In Memoriam 1992-1997/John Birks “Dizzy" Gillespie

JOHN BIRKS “DIZZY” GILLESPIE

1917—1993

We share your great sorrow at the passing of dearly loved, highly cherished John Birks Gillespie whose steadfastness in the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh and constant promotion of its teachings added a luminous quality and enviable dimension to the far—reaching influence of his distinguished life. Our grateful memory of his Bahá’í services is ineradicable. We ardently pray at the Holy Threshold for the progress of his radiant soul throughout the divine worlds. Kindly convey our loving sympathy to his dear wife Lorraine.

Universal House of Justice January 7, 1993

musician sits on an airplane en route

to Australia. In the seat beside him is a woman, a singer. They know each other; they have performed together. During the flight the man takes his prayer book and hands it to the woman. “I want you to have this,” he says. We don’t know what inspired him to seize that particular moment, and we don’t know the conversation that led to the offer. The woman said, “If you give me your prayer book, how are you going to pray?”

When the man said that he knew the prayers by heart, she was incredulous, opened the book, and tested him. When he recited the prayer, she quizzed him again. “What religion is this?” she asked, and he began to explain.

The story is told by Flora Purim,22 the well—known Brazilian jazz vocalist who later accepted the gift of the Faith of the man sitting next to her, Dizzy Gillespie, the man who had said, “I want you to have this.”

Pick up most any book about the history of American music or about the evolution of jazz, and you will find mention of Dizzy Gillespie, trumpeter, composer, and cofounder with Charlie “Bird” Parker of bebop, a movement that changed the course of music history. The magnitude of his influence and contributions were well recognized during his lifetime. In 1960 Dizzy was elected by Dawn Beat magazine’s readership to the Jazz Hall of Fame. He performed at the White House on at least three occasions, including a televised appearance in 1978, during which he sang his composition “Salt Peanuts” with President Jimmy Carter. He was also a Grammy Award winner in 1975 and 1980.

But in no year was he honored as much as in 1989, when he seemed to be hitting his prime at the age of seventy—two. In that year he gave three hundred performances in twenty—seven countries and a hundred US cities. While in Nigeria he was installed as an honorary chief, “Baashere ofVIperu”—an honor for which he was particularly proud. In that year President George Bush Sr. presented him with the National Medal of the Arts, and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) gave him the Duke Award “for fifty years of achievement.” The French gave him

22 Beatrice Richardson, Jazz Review interview with

Flora Purim—Queen of Brazilian jazz.

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jabn Bir/ex "Dizzy” Gillexpie

its highest tribute to an artist—the medal of the Commandeur dam [’Om’re desAm er 61,65 Lettm. In 1989 Dizzy received his fourteenth honorary doctoral degree and was granted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Other years were not without their kudos. The following year, for example, Dizzy received the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Honor, described as America’s “quintessential reward for a lifetime’s endeavor.”

But Dizzy’s greatest honor was that of being enabled in 1968 to recognize the Manifestation of God for this day. Alyn Shipton, author of Groovin’Hz'g/J: 7778 Life of Dizzy Gillespie, writes:

He had reached his lowest point at the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, which happened on a day when, as luck would have it, Dizzy was back in South Carolina, revisiting Cheraw and Laurinburg, with all their associative memories of segregation and the old South. His reaction to the news was to get spectacularly inebriated.

Two years earlier during the summer of 1966 Beth McKenty had introduced him to the Bahá’í Faith. Beth recalls:

While living in Milwaukee, one day I went into a bookstore where a book about Charlie Parker caught my eye. Although uninformed about jazz at that time, I found something appealing about the book and read it almost in one sitting. At the end, I thought, “What a pity Charlie Parker didn’t meet a Bahá’í!” It seemed to me his search was a spiritual one, and his life would have been very different, had he met the Faith.

Toward the end of the book, I read Charlie Parker’s words, “Dizzy Gillespie is the other half of my heartbeat!” When I read that, I wondered if it would someday be possible to bring the Bahá’í Faith to the attention of Dizzy Gillespie.

It was only a few months later that a notice appeared in the Milwaukee journal, announcing a one—week visit by Dizzy Gillespie and his group. After calling many hotels, the one where he was staying was located, and I asked to speak to him. He later told me that he never answered the phone directly while out on the road. But that day he happened to.

After telling him how much the book about Charlie Parker had moved me, and my thought that there is a Faith in the world that could have helped him, I explained that my husband and I were Bahá’ís and asked if he would consider coming to our home for dinner and letting us tell him briefly about

[Page 38]38 it. Uncertain whether he would hear me out, I blurted all of this hurriedly. Then there was such a long silence, I thought he had hung up.

At last he said, “I’ve learned out on the road not to trust man, woman, Child, or beast.”

Assuring him that that was certainly understandable, I asked if my husband, Dr. Jack McKenty, and I attended the Club and if Jack sent up his business card, could we meet? “If you look at us and don’t wish to come to our table, it’s all right,” I assured him.

He said, “Of course,” and hung up.

Jack was a surgeon and came home after a long day, a little late, but two other Bahá’í friends dropped in, and all four of us went to the club. We were able to get a table at the edge of the stage and the music started at 9:00 PM. When Dizzy Gillespie came out, Jack sent up his card and received an answering nod.

The music was wonderful! In between sets, Mr. Gillespie sat at many of the tables around us. By 1:30 AM, when he had not yet joined our table, I suggested that we leave. Jack said, “Are you crazy! We’ve been here all this time. I’m going to stay until the very last note!

Then Dizzy came to the microphone and said, “I had a great drummer by the name of Chano Pozo. I’m now going to play a piece by him, ‘Tin Tin Deo,’ and I’m dedicating it to two new friends, Jack and Beth McKenty.” At the end of the set, he came and joined us.

We learned that he was an ardent World Federalist, that he had toured Greece for the US State Department, and that his interests were broad. We went out for Chinese food and visited a long time. From the beginning, he was interested in what we said about the Bahá’í Faith. He later came to out home for dinner and accepted a prayer book and The Hidden Words.

That first night in Milwaukee, he told us, “So many of my friends have already died, I’ve always thought I’ll be dead by fifty.” He was then forty—eight, and was fifty when he declared himself a Bahá’í.

Shipton adds, “Within a year or so . . . Dizzy forsook drink for good. It was just one of his undertakings when he decided to become a Bahá’í" In his autobiography, 7?) Be or Not to Bop (1989), Dizzy explains:

Becoming a Bahá’í Changed my life in every way and gave me a new concept of the relationship between God and man—between man and his fellow man—man and his family. I became more spiritually aware, and when you’re spiritually aware, that will be reflected in what you do.

John Birks Gillespie was born on October 21, 1917, in Cheraw, South Carolina, the youngest of nine children born to James and Lottie Gillespie. His father, a bricklayer and part—time pianist, died when Gillespie was ten but not before he had instilled in his son a love for music, especially jazz. By age fifteen young Gillespie, an admirer of trumpeter Roy Eldridge, then a mainstay with the Teddy Hill band, had taught himself the rudiments of that instrument. He later replaced Eldridge in the Teddy Hill band.

Dizzy joined the Cab Calloway orchestra in 1939. His introduction to Calloway was provided by Lorraine Willis, a dancer at New York’s Apollo Theatre. She and Gillespie were married on December 9, 1940. That same year, while touring with the Calloway orchestra in Kansas City,

[Page 39]IN MEMORIAM 1992—1997 39

Gillespie met and became friends with a man whose musical genius would soon coalesce with his own to Change forever the way in which jazz was played: the saxophonist Charlie Parker, also known as “Yardbird” or simply “Bird.”

The bebop revolution, beginning in the early 19405, did not come easy. The music was not danceable, and some were offended by what they heard. Finding it too assertive, early club performances were described as an exchange of hostilities between the musicians and the audience. Jazz writer and biographer Stuart Nicholson wrote of it, “Bop knocked listeners out of their diatonic comfort zones. It demanded the active participation of its audience, which had to listen to understand what was going on. Jazz was consciously moving out of the realm of popular entertainment and demanding acceptance as a true art form in its own right.”23 It was the music’s first avant—garde movement, and it transported jazz from its deep—seated Dixieland roots into the modern era of multilayered and multifaceted harmonies, rhythms, and improvisations. “Bebop changed the whole lyrical emphasis of jazz,” the noted critic Ira Gitler later wrote. “It not only broke new ground harmonically, but it broke new ground rhythmically.”

By the mid—194os Gillespie, Parker, and a handful of other young innovators had virtually rewritten the canon ofjazz, adding to the traditional melodies and harmonies of the swing era the more cerebral and deeply layered mode of bebop expression. They had garnered a devoted following, and the influence of bebop was spreading. It was also having an effect on the spoken word performances of heat generation poets, and Dizzy’s beret, horn—rimmed glasses,

23 Stuart Nicholson, Ella Fitzgerald A Biography of the First Lady ofjazz, Da Capo Press, 1993, p. 97.

and goatee were widely adopted as popular dress icons of the beat uniform.

Were it not for Dizzy’s talent for teaching, who knows what would have happened to bebop and the history ofjazz. Nicholson noted, “But it was not just trumpet players who came under Gillespie’s spell; his ideas, so fresh and dramatic in the 19405, could be heard in the work of countless saxophonists, pianists, and guitarists.” An ideal front man for the music, “he would quietly explain the theory behind what he was doing to anyone who would listen, often demonstrating at a piano keyboard how the extended melodies affected his note choices.”24

Gillespie and Parker were the new music’s leading exponents, and Gillespie, besides earning a well—deserved reputation as a trumpeter without peer, made a further mark as a composer with such enduring jazz standards as “A Night in Tunisia,” “Groovin’ High," “Manteca,” “Woody ‘11 You,” “Con Alma,” “Salt Peanuts,” and “Birks’ Works.” Gillespie and Parker played for Earl “Fatha” Hine’s band. When Billy Eckstine left Hines to form his own orchestra, Dizzy and Bird and Sarah Vaughn followed. Dizzy became the orchestra’s music director.

Dizzy’s thirst for innovation did not end with bebop. Drawn to the infectious rhythms of the music of Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, he incorporated them into his own idiom to create a new and popular genre known as AfroCuban jazz. In 1947 he premiered at New York City’s Carnegie Hall an extended work, “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop,” and he is credited with recording, in the early 19505, the first album of Brazilian bossa nova music in the United States.

24 Ibid., p. 95.

[Page 40]40 THE BAHA’I’ WORLD

In 1953 so the story goes, someone accidentally stepped on Gillespie’s trumpet during a concert, bending the horn upward at a forty—five degree angle. When he tried playing the misshapen instrument, Gillespie found that he could actually hear the sound more clearly, so he left it that way. Along with his enormously bulging cheeks, the upturned horn became his signature. In 1955—56 Gillespie toured the Middle East, Asia, and South America on behalfof the US State Department, leading the “World Statesman” band as a musical “goodwill ambassador,” a role he continued to play in concerts around the world for more than three decades until illness forced him to discontinue his schedule in 1992.

For Dizzy, music and the practice of religion were one. Noted jazz journalist

Nat Hentoff recalls:

A member of the serene Bahá’í faith, Dizzy once told me that his religion taught him “eventually, mankind will become unified, when there is world government and everybody belongs to it, and you don’t need a passport. There’ll be an international language taught in all schools. This should take another thousand or two thousand years. But on the way, we get little pinches of unification. Like the United Nations.”

“And jazz?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “'Ihat really is a pinch of unification. It really makes me feel good to belong to jazz, to that part of society.”25

Dizzy promoted pinches of unification and in 1988 established his last big band, the United Nations Orchestra. Dizzy said, “The Bahá’ís believe in unity, but unity with diversity, to make it prettier . . . You

25 “Final Chorus,” Nat Hentoff} jazznrm)‘, online.

always think about what you can do to make it prettier.” The United Nations Orchestra brought together some of the best jazz musicians from the United States and Latin America, at least three ofwhom were Bahá’í whose Faith was strengthened by their association with Gillespie.

His last scheduled appearance was to be a seventy—fifth birthday tribute at Carnegie Hall, held in conjunction with the 1992 Bahá’í World Congress. He was too ill to attend the November event, and the other featured performers—James Moody, Paquito D’Rivera, and Jon Faddis—paid tributes to his musicianship and to his spiritual legacy as a Bahá’í.

John Birks Gillespie died ofpancreatic cancer on January 6, 1993, at Englewood Hospital in Englewood, New Jersey. A private Bahá’í service was held as well as a public funeral in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City—an all—star memorial performance attended by eight— to ten—thousand mourners. Dizzy is buried in Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York.

Although he will be remembered as one of the most gifted and influential jazz musicians of the century, Gillespie Closed his autobiography with the following self—assessment: “I would like to be remembered as a humanitarian, because it must be something besides music that has kept me here when all of my colleagues are dead. Maybe my role in music is just a stepping stone to a higher role. The highest role is the role in the service of humanity, and ifI can make that, then I’ll be happy. When I breathe the last time, it’ll be a happy breath.”

Adapted in part from an article

5y jack Bowers and information provided by Beth McKenty