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And the horn. It was as much a trademark as Armstrong's handkerchief. Story goes that in 1953, Dizzy returned to a recording session and found that his trumpet had been sat upon, or fallen upon, or in some way molested. It was bent into a near-perfect 45 degrees angle. He played it anyway and liked what he heard; he used to say he could hear himself better. And that was pretty much the way he was heard, too, from then on.
The horn was no more a stunt than all his roguish jokiness though. The music flowed from a kind of high spirit, a purposeful passion that the horn symbolized and the silliness deflected. There was nothing slight or offhand about the way he played, or how he lived. Born in South Carolina in 1917, he began to teach himself trombone and trumpet two years after his father -- a bricklayer by trade and a weekend bandleader by calling -- had passed on; before he left his teens he was playing professionally with the Frankie Fairfax band and had got himself his nickname.
It was in those years too that he met the dancer Lorraine Willis, to whom he * would be married ever after. He steered wide of the sundry social temptations of the musical life and, in 1968, became a member of the Baha'i faith. Personally, Dizzy was on the square and strictly legit; he fronted the first jazz band ever sent on a subsidized tour by the State Department, referred to President Dwight Eisenhower as "Pops," got Jimmy Carter to sing Salt Peanuts at the White House and copped one of those fancy medals from the Kennedy Center. He even ran for the highest office a couple of times himself (sample campaign lyric: "Your politics oughta be a groovier thing/ So get a good President who's willing to swing"), announcing that he would make Malcolm X Attorney General. None of this prankishness or social acceptance blunted the edge of his music: he initiated, almost singlehandedly, what's now called Afro-Cuban jazz, and as late as last year was still on the road, chops intact, wringing every note he could out of life.
He claimed he seldom listened to his records "because after you've played it, it's all gone anyway." When Dizzy laid it down, though, it changed tomorrow, and it will last forever. That's bebop, and about that there is no question.