ディジー・ガレスピー生誕100年記念
photo from YouTube
2017年10月21日はディジーの生誕100年記念日。
この日にあたって、ボビー・シューが、ディジーの死亡記事（ワシントンポスト）を全文タイプしたとのこと。以下のような文面とともにメールが送られてきました。
「ディジーは1993年1月6日に死去、この日は彼の妻ロレーンの誕生日だった。本記事を書いたジョナサン・ヤードリーによるこのまとめは、ディジーの功績を称える偉業と言える。100回目の誕生日にあたって、我々がみんなでこの記事を読み、彼を偲ぶのも素敵ではないだろうか」（Bobby Shew）
ディジー・ガレスピー（Dizzy Gillespie、本名：ジョン･バークス・ガレスピー、John Birks Gillespie、1917年10月21日 - 1993年1月6日）はジャズトランペット奏者、バンドリーダー、作曲家。アルトサックス奏者チャーリー・パーカーとともに、モダンジャズの原型「ビバップ」を築いた。ラテンジャズを推進させたアーティストでもある。
The Happy Life and Breadth of a Divine Creator
By Jonathan Yardley / Washington Post
Monday, January 11, 1993
What makes the death of Dizzy Gillespie doubly hard to countenance is that it isn't merely the end of an uncommonly glorious life, one that without exaggeration can be said to have brightened the world. It's also the end of a brilliant and incomparable period in American culture, one that lasted approximately three-quarters of a century and changed the sound of America forever.
John Birks Gillespie was the last of the founding giants of jazz. His death concludes the extraordinary line of succession that began with Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton and marched majestically on from Louis Armstrong to Sidney Bechet to Count Basie to Lester Young to Coleman Hawkins to Roy Eldridge to Billie Holiday to Duke Ellington to Charlie Christian to Sid Catlett to Charlie Parker to Thelonious Monk to Bud Powell to Miles Davis and now ends with Dizzy Gillespie. All are gone now; other musicians live on, some of them men and women of exceptional gifts, but the last of the titans has been felled.
It is beyond the power of words to describe the dimensions of this loss. Imagine if you will a line beginning with Bach and continuing through Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert before shuddering to a halt with the death of Brahms; viewed within an American context, that is the measure of what
The death of Dizzy Gillespie has ended. The people who invented and then perfected the most exquisite art form native to this country, people who performed at the center of our national stage from the early 1920's to the early 1990's, are no longer among us.
They were the men, and a few women, of jazz in its youth; Jelly Roll Morton liked to claim that he had "invented" jazz, and the claim wasn't entirely spurious. The first of them played in whorehouses and on riverboats; over the years they and their successors graduated to speak-easies and nightclubs, in time even to the concert stage. They took their music seriously---they seem to have known from the outset that they were onto something big, a new form of art that was of international consequence--but never solemnly;
They were more interested in composing and playing than in analyzing and criticizing.
In a relatively small number of years they took jazz through a remarkable number of phases, each an embellishment of what had gone before. Barely four decades passed between the triumphant emergence of the individual soloist in Armstrong's recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven to the leap into a whole new dimension that was accomplished when Parker and Gillespie began their own series of astonishing recordings. In Between these two revolutions they managed to find room for swing, the Dixieland revival, the big bands and above all else, the Ellingtonian golden years of the late 30's and early 40's.
Like Bach and Mozart before them, they laid the foundation, raised the beams and rafters, nailed tight the rooftop; they left room inside for interior decorations by others, but the shape of the mansion was their own creation. Now that they have all gone we can see that jazz is a middle-aged music, run short of genuine innovation, trying to strike a balance between reverence for its vanished past and satisfying of the bottomless artistic yearning for the original and the new. It is more self-conscious than ever before, in the clutches of academicians and specialists as much as those of nightclub managers and booking agents.
Traditionalists may argue that John Birks Gillespie belongs more to the years of jazz's middle age than to those of its youth--that bop, of which he and Parker were the herald angels, was a diminution rather than an enlargement of the music's essence.
Nonsense. Gillespie heard plenty of that during his lifetime, but he knew that bop was a logical progression from swing; Parker and Gillespie were to Armstrong and Morton as Stravinsky and Ravel were to Schubert and Brahms, which is to say pioneers of another order, adding their own walls to the mighty edifice. They put bop right at the heart of jazz, where it has ever since remained.
Gillespie was by any measure an extraordinary man, as most obituary notices and tributes have in some measure acknowledged. But there has been about too many of them the undertone of condescension with which jazz, and the black people who invented it, are too often addressed. Gillespie was a "man with a mean horn" as one put it, while Rudolph Nureyev who by coincidence died the same day, was an "artist".
The truth is quite to the contrary. Nureyev, brilliant and accomplished though he certainly was, was primarily a performer; Gillespie was a creator.
Gillespie was to other musicians as Stravinsky was to ballet dancers: He imagined and improvised and composed the music that is at the heart of their repertoire, without which they would have far less to play, or to dance. Try to imagine jazz at this point in its history without "Night in Tunisia" or "Manteca" or "Con Alma" or "Woody 'n You", and you have imagined the unimaginable.
Gillespie the soloist was of a piece with Gillespie the composer and bandleader. He charted new territory yet kept jazz fixed in its essential character. His range was breathtaking; no one who has ever played jazz trumpet has come even close to the facility and grace with which he could swoop from the high register to the low, never descending to the cheap theatrics favored by so many lesser trumpeters. He had s reputation for up-tempo work, but was every bit as confident on ballads and slow pieces. If you doubt that, listen to him play "Stella By Starlight".
He was a person of integrity, conviction and humor, all of which were tightly bound together. He'd been born in a rigidly segregated town in South Carolina called Cheraw, and it was not much less segregated when, in the spring of 1959,mits mayor somewhat improbably offered to hold a day in his honor. As Gillespie says in "To Be or Not To Bop", his autobiography, this invitation" coming at the height of the civil rights struggle down there sounded pretty strange" but he accepted it and had a fine time. "It was all mixed up, racially", he wrote, "probably the first time in Cheraw since Reconstruction, probably the first time in South Carolina".
What Gillespie doesn't say in his memoir is that after the celebration he went directly to the University of North Carolina, where he and his group played before an audience of privileged white fraternity boys and their privileged white sorority-girl dates. The excitement of the previous moment hadn't faded, and when he got on stage he started to talk about it. Instead of a lecture on justice and equal rights he delivered a wildly funny. Self-mocking routine that had his skeptical listeners roaring with laughter; he drove home his point with humor, which at that time and that place drove it all the harder.
He laughed at everything, and it was impossible not to laugh with him. One of his most ingratiating recordings--a number that audiences invariably beseeched him to play in concert--was his own interpretation of the great spiritual, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot". Gillespie retitled it "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac", and began it with a wild parody of African chants. Then he started to sing: "I looked over Jordan and what did I see. Coming for to carry me home? Oh, an Eldorado, coming after me, coming for to carry me home".
That's where he is now. Tears are not in order. "Maybe my role in music is just a stepping-stone to a higher note:, Dizzy Gillespie wrote. "The highest role is the role in the service of humanity, and if I can make that, then I'll be happy. When I breathe the last time, it'll be a happy breath!". Amen.
