''This
is not a party,'' Jon Faddis was saying. ''We got a
lot of work to do.'' True enough, the hangers-on in the Wild Bill
Moore Memorial Rehearsal Room at Musicians Local 47, in the Heart of
Hollywood, were getting on the verge of being raucous.
Clifford Jordan, the tenor saxophonist, was curled up
on a banquette in the corner, catching some Zs, recovering from his
opening the night before at Marla's Memory Lane with flugel eagle
Johnny Coles.
Clora Bryant, the trumpetiste, was adriotly perched
under her dashing straw hat on the top of a desk with her red slippers
jiggling over the edge, talking to her two grown sons, who were
standing around looking like they wished they were in the gym.
Terry Gibbs, the vibraharpist, who lives in the
Valley, was rapping with neighbor Frankie Capp, the drummer, and Bill
D'Arango, a former Charlie Parker bandmate who's getting back into the
jazz guitar game after moving here from Cleveland. D'Arango had just
opened at the Comeback Inn in Venice.
Sitting on wooden chairs against the walls, or
walking around, were three or four folks with still cameras, a couple
of writers, a half-dozen unidentifieds, and a couple of people from
Playboy,
The latter had brought in the press to witness a
rehearsal of the big band Dizzy Gillespie will lead in his Sunday
night appearance at the Playboy Festival on June 19, 1988.
This
was John Birks Gillespie's 70th birthday year, and
his 55th year in show business, which might account for the way
Faddis, one of Dizzy's best known proteges, raised his eyebrows at
himself when he said it wasn't a party.
Because it was a party. You only had to look at Clora,
whose very costume said ''Right on!'' to know that. If you've heard
her with Jeannie and Jimmy Cheatham's Sweet Baby Blues band, you know
she's a great player in the tradition of Roy Eldridge, who was Dizzy's
idol.
And she has been one of Gillespie's most devoted fans
every since she heard a recording of ''Things to Come,'' a mindblowing
Gil Fuller chart from Dizzy's beloved big band of the late 1940s.
She gives Dizzy a warm hug when he arrives, wearing
red white and blue plaid trousers, a scarlet T-shirt, and high top
shoes. And things really begin to pop as he takes over from Faddis.
Now, ''Things to Come'' might be described as
pandemonium on the Concorde, a pell mell excursion full of snarling
dissonances and fiendishly difficult high-velocity passages for the
trumpet section.
Emboldened
by his triumphs on 52nd Street
in the Apple, the young Gillespie commissioned it for a band he put
together that had people in it like Ray Brown, the bassist, John
Lewis, the pianist, Kenny Clarke the drummer, John Coltrane, James
Moody, Billy Mitchell, Yusef Lateef and Cecil Payne, the saxophonists.
Lee Morgan and Benny Bailey played trumpet, and J.J. Johnson worked on
trombone. Dizzy fired Thelonious Monk!
But the personnel changed continually, the tours were
brutal and although they were hell on Latin throbbers like
''Manteca,'' or rotgut blues like ''Emanon,'' some purists felt
Dizzy's boys could never really nail ''Things to Come.'' ''It sounded
a little raw,'' Terry Gibbs remembers.
Today should be different. A who's who of Los Angeles'
jazz finest is working over these numbers, as well as Dizzy's own
''Night in Tunisia,'' and Monk's ''Round Midnight.''
In the trumpet section are ''Mr. Lead Trumpet,''
Snooky Young, and Conte Candoli, the first a veteran of Jimmy
Lunceford and Count Basie, and the second an alumnus of Woody Herman
and Stan Kenton. Plus Oscar Brashear, who works with Gerald Wilson and
is a renowned soloist and Faddis, who sounds uncannily like Dizzy did
in the 1940s, and plays lead with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra
in New York.
Brashear, Faddis, Young and
Candoli at work.
''They
got some beautiful musicians out here in California,''
as Dizzy puts it, also meaning Teddy Edwards, an old Central
Avenue man on tenor, who's sitting with Jerome Richardson, Sam Rivers,
Jack Kelso, and Jack Nimitz in the sax section a few feet from Dizzy's
chair.
Behind them are Jimmy Cleveland, Charlie Loper, and
Garnett Brown on trombones with Mike Daigeau on tuba, masters all, and
the great Gerald Wiggins is seated far away from the bandstand at the
pipsy little upright piano with his glasses on his head, reading a
paperback during the long waits.
In his unmistakable croak, Dizzy scat sings the tricky
parts in ''Round Midnight'' for the reed section, switching his
70-year-old hips to bring out the two distinct rhythms superimposed in
one passage. In another, he shows the hornmen how to add more oomph by
stressing certain accents.
''This is the way I stomp off,'' he says, stamping
his heel on the floor once and whirling about to face them. It's not
one, two, one two three four, like they might expect.
''I start on four,'' he says, grinning
wickedly. A surprise attack! One beat and they're off.
It
must have been like that in the old days, when Dizzy
and his wife Lorraine, to whom he is still married, lived in Manhattan
at a legendary apartment on Seventh Avenue.
''Dizzy was sort of like a school,'' tenor man Budd
Johnson told Ira Gitler. ''All the musicians used to come up there,
and he used to sit down at the piano and of course he was playing the
modern changes.''
Charlie Parker used to arrive before breakfast, Trummy
Young added, and because he couldn't write music, he'd want Dizzy to
write down his ideas. But Lorraine wouldn't let him in. So he'd play
his stuff in the hall and Dizzy would sit at the piano inside and
transcribe it.
Today, Dizzy sticks close to his chair, slipping out
of the room every once in a while to smoke a cigar. He's been playing
all week at Catalina's, and his rhythm section is at stage right,
Ignacio Berroa behind the drums, John Lee on electric bass, and Ed
Cherry on guitar. Sitting in is the venerable Victor Pantoja on
congas, another instrument on which Gillespie is at home.
Ignacio is a suave powerhouse who likes to play with
the heavy end of the stick and wash the assembled masters with silvery
cymbal splashes. The hours of work on individual sections pass quickly
and for a finale they roll through all of the numbers they'll be
playing at the festival, saving ''Things to Come,'' the big one, for
last.
Dizzy stomps his foot once. Everybody starts jumping
like crazy for eight bars before Faddis whistles them to a halt. It
sounded good to me, but Dizzy is a perfectionist and something must
have gone wrong. They start again. Another train wreck.
But the third time's a charm. The ensembles are
flawless, Dizzy whispers his supersonic solo, Oscar, Candoli, and
Faddis take one scorching chorus each as the tireless Ignacio kicks it
all along in a sort of fast forward bossa nova, and before you know
it, ''Things to Come'' have gone and went.
The listeners laugh and cheer, especially Clora. Dizzy
smiles a gentle smile. ''That's it,'' he croaks. The gratified masters
join the laughter. ''Thank you for an excellent rehearsal,'' Faddis
says, a bit of an understatement
''You'll never hear anything like that again,'' a
blissed out listener remarks to Pantoja, a Cuban who's been with Dizzy
for 20 years.
''That's the old man,'' he replies, beaming.
