When Dizzy Gillespie moved to Philadelphia after high school, he saw his idol perform for the first time. It was at a club called the Rendezvous, and Roy Eldridge engaged in a cutting contest with Rex Stewart, Duke Ellington’s trumpet player, that made Stewart “cry,” Dizzy remembered. Later Gillespie moved to New York just as Eldridge was leaving Teddy Hill’s band to join Fletcher Henderson. Dizzy auditioned and got the open trumpet chair—to the annoyance of some of the older veterans in the band—because Teddy Hill was so taken with how much Dizzy sounded like Roy.
While playing with Teddy Hill, Gillespie became inspired by another Pittsburgh musician, drummer Kenny Clarke. Kenneth Spearman Clarke had grown up in the Hill District. His mother, the former Martha Grace Scott, was also a talented pianist who taught him to play his first notes. But Martha died when Kenny was only five years old, and his father, Charles Spearman, left Pittsburgh to start another family in Washington, D.C. Kenny was placed in an orphanage in the Lower Hill, the Coleman Industrial Home for Negro Boys. The orphanage was cramped and dingy, with more than thirty boys sleeping in four rooms. But the matrons took them to church every Sunday and invited local musicians to give recitals. By nine, Kenny had foraged a set of drumsticks, and someone at the orphanage had taught him how to play the snare drum. By the time he entered junior high, Kenny was leading the marching band.
At fifteen, Clarke dropped out of school and began performing in the dance halls and clubs of Wylie Avenue. Two Irishmen who owned a local music store, Hammond and Gerlach on Penn Avenue, gave him lessons and allowed him to practice on a professional drum kit. When the drummer for a popular local dance band fell ill, Kenny got his first taste of keeping a swing tempo for a ballroom of Lindy-hoppers. But he quickly tired of thumping out a monotonous four-four beat on the bass drum.
Although not certain, it’s likely that at some point Clarke heard a recording by “Papa Jo” Jones, the first big band drummer to keep time with the hi-hat, the stacked cymbals operated by a foot pedal on the side of the drum kit. By the time Clarke arrived in New York City in 1935, at the age of twenty-one, he was keeping time by “riding” the hi-hat with his left foot, freeing up his right foot to throw in bass drum accents that he called “dropping bombs.” When Kenny made his first recordings with the Edgar Hayes band in 1937, he already had a sound that jazz historian Gunther Schuller later proclaimed “the beginnings of modern drumming.”
Clarke joined the Teddy Hill band a year later, and he and Dizzy Gillespie clicked immediately. Dizzy loved the fast tempos that Kenny kept on the hi-hat, and the way his bombs on the fourth beat set up Gillespie’s trumpet riffs. Both men dug the interplay of the horn and the cymbals, as if the two brass instruments were talking to one another. Gillespie imagined Clarke’s drums as “cousins” with his horn, and listened for their encouragement to take new chances. “He infused a new conception, a new language, into the dialogue of the drum, which is now the dialogue,” Dizzy recalled.
While everyone else marveled at Gillespie’s harmonic inventions—how he improvised new music over chord changes rather than simply embellishing melodies—Clarke was fascinated by his friend’s rhythmic originality. “It wasn’t only his trumpet playing,” Clarke said. “He had a lotta other things that people didn’t see, but I saw the rhythmic aspect of it.” Both men played piano, and they introduced new concepts to one another on the keyboard. “Kenny would run up to me—he played piano, too, all of them played piano—and say, ‘Look here . . . bam!’ Right on the piano,” Dizzy recalled. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ because guys were very generous in those days with their ideas, man.”
Other band members didn’t dig Clarke’s unconventional technique at all. They complained to Teddy Hill, who struggled himself to describe what his drummer was up to with his offbeat snare accents and bass bombs. “He does all those ‘klook-mops’ and shit,” Teddy sputtered to Dizzy one day. So that’s what Gillespie started calling Clarke: “Klook-Mop.” The nickname stuck—“Klook Clarke”—but it didn’t stop the grumbling from band members who could only follow tempos pounded on the bass drum. “We can’t use Klook because he breaks the time too much,” a trombonist who helped manage the sidemen griped to Hill. Eventually the trombonist persuaded Hill to fire Clarke.
Teddy Hill wasn’t finished with Kenny Clarke, however. By the end of 1939, Hill’s orchestra had disbanded and he had gone into a new line of work, managing a small nightclub in the back of the Cecil Hotel on West 118th Street in Harlem. The owner was Henry Minton, a saxophonist who was the only black delegate to the local branch of the American Federation of Musicians. Officially, the union prohibited members from performing unless they were paid. So-called walking delegates issued fines to anyone caught jamming for no money. But Minton was determined to provide cover for musicians who wanted to play after hours. So he opened a club he called Minton’s Playhouse down the street from Apollo Theater. For the house band, Minton encouraged Hill to look for confident improvisers and accompanists. To play piano, Hill brought in a self-taught prodigy whose name, Thelonious Sphere Monk, matched his eccentric clothes and otherworldly sound. To play drums, Hill hired Klook Clarke.
Over the next few years, Minton’s became a nightly musical laboratory. On Mondays, the owners of the Apollo Theater treated their headliners to dinner at Minton’s, and the ensuing jam sessions went until dawn. Established stars such as Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster sat in, soaking up the ideas of the younger players and testing them in cutting contests. Roy Eldridge showed up regularly to duel with Dizzy Gillespie, and before long Monk was teasing the Pittsburgh master that his disciple had surpassed him. Charlie Christian, the electric guitarist in Benny Goodman’s band, crafted improvisations that stretched far beyond the four- and eight-bar solos of swing.
Charlie Parker arrived in Harlem with the Jay McShann band from Kansas City and quickly became a fixture at Minton’s. While Gillespie was forever analyzing the new music, Parker came to it effortlessly, with awesome technical chops, encyclopedic command of musical quotations, and a natural ear for mixing bebop with the blues. Previously known as a stride pianist, Thelonious Monk began to experiment with unexpected pauses and dissonant leaps, sometimes becoming so pleased with himself that he would jump up and dance around his piano. Meanwhile, Kenny Clarke added rhythmic innovation, perfecting a style that supported the new music while making the drums an equal partner in improvisation for the first time.
Starting in 1942, another Pittsburgher became a nightly presence at Minton’s. Mary Lou Scruggs had seen a lot of the world since her start as “the little piano girl of East Liberty.” After she married Joe Williams at the age of seventeen, they moved to Memphis and Joe went on the road with Andy Kirk’s “Twelve Clouds of Joy,” leaving his young bride to make ends meet by working part-time for an undertaker. Eventually Mary Lou joined Andy Kirk’s band as well, and soon she emerged as a soloist, composer, and arranger. But by the early 1940s, Mary Lou had divorced Joe Williams and moved to New York City, where she befriended the new generation of bebop pioneers.
In the 1930s, Williams had become known as the queen of the swing piano, with its emphasis on keeping a steady, relaxed time. But thanks to her grounding in the sophisticated piano culture of Pittsburgh, she immediately grasped the complex new music of the 1940s, with its “millions of notes,” as she put it. At Minton’s, Williams acted as an unofficial den mother. She kept a wary eye out for white musicians who tried to steal material by sitting in the audience and scribbling transcriptions into notebooks and on shirt cuffs. When Mary Lou got her own gig at Café Society, the nightclub in Greenwich Village, Monk and Dizzy would show up at her apartment in the early morning, after she finished her last set, and stay for hours excitedly demonstrating their new discoveries.
After the Teddy Hill Orchestra broke up in 1939, Gillespie joined Cab Calloway’s band. But it wasn’t long before Dizzy became restless in the job, which kept him on the road and away from the Harlem jam scene for long stretches. Th
e other band members were more interested in trading real estate tips than discussing music. All Cab Calloway seemed to care about, besides making money, was betting on horses at the track.
When the band reached Hartford, Connecticut, in 1941, the tension boiled over. Before the Calloway orchestra came on, a trumpeter for the warm-up band started hurling spitballs at his drummer. When Cab entered, he saw the wet debris on the stage and assumed that Dizzy was the culprit. After the curtain went down, he accused Gillespie. When Dizzy denied responsibility, Cab became enraged and climbed into the orchestra to punch him. Band members pulled them apart, and Calloway stormed off to his dressing room. When Dizzy passed by several minutes later, Cab rushed into the hallway and accused him again. This time, Dizzy pulled a knife. When Calloway got back to his dressing room, he saw blood seeping through the leg of his white tuxedo. He went to find Gillespie and fired him on the spot. “Get him outta here!” Cab shouted to his band manager, who hastily paid Dizzy in cash and hustled him onto a bus back to New York.
For the next year, Gillespie played with several other bands, but nothing lasted until Billy Eckstine persuaded him to join the Earl Hines orchestra by offering him $20 a week and the chance to play with Charlie Parker.
Although Gillespie and Parker had jammed at Minton’s and other New York clubs, playing in the Hines band gave them the chance to compare notes and practice together for the first time. While the orchestra was on the road, the two men holed up during the day playing scales and etudes from the exercise books they both carried with them. (Although Gillespie denied it, Earl Hines was convinced that their early bebop improvisations were all based on those practice scales, mixed in hundreds of ways over all twelve keys.) Both men were highly competitive, but not with each other. “It was a mutual non-aggression pact, a matter of respect for one another, of respect for the other’s creativity,” Gillespie recalled. “We each inspired the other.”
That respect extended to making sure that Parker’s drug habit didn’t undermine their partnership. “We were together all the time, playing in hotel rooms and jamming,” Gillespie recalled about the time on the road with the Hines band. “We were together as much as we could be under the conditions that the two of us were in. His crowd, the people he hung out with, were not the people that I hung out with. And the guys who pushed dope would be around, but when he wasn’t with them, he was with me. Yard was very funny about that. He never used in front of me.”
One night, the Hines band found itself playing in a white dance hall in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas. During a break, Gillespie was tinkering on the piano when a customer gave him a nickel to play a special request in the next set. Dizzy tossed the coin away and went back to the piano. Later, when the concert was over and he thought everyone had left, Gillespie went to use the “whites only” men’s room. As he came out, the man with the nickel cracked a bottle over his head. Gillespie tried to grab another bottle to retaliate, but five other white men grabbed him and pinned him down. Suddenly, Parker appeared. “You took advantage of my friend, you cur!” Bird shouted, startling the assailants enough that they let Dizzy go. “That was funny,” Gillespie chuckled when he told the story about the white assailant, “because I knew that peckerwood didn’t know what a cur was!”
Soon after recruiting Gillespie and Parker, Eckstine came upon another raw but extraordinary young talent. Finding himself in New York City and short on money, he stopped by the Apollo to ask the manager to cash a check. He heard the sound of an intriguing female voice and poked his head into the theater. A tall, dark-skinned eighteen-year-old from Newark was standing awkwardly on stage and singing with effortless, infectious vibrato. Eckstine introduced himself to Sarah Vaughan and told her that he was going to tell Hines to hire her. But Hines balked. The band already had a female vocalist—an older and more refined singer named Madeline Green—and Hines couldn’t afford three singers, with their high union salaries.
Fortunately, Vaughan was also an accomplished keyboard player, so Hines agreed to hire her as a second pianist, at a lower union rate. But Eckstine was so determined to make her the female vocalist that he rattled Madeline Green until she quit. With Vaughan at his side, Eckstine had a singing partner whose talent matched his own—and whose vibrato he began to emulate. Meanwhile, Parker and Gillespie gained a new friend and a musical soul mate. Soon Dizzy was writing special arrangements for Sarah, and Bird was accompanying her with bebop obbligatos. Offstage, the two men delighted in bringing out the salty tongue behind Vaughan’s shy demeanor that led band member to give her the nickname “Sassy.”
While playing with another orchestra before joining Earl Hines, Gillespie had composed an exotic-sounding instrumental piece that embodied many of his new rhythmic and harmonic ideas. He called it “Interlude.” When he played it for Hines, the bandleader suggested another title, inspired by the headlines about black soldiers fighting in North Africa: “A Night in Tunisia.” Hines also added another Gillespie number to his play- list, calling on Dizzy to shout the tune’s name from the bandstand: “Salt Peanuts!”
Those stories—and the uniting of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan at such an early stage in their careers—would later lead jazz historians to label the Earl Hines orchestra “the incubator of bop.” Yet sadly, there were no recordings of the band during this period. From the summer of 1942 until the early fall of 1943—the time during which the three pioneers played for Hines—the American Federation of Musicians went on strike, forbidding members to make records until the big labels agreed to share more of the new revenue that was coming in as radio stations turned from broadcasting live performances to playing recorded music.
In early August of 1943, the Hines orchestra was performing at the Howard Theatre in Washington when they read reports of a race riot in Harlem. The band was scheduled to begin a tour of the South, but Eck- stine told Hines that he refused to go. A year earlier, Eckstine had married June Harris, a striking former nightclub entertainer who was urging him to settle down in New York. Billy also had no interest in seeing how he would be treated in the land of Jim Crow after the Harlem riots. When Billy informed Dizzy and Bird that he had “put his notice in” to Hines and explained the reason why, the two sideman decided that they would quit the band, too.
For a brief time, the alumni of the Hines orchestra went their separate ways. Eckstine began singing in clubs on 52nd Street. Gillespie tried to put together a bebop orchestra. But it soon became apparent that they could all make more money if Eckstine formed his own band, capitalizing on the popularity of “Jelly, Jelly” and playing in large theaters rather than small Manhattan clubs. So Billy began reassembling the old Hines bandstand, starting with Dizzy and Bird. Shadow Wilson had enlisted in the Army, so Eckstine recruited Art Blakey to play the drums. In the summer of 1944, they began the tour that brought them to the Aragon Ballroom in Pittsburgh.
On that first tour, the band also played at the Club Riviera in St. Louis. One night, a skinny dark-hued teenager showed up carrying his trumpet. The boy had just finished high school in the nearby town of Alton, Illinois, and had fallen hard for the new bebop sound. One of Eckstine’s trumpeters was out with tuberculosis, so the band manager asked if the teenager had a union card. “Yeah, I have a union card,” he answered. So Miles Davis was invited to sit in for the rest of the two-week engagement.
Miles struggled to keep up. Eckstine would later tease him that he “couldn’t even blow your nose” at that point. Still, the experience changed his life. Davis went home to Alton determined to master the horn and make it to New York to play alongside his musical heroes again. He also came away deeply impressed with the way the bandleader everyone called “B” stood up for his musicians with the Club Riviera’s white owner and white patrons. It was an unapologetic toughness that Davis would later emulate in his own career. “B didn’t take no shit off nobody,” Miles recalled.
For the other members in the orchestra, Eckstine was unlike any bandleader with whom they had ever pl
ayed. He respected their new musical ideas and openly encouraged their rebelliousness. At their next stop in Cleveland, Sarah Vaughan joined the band, and soon she and Gillespie and Parker were up to more irreverent hijinks. When Art Blakey complained about how much the three cursed, Eckstine told him: “Art, if you’re going to be in the band . . . you’ve got to get used to using profanity.” Eckstine not only allowed his musicians to drink and gamble on the road; he mounted flashlights on wire hangers at the back of the tour bus so they could play cards through the night.
When Eckstine finally agreed to tour the South, he brought firearms. In one town, FBI agents confiscated the tour bus after receiving reports that band members were shooting crows from the windows. In another town, a hotel owner who had accepted a reservation for the orchestra claimed to have no rooms available once he saw that Billy Eckstine was not white or Jewish, as the man had assumed. While Eckstine bickered with the hotel owner, Blakey and another band member climbed up to a second-floor balcony and started urinating into the courtyard. When the owner looked up, Eckstine punched him in the face, and the musicians made a run for it.
In his first year as a bandleader, Eckstine sold out theaters wherever he went and commanded an average of $5,500 a week—not quite Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington money, but more than most other swing bands of the era, black or white. Dizzy Gillespie took over as musical director as well as lead trumpeter, creating up-tempo arrangements of old standards and adding new bebop tunes such as “A Night in Tunisia” and “Second Balcony Jump” to the band’s repertoire. But Charlie Parker was another story. Within a month of joining the band, he began missing engagements due to his heroin habit, and one time he showed up without his horn because he had pawned it to buy dope. By the time the orchestra arrived at the Apollo Theater for its Christmas engagement at the end of 1944, Parker had quit to go back to performing in small clubs.
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