Dizzy Gillespie’s Transnational Vision of Music
Below, in the second of three excerpts from my Afterword for Murray Talks Music, which is titled “The Blues and Jazz as Aesthetic Statement,” I summarize a (circa 1985) discussion between Albert Murray and grandmaster jazz trumpeter and composer Dizzy Gillespie. When I originally read the conversation I was struck by a moment in which Gillespie’s transnational vision of music transcended while including Murray’s North American focus. The excerpt then focuses on why Black American literature hasn’t, according to Murray, had an impact comparable to Black American music vis-à-vis the seminal example of Louis Armstrong, and closes by transitioning from Dizzy to Duke Ellington in the pantheon of blues idiom musical wisdom.
The Blues and Jazz as Aesthetic Statement (continued)
Murray’s extensive interview with an honored and revered ancestor, Dizzy Gillespie will certainly dispel the rubbish that he didn’t appreciate bebop, but, moreover, the conversation between Murray, a critic-scholar-native insider to the jazz idiom who literally grew up with the music as it manifested its variations on blues idiom themes, and Gillespie, cofounder (with alto sax grandmaster Charlie Parker) and the greatest teacher and promoter of bop (and one of its greatest composers), will provide historians and fans a thumbnail sketch of the cultural and musical scene which the two men shared. As they riffed back and forth, recalling names, songs, places, territory bands, the special role of the piano in jazz improvisation, the imperative of style in aesthetic endeavor, great teachers and moments from the past, giving representative anecdotes about how bop was received, and acknowledging their own place as honored elders, a picture of shared meaning, values, and internal standards of evaluation becomes clear.
Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis
Dizzy’s Vision for the Music of the Western Hemisphere
When Murray mentions in his interview with Dizzy Gillespie that Wynton Marsalis is one of the two top classical trumpeters in the world, but that Marsalis wondered if he’d make it to the upper reaches of the greatest jazz trumpeters, it implies that jazz performance at the highest levels could be even more challenging than the performance of European concert music. One distinction is the fundamental role of improvisation in the blues idiom, a practice so fundamental to human life that an interdisciplinary academic field (Critical Improvisation Studies) has been established to study it. Another is a difference in rhythmic emphasis and facility. As Murray mentions several times in this volume, the percussive nature of blues idiom music is likely its most definitive feature. Gillespie agreed (while underscoring the harmonic devices of bebop). “Classical musicians don’t know anything about an upbeat,” said Gillespie. “The conductor, when he brings his hand down, that’s ‘one’ . . . He has no beat for an upbeat. And we live on it. That’s why we can play their music, and they can’t play ours.”
When Murray says, “That particular emotion comes from . . .” Gillespie interjects: “Yeah, we are the sanctified church, we got that beat.” Although in Stomping the Blues Murray wrote that “many of the elements of blues music seem to have been derived from the downhome church in the first place,” he identified the disposition of black Americans to “turn all movement to a dance beat elegance” as derived from our “captive ancestors.” Gillespie, pointing to the holiness or sanctified church as the rhythmic cradle—which fits Murray’s thesis but from a sacred angle—quilts a conception of jazz as intimately tied to religio-spiritual sources emphasized by Jon Hendricks, Mary Lou Williams, and Duke Ellington.
Another subtle distinction between Murray and Gillespie surfaced based on their distinct objectives. Murray insisted and demonstrated that jazz, as performed at the upper reaches of aesthetic statement by, say, Louis Armstrong, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and Charlie Parker, is on a par with the greatest music of any time and in any place. Considering the lowly place of the blues and jazz in the minds of many in the so-called white and black communities in the early days of the music coming into the public sphere even on to the bebop era and beyond, such a cultural project was courageous and audacious. Murray also revealed the mythic (the heroic jazz musician engaging existential and bandstand foes/partners through antagonistic cooperation on the break), the ritualistic (purification and fertility rituals), as well as the literary, rhetorical, cultural, and cosmic context of the music’s evolution and significance.
Gillespie, a creative pioneer, both as an instrumentalist and as a stylistic innovator, included, yet transcended, the more U.S.-centric vision of Murray’s, in a similar manner that Gillespie included the foundations of early jazz and the big-band swing era yet innovated beyond. His transnational vision was that “the music of the Western Hemisphere one day will be unified . . . It’s not there quite yet, but they’re doing it. The rock and roll guys are doing it. They got jazz and they got blues and they got Latin in their music. I think one of these days the music of Brazil, the West Indies, Cuba and the United States will be unified.”
Then Murray pointed out that from W. C. Handy onward, early jazz included Latin American elements owing to infusions of the people and cultures resulting from the Spanish-American War, the building of the Panama Canal, and so on. In his very last essay, “Jazz: Notes Toward a Definition,” Murray makes mention of the Latin American influence on jazz as a dance music in the ceremonial context of the juke joint, honky tonk, and ballroom. Yet the vision of hemispheric unity through music was Gillespie’s, perhaps influenced by his adherence to the Baha’i faith, which during the years of his youth strongly affirmed the concept of “racial amity.”
Black American Music and Literature
In 1997, Murray received an honorary degree from my undergraduate alma mater, Hamilton College. Murray is in front, holding a cane; to his immediate right are his wife Mozelle and his daughter Michele. I’m in the middle behind Murray, to my right, Robert G. O’Meally; to his right is English professor, John O’Neill, one of my favorite teachers from my undergraduate years at Hamilton, 1981-1985. Delbert Spurlock is on the far right, his son to his right and my left.
In Murray’s conversation with Bob O’Meally for the Smithsonian’s Jazz Oral History Project there’s a defining moment. Many have wondered why black American literature hasn’t risen to a level of accomplishment comparable to the heights reached by black music. Considering the global impact of not just blues and jazz but other forms of music innovated by artists across the black diaspora, this point of view is arguably true, even if only felt intuitively. Professor O’Meally asks Murray to clarify: why the difference? Why would Ralph Ellison say to a young black writer to “check out the Russians” but in reference to a young Louis Armstrong it wouldn’t have been necessary to say check out Mozart and Beethoven first?
Albert Murray: Well, the difference is that they knew the literature of the trumpet, because they knew about John Philip Sousa and all these people. They knew what that was, but he grew up . . . where something was actually being created. You see what I’m saying? Something was being created which he latched on to. And it had all the rest. And besides, they knew it. You would talk to Louis, you know, the guy would say . . . “Well, what did you hear?” [imitating Louis Armstrong]: “We heard it all. We heard all the stuff they playing, we had the radio, we had the phonograph records, we like music!” And the interviewer says, “Yeah, but did you listen to people, you know, like . . . Brahms or Mahler?” He’d say, “Yeah. We’re into Brahms. Yeah, all that stuff, and we heard Gustav Mahler! And don’t forget Fats Waller!” You see, he was always together with those things [laughs]. It was just music to him.
He makes much of when Erskine Tate and those guys were playing classical music. He’d say, “Yeah, they’re playing those overtures, man, tell you to turn back five pages. You have to be able to read that stuff. I picked up on reading quite a bit in the pit band.
Jazz, as a North American form, incorporated European, African, and Latin American elements into its synthesis to innovate a new musical art form. Armstrong is the stylistic progenitor of the idiom as it developed post-ragtime. For black writers, or writers from any background for that matter, to approach such a level of achievement, they’d have to master and synthesize the literary tradition they’re working in and put a contemporary stamp upon it with their individual voice and style. If that voice and style infuse the very language as written in the public domain, then the achievement would be comparable. Perhaps now it’s easier to see why Murray so appreciated Hemingway and thought he best translated in American vernacular the style and achievement of the blues idiom.
From Dizzy to Duke
Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie
After the statement in the quote above, Murray essays a remarkable short history of the milieu of music education extant in the early decades of jazz, recalling themes from his conversation with Dizzy Gillespie and an amazing interview about Duke Ellington from 1989. Loren Schoenberg hosted this WKCR radio program at Columbia University in New York, engaging Murray and Stanley Crouch about the sui generis stature of Duke Ellington within jazz and Western music overall. The profound content of this radio program has significance far above the attacks on Ellington’s legacy by writers such as James Lincoln Collier, Terry Teachout, and Adam Gopnik, who, like thieves in broad daylight, have tried to blur and mar Ellington’s iconic status, as if his reputation was too uppity.
In the context of Murray’s body of work and thought, Duke is central as the most comprehensive realization of the vernacular imperative to transmute the raw experience of his life into universal aesthetic statement. Duke also distinguished musical greatness in twentieth-century American terms in contradistinction to the European concert tradition. Even when Ellington rearranged Grieg and Tchaikovsky, he framed it within his own blues idiom aesthetic, values, and style. In fact, if Homo Americanus—according to Constance Rourke: part Negro, part Yankee, part Native American, and part frontiersman—is the cutting edge of Western culture, as Murray often said, then Duke may be the quintessential composer of the century . . .