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The Trumpet "
say, mainly in eighths and quarter notes, and where the swing era musicians had tended to broaden this approach with the more frequent use of triplets, Gillespie was able, through an unprecedented alliance of imagination and technique, to unleash a glittering waterfall of sixteenth notes, simultaneously implying, through his choice of notes, a more complex harmonic structure. The newly gained complexity was supplemented by the contrasting effects of long pauses, of notes held for a measure or two, of an austere beauty in the spelling out of a ballad.
Gillespie's cataclysmic arrival, by 1943 a fait accompli among musicians, was not acknowledged for three years by most of the critics. Traditionalist-oriented, they then engaged in all-out combat against the new force he represented, accusing him of playing mathematically, of lacking emotion. Another five years were to pass before many of them were to agree that the style they had branded "cold as steel" was in fact a flaming sword.
By that time Gillespie had launched a whole new trumpet generation. Among the first to serve as propaganda agents for bop were Howard McGhee, Kenny Dorham, Red Rodney, the late Fats Navarro and one who later was to start a college of his own, Miles Davis.
While almost every young trumpeter, as well as many of the older-established musicians, turned to Gillespie for new inspiration, the direct roots to earlier jazz forms were by no means broken off. Through the 1940s most of the leading influences of earlier years remained in the forefront or close to it, their styles unchanged. Emmett Berry, a product of the Fletcher and Horace Henderson bands, and Bill Coleman, whose lyrical tone and fluent style were too little appreciated and too seldom recorded, both played with Teddy Wilson in 1940-1. Jonah Jones in the Galloway band, Harry "Sweets" Edison with Basie; Ray Nance and Harold Baker with Ellington continued to display individual swing-era personalities, while the Armstrong light still burned in the bright horns of Lee Castle with Dorsey, Wild Bill Davison with Condon. The "new Bix", hailed in the person of Bobby Hackett in 1938, continued to share honors with older * new Bixes" long taken for granted, notably Jimmy McPartland. |
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