Honoring Dizzy: Tanglewood Jazz 2000
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Aug. 31, 2000) - When Tanglewood’s annual Jazz Weekend kicks off on Friday night, it will be with a concert honoring one of the single most influential jazz musicians of all time.

Dizzy Gillespie was a groundbreaking trumpeter, performer, entertainer, comic, singer, composer, bandleader and, with saxophonist Charlie Parker, one of the pioneers of modern jazz. In recognition of these and other accomplishments, a sextet of musicians who call themselves the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars will perform a program of Gillespie’s music in Ozawa Hall on Friday at 7:30 p.m.

“All of us playing with the group had experience playing with Dizzy, and he meant so much to us personally and musically,” said trumpeter Jon Faddis, the leader of the group, a one-time protégé of Gillespie, and to some, the likely heir to Gillespie’s chair as the leading jazz trumpeter of his time.

“The idea is to honor both his music and his person by continuing to play some of the tunes he liked to play,” said Faddis, who also leads the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, in a recent phone interview.

By his mid-teens, Faddis, who grew up in Oakland, had met Gillespie and sat in with his band at the famed Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. By age 20, Faddis was garnering favorable comparisons to Gillespie for his muscular, acrobatic trumpet style. Big-band leader Mel Lewis called Faddis “the greatest young trumpet player I’ve heard since Dizzy,” and Gillespie himself is quoted having called Faddis “the best ever - including me!” By the late-‘70s, Faddis was touring and recording with Gillespie, and in 1982 he joined Gillespie at a White House showcase of young jazz talent. In 1987, Faddis organized and rehearsed Gillespie’s big band in preparation for the bandleader’s 70th birthday international tour, and a few years later, he was named musical director of Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra.

Like Faddis, the other members of the Gillespie Alumni All-Stars have various connections to the jazz great known for his puffed-out cheeks, his stratospheric horn blasts, his upward-pointed instrument and his trademark numbers like “A Night in Tunisia” and “Salt Peanuts.” Saxophonist and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera found a sympathetic partner in Gillespie when he defected from his native Cuba in 1981. Gillespie had long been a champion of the Spanish tinge in jazz, and like D’Rivera, his penchant for Afro-Cuban textures and rhythms made him a kind of cross-cultural ambassador, as well as a pioneer of interest in so-called world music.

Trombonist Slide Hampton is one of the all-time greats on his instrument. A member of Faddis’s Carnegie Hall band, Hampton began playing with Gillespie in the 1950s, and shared directorship of Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra with D’Rivera. In 1990, Hampton collaborated with Gillespie as the arranger and conductor of Gillespie’s first original score for a feature film, “The Winter in Lisbon,” and in 1992, Hampton was musical director of Gillespie’s Diamond Jubilee, a yearlong series of celebrations honoring Gillespie on the occasion of his 75th birthday.

In 1962, after a stint with drummer Roy Haynes, pianist Kenny Barron was hired by Dizzy Gillespie, on recommendation of James Moody, to replace Lalo Schifrin. Remaining with Gillespie until 1966, Barron quickly gained fame as one of the best improvisers and composers. He went on to play with Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine, Milt Jackson and Stan Getz, and to gain fame as a leader of his own group.

Bassist John Lee and drummer Cecil Brooks III, who round out the Gillespie Alumni All-Stars, have also been associated with Gillespie. Lee joined Gillespie’s band in 1984 and performed with him through 1992. He now is the program director for “Dizzy: The Man and the Music,” the official clinic and concert program for colleges and universities celebrating Gillespie’s life and work.

Faddis said the task of the Alumni All-Stars is a delicate balancing act. “We don’t imitate the way he played,” he said. “We do some arrangements similar to what he did when he was playing, but to replicate and do it the same is very near impossible.

“We use his material as a source of inspiration and as a starting point for the group. I think one of the funny things is that people are starved for a good melody these days, and he had a lot of them.” Faddis said there are some misconceptions about Gillespie based on misunderstandings of his personality. He was a dedicated entertainer and wanted his audience to enjoy themselves, but at the same time he was a serious musician and thinker, and utterly professional.

“Some people think that he wasn’t serious about music, as serious as somebody like Miles Davis, because he liked to entertain,” said Faddis. “But he was brilliant in so many areas … whether it was politics or social things, definitely music. He had a wide range of interests and his knowledge was pretty phenomenal.”

Gillespie’s efforts to make his audiences feel comfortable didn’t come at the expense of either the music or the performance. In this he was influenced early on by his direct experience playing with Cab Calloway and Billy Eckstine.

“He really admired them, their sense of professionalism, everybody being on time,” said Faddis. “John Lee told me a story once that their plane was delayed, and they were supposed to do a concert with Cab Calloway, and Dizzy showed up late because the plane was late, and Cab just gave him one of those looks. I think Cab instilled that in him, and Dizzy instilled that in his musicians. It gets passed down from generation to generation. Dizzy would show up at least an hour and a half before the job.” Mostly though, Gillespie’s accomplishments were to expand the vocabulary of his instrument and of jazz itself.

“I think Charlie Parker was a big influence on Dizzy, but the contributions he made to the music were very important and are still being discovered today,” said Faddis. “His expansion of the language of the trumpet is one major thing he contributed, by taking Roy Eldridge’s style and making it his own and expanding that language. Dizzy was doing things on the trumpet that were impossible. But Dizzy never disparaged anyone who came before him. Dizzy sat down Roy Eldridge once and told him what he had done couldn’t be taken away from him.

“His melding of rhythms from different cultures along with jazz is also one of his most important contributions, and also I guess his sense of harmony. The things that he and Monk and Charlie Parker worked out, and Bud Powell and Oscar Pettiford, that became known as bebop, the harmonic contributions that Dizzy made to the music are very important, besides the brilliant cache of wonderful songs he wrote.”

For Faddis, personally, Gillespie was a crucial influence, both musically and personally. “He meant the world to me,” he said. “He was my hero growing up, and after I got to meet him and spend a lot of time with him, we became almost like father and son. He showed me music and the business aspect. Our relationship developed to the point where I was growing out of the son role and we became more like brothers and peers. He’d come and sit in with my band rather than me coming to sit in with him.”

Faddis remembers fondly those times when he had a few moments alone with Gillespie and the two would talk shop over a piano. “We would talk about different harmonic things,” he said. “We’d sit at the piano and he’d say check this out, over this chord you can play this idea or this scale. That was always fun. No matter how tired he was or anything like that, he always had time for music. And we talked about trumpet quite a bit. Rhythm -- that was one of his main loves, was rhythm. He loved rhythm, and what you could do with it as a player, what he wanted drummers and bass players to do.”

SIDEBAR:
Jazz Weekend at Tanglewood:

In addition to the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars on Friday, Sept. 1, at 7:30 p.m. in Ozawa Hall, there are three other shows in this year’s Labor Day Jazz Weekend at Tanglewood in Lenox.

On Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, the festival continues with performances by pop-jazz vocalists Tony Bennett and 1999 Grammy Award winner Diana Krall, who also plays piano. Bennett’s most recent recording was a Grammy-winning tribute to Duke Ellington, “Bennett Sings Ellington/Hot and Cool,” including versions of Ellington songs like “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “She’s Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” and “Caravan.” Krall’s most recent album, “When I Look in Your Eyes,” was a departure from the piano-trio settings of her earlier recordings; it featured string orchestrations by Johnny Mandel, of Frank Sinatra fame. On Sunday at 1:30 p.m. in Ozawa Hall, Boston-based vocalist Rebecca Parris makes her Tanglewood debut.

And on Sunday at 7:30 p.m., the curtain comes down on Tanglewood’s summer season with Dave Brubeck’s 80th Birthday Celebration, featuring the legendary pianist and his quartet, including bassist Alec Dankworth, saxophonist/flutist Bobby Militello, and drummer Randy Jones. Brubeck won a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys in 1996, the same year he was inducted into the International Jazz Hall of Fame.

Brubeck’s new album, “One Alone,” features solo piano renditions of standards including “Just Squeeze Me” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Other recent recordings include “Bach to Brubeck.” Brubeck is also the subject of a recent tribute disk, “In His Own Sweet Way,” produced by John Zorn, and featuring a bevy of downtown avant-garde musicians, including Anthony Coleman, Uri Caine, Erik Friedlander, Dave Douglas, Sex Mob, Joey Baron, David Krakauer, and Medeski, Martin and Wood, performing their version of Brubeck compositions.
For more information call 413-637-5165.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 31, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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