Jazzscript.co.uk - extracts from Giant Steps by Kenny Mathieson

... from the chapter on Dizzy Gillespie, recounting Dizzy's first meetings with Charlie Parker :-

The two men first met in Parker's hometown of Kansas City in 1940, while the trumpeter was on the road with the Calloway band. Parker had been developing his own version of the music, both in Kansas and in New York, as his recordings with Jay McShann demonstrate. Their historic collaborations still lay ahead of them at this point, however, and following his split with Calloway, Dizzy worked briefly with a number of leaders, including Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Les Hite, and, very briefly and tantalisingly, Duke Ellington. His solo on Lucky Millinder's Little John Special in 1942 has some claim on being the first fully formed bop solo on record, and contained what would become the famous Salt Peanuts riff, although Gunther Schuller has argued in his monumental study The Swing Era that the figure had already surfaced on a recording of Sweet Georgia Brown by the John Kirby Sextet in 1939, a reminder of the informal nature - or at least origin - of many bop compositions.

An important association in this period arrived with Gillespie's tenure in the big band led by Earl Hines, which the trumpet joined in late 1942. By all accounts, the pianist's band was a strange amalgam of players firmly rooted in the swing style, and the emerging beboppers. Gunther Schuller has worked out that in March and April of 1943, the band briefly included Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Wardell Gray, Bennie Green, Bennie Harris, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine, from the evolving modernist camp. Dizzy recalled that Earl "had a lot of young guys who all wanted to lay in the modern style", and described the unit as a "a beautiful, beautiful band". He admired (and learned from) Hines's class and professionalism, and it was at this time when he began to form a close relationship with Parker, who had also been recruited to play tenor in the band - Diz claims each was lured into the band by being told the other was planning to join up.

"I guess Charlie Parker and I had a meeting of the minds, because both of us inspired each other. There were so many things that Charlie Parker did well, it's
hard to say exactly how he influenced me. I know he had nothing to do with my playing the trumpet, and I think I was a little more advanced, harmonically, than he was. But rhythmically he was quite advanced, with setting up the phrase and how you got from one note to the other. How you get from one note to the other really makes the difference. Charlie Parker heard rhythm and rhythmic patterns differently, and after we had started playing, together, I began to play, rhythmically, more like him. In that sense he influenced me, and all of us, because what makes the style is not what you play but how you play it."

Too much has been made at times of that implied distinction between the two men's harmonic and rhythmic capabilities. What was true in 1942 was a very different case by the time they made their celebrated small-group recordings in 1945, when any such distinction was already all but indiscernible. Dizzy's harmonic understanding may indeed have been more firmly grounded in theory, and Bird's rhythmic sense a shad more finely graded, but by the time the fledgling bebop had matured in the middle of the decade, the differences were too minimal even to measure. Nonetheless, many musicians felt - and still feel - that Gillespie was the principal harmonic theorist behind the new music. Monks harmonic developments were highly advanced and far-reaching, but Dizzy's were more widely accessible to players coming into the music and less strongly marked with the idiosyncratic personal stamp of Monk's ideas; in addition, Dizzy's outgoing personally made him more approachable as a source of wisdom than the forbiddingly strange pianist.

The trumpeter clearly saw his function as an informal teacher as an important one, and his mastery of the piano was a crucial element in that process. He recalls that musicians like Miles Davis would ask him where he found the notes and harmonic ideas he utilised. The answer was from the piano.

"That's your ass if you don't play piano, you can't find them. You might luck on them sometimes, but if you know the piano, you'll know where they are all the time. You might get lucky and find one every now and then just from playing your own instrument, but if you know the piano, you'll know where they are all the time. You can see them."

... from the chapter on Charlie Parker, recounting the young Charlie Parker's time in Kansas City :-

Charles Parker, Jr was born in Kansas City on 29th August 1920, on the Kansas side of the Kaw River which divides that state's portion of the city from the Missouri one. By the time he began to develop a serious interest in music, the Missouri side of the city (where the family now lived) was reaching its peak as one of the crucial musical centres of jazz history. The town was efficiently run by the notorious Tom Pendergast, and the wholesale corruption of his regime had encouraged a thriving hotbed of rackets - gambling, prostitution, extortion, narcotics, - all carried on largely untroubled by the police, who kept out of the way other than to collect their payoffs. As in other cities, the gangster-run clubs provided a dubious working environment for musicians, but the dingy drinking dens which sprang up around the city's Twelfth Street also provided the well-springs of the Kansas City sound. The legendary jazz sessions would carry on through the night, and occasionally round the clock. Clubs like the Harlem, the Hey-Hey and the Reno attracted the best musicians of the day, who either took up residence in KC - the New Jersey-born Count Basie ran the city's number one band - or sat in on the jam sessions when passing through on road tours with nationally known outfits like the Duke Ellington or Cab Colloway Orchestra.

According to Russell, and the testimony of Bird's friends at the time, as a teenager Parker ingratiated himself with local musicians and they would sneak him into the quiet balcony above the stage at the Reno. There, he would absorb hour after hour of music, and try to apply the sounds he heard to his own battered alto, bought by his hard working, doting mother and barely playable. Instruments did not seem to matter much to Bird - he got his first decent instrument, a brand new Selmer, with the insurance payoff following a car accident on the way to a gig in 1936 - but a good Horn was useful for its pawn value as much as its sound. Since he replicated his distinctive sonority on a whole succession of borrowed instruments over the years, and played a plastic alto from England for a time in the 1950's with equally positive results, it is reasonable to assume that he regarded tone production as a function of the player rather than the horn.

Like the later sessions at Minton's and Monroe's, the Kansas City jam sessions were merciless affairs for anyone who did not have their chops and their musical ideas together. As a tyro musician Parker endured some famous humiliations, firstly attempting some double-time passage on Body and Soul with some of his piers at the Hi-Hat, and subsequently in an even more humiliating breakdown at the Reno, when he was 'gonged-off' by an irate Jo Jones, the great drummer of the Basie band. The flying cymbal provided a tiresomely repeated leitmotif in Clint Eastwood's well-intentioned film of Parker's life, Bird (1988), but it also provided the stimulus for further advancement in the altoist's playing.

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