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.