attack—but his overall style was still hot and swinging. Much of Navarro’s best work was as a sideman: with Bud Powell on “Wail,” on “The Squirrel” and “The Chase” with Tadd Dameron, alongside Benny Goodman on “Stealin’ Apples,” or on “Ornithology” with Charlie Parker. Discographers tell us that the latter performance was recorded at Birdland only a few days before Navarro died from tuberculosis in 1950 at age twenty-six—an assertion almost impossible to believe given the forcefulness and absolute command of Navarro’s playing. Under different circumstances, Navarro’s reputation might have matched Clifford Brown’s or even Miles Davis’s. Instead, he left behind just a handful of tracks that leave us musing over what this deeply gifted musician might have achieved with more time.

Navarro’s frequent employer, Tadd Dameron, was, for his part, an unlikely modern jazz player. Was Dameron a real bebopper? His compositions are often cited as model bop pieces—but many of the best known were written in the late 1930s before the new movement had crystallized. His early roots straddled musical idioms: as an arranger, he was equally comfortable working for swing bands such as Lunceford’s and Basie’s or writing for modern jazz ensembles led by Gillespie and Eckstine. Moreover, his approach to the piano had none of the telltale signs of bop: it lacked the insistent linear drive of a Bud Powell as well as the hypermodern harmonic sense of a Thelonious Monk. Instead, Dameron favored a more thoughtful approach, and even his improvisations have a tendency to sound like structured compositions—not surprising, perhaps, given his overriding interest in writing. Almost from the start of the bop movement, Dameron’s songs had been favored by the new generation of jazz players, with Sarah Vaughan recording “If You Could See Me Now” and Gillespie relying on “Hot House” (Dameron’s reworking of “What Is This Thing Called Love”) as a regular feature number. Many of his other pieces—“Good Bait,” “Our Delight,” and “Lady Bird”—have also become part of the standard jazz repertoire. By temperament, Dameron might have been inclined to focus on composing, but earning a livelihood in the jazz world in the mid-1940s was difficult without toiling nightly as a performer. Hence, Dameron increasingly gravitated toward the club scene. It was a fortuitous decision. A lengthy stint at the Royal Roost found Dameron fronting an outstanding house band, which also included Navarro and drummer Clarke. Later Dameron bands featured Clifford Brown and Miles Davis. By the mid-1950s, Dameron had become inactive, due partly to his reserved personality, but even more to a growing dependence on narcotics, a problem that eventually led to incarceration. Between his release in 1961 and his death in 1965, Dameron attempted to reenter the fray of the jazz world, but never with more than passing success.

But of all the modern jazz players who graced the New York scene at the time of Parker’s return, Gillespie still reigned as the only one who not only could approach Bird in terms of raw talent, but also possessed a charismatic stage presence that might bring the new modern sounds to a wider audience. Seizing the opportunity generated by his growing reputation, Gillespie formed a bebop big band in 1946. Larger ensembles would continue to fascinate Gillespie for the rest of his career, despite the economic challenge of maintaining a big band in the postwar years. Yet Gillespie never needed the larger unit—as, say, Ellington did—to define his musical aspirations. Gillespie invariably hired outsiders to write charts and organize the band; the trumpeter was content to front the group and play the role of star soloist. For his postwar band, the role of “musical director” fell to Gil Fuller, who had worked with Dizzy in the Eckstine ensemble. On charts such as “Things to Come,” “Manteca,” and “Ray’s Idea,” Fuller provided Gillespie with a suitably modernistic setting to showcase this doyen of the bebop movement.

Gillespie’s interest in Afro-Cuban music also continued to develop during this period. As early as 1938, Gillespie had spoken to Mario Bauzá about the potential for using a conga player in a jazz band. Some nine years passed before Gillespie, now fronting his own big band, was ready to make the move. Consulting again with Bauzá, Dizzy was introduced to Chano Pozo, an exciting conga player who spoke little English, read no music, but was a master of Cuban rhythms. Although their collaboration was short-lived—Pozo was killed in a Harlem altercation the following year—it set a precedent rich in implications for both Gillespie and the jazz world as a whole. True, there had been earlier attempts to fuse Latin music with jazz, but none had the symbolic impact of Gillespie’s appearance with Pozo on the stage of Carnegie Hall in September 1947.

Jelly Roll Morton is often seen as the originator of this fusion of styles—after all, he had suggested, in an often-quoted remark, that the “Spanish tinge” was the “right seasoning” for jazz, and backed up these words with his own artful compositions and performances (“The Crave,” “Mamanita,” “Creepy Feeling”)—but even earlier rag composers such as Scott Joplin had explored the habañera rhythm, which is the basis for the tango. This rhythm shows up in Joplin’s “Solace” and in the second theme of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” The popularization of dances such as the tango and, later, the rumba also furthered the acceptance of Latin music in the United States. Yet the missing ingredient, a distinctly Afro-Cuban perspective on jazz, did not appear in any meaningful degree until the 1940s, spurred then partly by the growing attention of jazz players to its potential, but even more by the influx of Cuban musicians into the New York music scene. Mario Bauzá left Cuba for New York in 1930 and, as we have seen, furthered Gillespie’s interest in this music during their joint tenure in the Cab Calloway band. The Cuban vocalist Machito followed, coming to New York in 1937, where in later years his band, the Afro-Cubans, made pioneering steps in fusing jazz harmonies with Cuban melodies and rhythmic patterns. Around this same time, Duke Ellington found some success with his recording of Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” but though this composition is now considered a milestone in the evolution of Latin jazz, most listeners at the time heard more of the Middle East than Tizol’s native Puerto Rico in the recording. Even a decade later, when Stan Kenton added Machito and two percussionists from the Afro-Cubans to his band for his 1947 hit recording of “The Peanut Vendor”—made a few weeks after Gillespie and Pozo’s Carnegie Hall concert—the mixture of Latin and jazz elements was still considered by big band fans as more a novelty than the sign of the emerging “salsa” style, which would eventually stand out as an important and vibrant musical idiom in its own right. In this context, Gillespie’s passionate advocacy of Afro-Cuban styles (or “Cubop” as his hybrid approach came to be known for a time) served as the key turning point, building on earlier forays and giving these new sounds a visibility that no doubt inspired other major jazz artists to explore the Afro-Cuban nexus.

The move from bebop to Cubop did not come easily. Although both Pozo and Gillespie could trace their cultural heritage back to overlapping African roots, the later evolution of their respective musical vocabularies had taken them to far different points. The clave rhythm, central to Cuban music, was antithetical to the more open pulse of modern jazz. And the song structures that permeated jazz felt equally constraining to Pozo, who preferred the freedom of the
montuno
vamps of his native music. Gillespie wanted to draw on Pozo’s instincts as a composer, but much of the burden fell on Dizzy and his collaborators Fuller and George Russell to transform Pozo’s simple constructs into full-fledged pieces. In the face of these conflicting traditions, a healthy dose of give-and-take proved essential. On “Manteca,” Gillespie contributed a contrasting theme to soften the insistence of Pozo’s main melody. On “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop,” Russell and Gillespie provided Pozo with an unstructured interlude to feature his playing in an open-ended solo. On other pieces the band vacillated between jazz and Cuban rhythms, unsure where to anchor their beat. Did these compromises work? George Russell’s description of the crowd’s reaction to the premiere of “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop” reflects the upside potential of this meeting of musical minds: “The audience was in a state of shock. They didn’t believe that an orchestra could really rise to that level of excitement and innovation.”
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But with Pozo, as with Parker, Gillespie was dealing with an unstable personality. “Chano was a hoodlum … a rough character,” bassist Al McKibbon explains. Gillespie in his autobiography describes him as a “roughneck.” Pozo carried a long knife with him wherever he went, as well as a bullet permanently lodged in his spine, a carryover from a disagreement over royalties. And like Parker, Pozo did not live to see his thirty-fifth birthday, his lifestyle on the edge eventually exacting its toll. Pozo was shot in a New York barroom in December 1948, only fourteen months after his triumphant Carnegie Hall debut with Dizzy Gillespie.

That same Carnegie Hall performance also featured a much-anticipated reunion of Gillespie with Charlie Parker. These encounters would be rare from now on—Parker was fronting his own group with Miles Davis on trumpet, while Gillespie was preoccupied with his larger band. Yet each of the recorded meetings between these two leading lights of modern jazz produced substantial music. At Carnegie Hall, Parker pushed the band relentlessly on “Dizzy Atmosphere,” letting loose with a virtuosic solo of the highest order. Who could follow such a solo? Perhaps only Gillespie. Spitting out scorching, jagged phrases, Gillespie played one of the strongest—and almost certainly the fastest—solos of his career. Again at the Clef record date in 1950 and at the Massey Hall concert in 1953, Parker and Gillespie would spur each other to create some of the most memorable performances of the bebop idiom.

For his day-to-day working band, Parker had enlisted a trumpeter who would eventually come to represent the opposite stylistic pole to Gillespie’s heated pyrotechnics. Miles Davis, the future leader of the cool movement, would seem an unlikely choice to share the front line with the firebrand altoist. Some have suggested this was only part of a long-standing pattern of Parker’s. Time and again his musical instincts led him to hire trumpeters who would counterbalance, rather than mimic, his high-powered improvisations. With Davis, with Chet Baker, with Kenny Dorham, with Red Rodney—Parker invariably reached for a more low-key and reflective melodic voice, a tonic to offset his acidic alto lines. But then again, this interpretation may be reading too much into Miles Davis, circa 1947. Davis, at that time, was still under Gillespie’s spell, struggling to fit his introverted temperament into the latter’s extroverted style. On fast numbers—hear his attempts to follow Parker on “Donna Lee”—Davis is anything but calm and collected. His phrasing is nervous, his articulation suspect. Yet Parker must have seen, if not the future birth of the cool, at least some diamond in the rough in this teenage acolyte, hints of greatness that the surviving recordings from that period do not show. After all, Bird, who could have his pick, more or less, of any trumpeter, opted for unknown and unheralded Miles Dewey Davis.

Davis, even then, was an enigma. Raised in an affluent environment in St. Louis, he exhibited a street-smart toughness that seemed more in tune with life on the wrong side of the tracks. Davis’s father was a successful dental surgeon with three degrees, who also owned a two-hundred-acre farm—as late as 1962, when Miles was earning a six-figure income, he could boast that his father was worth more than he was. His uncle was educated at Harvard and had studied in Germany. Yet this scion of a successful family came to be dubbed the “Prince of Darkness” by some—no carefree nickname, Fats or Sonny, for him—and the title matched the moods of this aloof man who associated with prizefighters, filled his autobiography with expletives, and left behind a litter of strained relationships. Contradictions run through his entire life story. A fierce critic of established hierarchies, Miles chose Juilliard for his musical education, the ultimate outsider opting for the insider’s path—then giving it all away to shadow Parker and the early boppers, again gravitating to the periphery. Once established as a mainstay of the bebop movement, he abandoned that course as well, espousing a radical new style, the cool as it came to be known— then again renouncing this new love to pursue other dalliances—with modal, impressionist, hard bop, and quasi-free styles, and ultimately a controversy-provoking leap into jazz-rock fusion. But most of all, the enigma comes in trying to reconcile the man and his music: one all hard surfaces, the other mostly smooth contours. There are no easy answers, or glib one-paragraph summaries, when one deals with Miles Davis.

Born in Alton, Illinois, on May 26, 1926, Davis moved with his family to East St. Louis when he was still an infant. His father, also named Miles—the trumpeter possessed the elegant formal name of Miles Dewey Davis III—set a tone for achievement that the son strived to match, in his own contrary way, for the rest of his life. The boy’s relationship with his mother Cleota Henry Davis was more complex. She viewed his musical pursuits with suspicion, and it wasn’t until he was an adult that Miles learned that she was an accomplished pianist. “She sat down one day and played some funky blues,” he remembered with astonishment.
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Davis’s parents eventually separated, with mother and son never fully coming to terms. When she died, Davis did not even attend her funeral. Yet her recordings of Tatum and Ellington introduced Miles to the music he would ultimately embrace. But when Cleota planned to give her son a violin for his thirteenth birthday, her husband stepped in to insist that the trumpet was a better choice. Under the tutelage of a local instructor, Miles made some progress, but developed more rapidly when he came under the sway of Elwood Buchanan, a jazz trumpeter who had recently been on the road with the Andy Kirk band. Buchanan directed Davis’s attention to jazz players such as Harold Baker and Bobby Hackett—unusual choices, outside of the Oliver-Armstrong-Eldridge orbit, but perhaps stimulating ones given Miles’s later gravitation toward the cool. By his midteens, other influences and techniques were being assimilated: through additional lessons with the first trumpeter in the St. Louis Symphony (“He said I was the worst trumpet player he ever heard in his life”), as well as through friends who shared his enthusiasm for jazz, such as pianist Duke Brooks and trumpeter Clark Terry, the latter also destined to become a major jazz artist.