Lie Six

Number six is really a trick: that beboppers tended to express unpatriotic attitudes regarding segregation, economic injustice, and the American way of life.

We never wished to be restricted to just an American context, for we were creators in an art form which grew from universal roots and which had proved it possessed universal appeal. Damn right! We refused to accept racism, poverty, or economic exploitation, nor would we live out uncreative humdrum lives merely for the sake of survival. But there was nothing unpatriotic about it. If America wouldn’t honor its Constitution and respect us as men, we couldn’t give a shit about the American way. And they made it damn near un-American to appreciate our music.

Music drew Charlie Parker and me together, but Charlie Parker used to read a lot too. As a great reader, he knew about everything, and we used to discuss politics, philosophy, and life-style. I remember him mentioning Baudelaire - I think he died of syphilis-? and Charlie used to talk about him all the time. Charlie was very much interested in the social order, and we’d have these long conversations about it, and music. We discussed local politics, too, people like Vito Marcantonio’s ideas because as musicians we weren’t paid well at all for what we created.

There were a bunch of musicians more socially minded, who were closely connected with the Communist Party. Those guys stayed busy anywhere labor was concerned. I never got that involved politically. I would picket, if necessary, and remember twice being on a picket line. I can’t remember just what it was I was picketing for, but they had me walking around with a sign. Now, I would never cross a picket line.

Paul Robeson became the forerunner of Martin Luther King. I’ll always remember Paul Robeson as a politically-committed artist. A few enlightened musicians recognized the importance of Paul Robeson, amongst the Teddy Wilson, Frankie Newton, and Pete Seeger. All of them very outspoken politically. Pete Seeger is so warm: if you meet Pete Seeger, he just melts, he’s so warm. He’s a great man.

In my religious faith, the Baha’i faith, Bab is the forerunner of Baha’u’llah, the prophet. “Bab” means gate, and Paul Robeson was the “gate” to Martin Luther King. The people in power made Paul Robeson a martyr, but he didn’t die immediately from his persecution. He became a martyr because if you are strangled for your principles, whether it’s a physical strangulation or mental strangulation or social strangulation you suffer. The dues that Paul Robeson paid were worse than the dues Martin Luther King paid. Martin Luther only paid his life, quick, for his views, but Paul Robeson had to suffer a very long time.

When the play Othello opened in New York with Paul Robeson, Jose Ferrer, and Uta Hagen, I went to the theater to see it, I was sitting way up in the highest balcony. Paul Robeson’s voice sounded like we were talking together in a room. That’s how strong his voice was coming from the stage, three miles away. Paul Robeson, big as he was, looked about as big as a cigar from where I was sitting. But his voice was right up there next to me.

I dug Paul Robeson right away, from the first words. A lot of black people were against Paul Robeson; he was trying to help them and they were talking against him, like he was a communist. I heard him speak on many occasions and, man, talk about a speaker! He could really speak. And he was fearless! You never hear people speak out like he did with everything arrayed against you and come out like he did. Man, I’ll remember Paul Robeson until I die. He was something else.

Paul Robeson became “Mr. Incorruptibility.” No one could get to him because, man, there are so many ways to corrupt a personality. Paul Robeson stands as a hero of mine and he was truly the father of Malcolm X, another dynamic personality who I talked to a lot. Oh, I loved Malcolm, and you couldn’t corrupt Malcolm or Paul. We have a lot of leaders that money corrupts, and power. You give them a little money and some power, and they nut. They go nuts with it. Both Malcolm and Paul Robeson, you couldn’t get to them. The people in power tried all means at their disposal to get them. So they killed Malcolm X and they destroyed Paul Robeson. But they stood up all the time. Even dying, their heads were up.

One time, on the Rudy Vallee show, I should’ve acted more politically. Rudy Vallee says, introducing me, “What’s in the Ubangi department tonight?” I almost walked off the show. I wanted to sue him but figured there wasn’t any money in it, so I just forgot about it and played. Musicians today would never accept that, but then, somehow, the money and the chance to be heard seemed more important.

We had other fighters, like Joe Louis, who was beautiful. I’ve known Joe Louis since way, way back when I hung out in Sugar Ray’s all the time, playing checkers. Sugar Ray’s a good checker player, but dig Joe Louis. He’d come down to hear me play, and people would want Joe Louis to have a ringside seat. He’d be waaay over in a corner someplace, sitting there digging the music. I you announced him, “Ladies and gentlemen, the heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Louis, is sitting over there,” he’d stand up to take a bow and wave his hands one time. You look around again he’s gone. Other guys I know would want a ringside seat, want you to announce them and maybe come up on the stage. But Joe Louis was like that. He was always shy, beautiful dude. He had mother wit.

It’s very good to know you’re a part of something that has directly influenced your own cultural history. But where being black is concerned it’s only what I represent, not me, myself. I pay very little attention to “Dizzy Gillespie,” but I’m happy to have made a contribution. To be a “hero” in the black community, all you have to do is make the white folks look up to you and recognize the fact that you’ve contributed something worthwhile. Laugh, but it’s the truth. Black people appreciate my playing in the same way I looked up to Paul Robeson or to Joe Louis. When Joe would knock out someone, I’d say, “Hey …!” and feel like I’d scored a knockout. Just because of his prowess in his field and because he’s black like me.

Oh, there was a guy in Harlem, up there on the corner all the time preaching. Boy, could he talk about white people! He’d get a little soap box. I don’t know his name, but everybody knew about him. He wasn’t dressed all fancy, or nothing, and then he had a flag, and American flag. Ha! Ha! That’s how I became involved with the African movement, standing out there listening to him. An African fellow named Kingsley Azumba Mbadiwe asked me who I was and where I came from. I knew all the right answers. That was pretty hip being from South Carolina and not having been in New York too long. Out friendship grew from there; and I became attached to this African brother. One time, after the Harlem riots, 1945, Mbadiwe told me, “Man, these white people are funny here.”
“Whaddayou mean … ?”
“Well, they told me to stay outta Harlem,” he said.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“They say that it’s dangerous for me up here. I might get killed.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“Well, I asked them how they gonna distinguish me from anybody else up here? I look just like the rest of them.”

Heh, heh. Heh. It was at that time I observed that the white people didn’t like the “spooks” over here to get too close to the Africans. They didn’t want us, the spooks over here, to know anything about Africa. They wanted you to just think you’re somebody dangling out there, not like the white Americans who can tell you they’re German or French or Italian. They didn’t want us to know we have a line so that when you’d ask us, all we could say was we were “colored.” It’s strange how the white people tried to keep us separate from the Africans and from our heritage. That’s why, today, you don’t hear in our music, as much as you do in other parts of the world, African heritage, because they took our drums away from us. If you go to Brazil, to Bahia where there is a large black population, you find a lot of African in their music; you go to Cuba, you find they retained their heritage; in the West Indies, you find a lot. In fact, I went to Kenya and heard those cats play and I said, “You guys sound like you’re playing calypso from the West Indies.”

A guy laughed and he said to me, “Don’t forget, we were first!”

But over here, they took our drums away from us, for the simple reason of self-protection when they found out those cats could communicate four or five miles with the drums. They took our language away from us and made us speak English. In slavery times, if they found out that two slaves could speak the same African language, they sold off one. As far as our heritage goes, a few words creeped in like buckra ? I used to hear my mother say, “that ole poor buckra” ? buckra meant white. But with those few exceptions when they took our drums away, our music developed along a monorhythmic line. It wasn’t polyrhythmic like African music. I always knew rhythm or I was interested in it, and it was this interest in rhythm that led me to seize every opportunity to find out about these connections with Africa and African music.

Charlie Parker and I played benefits for the African students in New York and the African Academy of Arts and Research which was headed by Kingsley Azumba Mbadiwe. Eventually, Mbadiwe wound up becoming a minister of state in Nigeria under one of those regimes, but over here, as head of the African Academy, he arranged for us to play some benefit concerts at the Diplomat Hotel which should’ve been recorded. Just me, Bird, and Max Roach, with African drummers and Cuban drummers; no bass, nothing else. We also played for a dancer they had, named Asadata Dafora. (A-S-A-D-A-T-A D-A-F-O-R-A ? if you can say it, you can spell it.) those concerts for the African Academy of Arts and Research turned out to be tremendous. Through that experience, Charlie Parker and I found the connections between Afro-Cuban and African music and discovered the identity of our music with theirs. Those concerts should definitely have been recorded, because we had a ball, discovering our identity.

Within the society, we did the same thing we did with the music. First we learned the proper way and then we improvised on that. It seemed the natural thing to do because the style or mode of life among black folks went the same way as the direction of the music. Yes, sometimes the music comes first and the life-style reflects the music because music is some very strong stuff, though life in itself is bigger. Artists are always in the vanguard of social change, but we didn’t go out and make speeches or say “Let’s play eight bars of protest.” We just played our music and let it go at that. The music proclaimed our identity; it made every statement we truly wanted to make.