Lie Eight

It’s true, melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically, we found most pop music too bland and mechanically unexciting to suit our tastes, but we didn’t attempt to destroy it, we simply built on top of it by substituting our own melodies, harmonies, and rhythms over the pop music format and then improvised on that. We always substituted; that’s why no one could ever charge us with stealing songs or collect any royalties for recording material under copyright. We only utilized the pop song format as a take-off point for improvisation, which to us was much more important. Eventually, pop music survived by slowly adopting the changes we made.

Beboppers couldn’t destroy the blues without seriously injuring themselves. The modern jazz musicians always remained very close to the blues musician. That was a characteristic of the bopper. He stayed in close contact with his blues counterpart. I always had good friendships with T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, Joe Turner, and Cousin Joe, Muddy Waters,all those guy,? because we knew where our music came from. Ain’t no need of denying your father. That’s a fool, and there were few fools in this movement. Technical differences existed between modern jazz and blues musicians. However, modern jazz musicians would have to know the blues.

Another story is that we looked down on guys who couldn’t read [music]. Erroll Garner couldn’t read and we certainly didn’t look down on him, even though he never played our type of music. A modern jazz musician wouldn’t necessarily have to read well to be able to create, but you couldn’t get a job unless you read music; you had to read music to get in a band.

The bopper knew the blues well. He knew Latin influence and had a built-in sense of time, allowing him to set up his phrases properly. He knew chord changes, intervals, and how to get from one key to another smoothly. He knew the music of Charlie Parker and had to be a consummate musician. In the currant age bebop, a musician would also have to know about the techniques of rock music.

Ever since the days at Minton’s we had standards to measure expertise in our music. Some guys couldn’t satisfy them. Remember Demon, who used to come to play down at Minton’s; he came to play, but he never did, and he would play with anybody, even Coleman Hawkins. Demon’d get up on the stand and play choruses that wouldn’t say shit, but he’d be there. We’d get so tired of seeing this muthafucka. But he’d be there, and so we let him play. Everybody had a chance to make a contribution to the music.

The squabble between the boppers and the "moldy figs," who played or listened exclusively to Dixieland jazz, arose because the older musicians insisted on attacking our music and putting it down. Oooh, they were very much against our music, because it required more than what they were doing. They’d say, "That music ain’t shit, man!" They really did, but then you noticed some of the older guys started playing our riffs, a few of them, like Henry "Red" Allen. The others remained hostile to it.

Dave Tough was playing down at Eddie Condon’s once, and I went down there to see Dave because he and his wife are good friends of mine. When he looked up and saw me, he says, "You the gamest muthafucka I ever seen in my life."

"Whaddayou mean?" I said.

"Muthafucka, you liable to get lynched down in here!" he said. That was funny. I laughed my ass off. Eddie Condon’s and Nick’s in the Village were the strongholds of Dixieland jazz.

Louis Armstrong criticized us but not me personally, not for playing the trumpet, never. He always said bad things about the guys who copied me, but I never read where he said that I wasn’t a good trumpet player, that I couldn’t play my instrument. But when he started talking about bebop, "Aww, that’s slop! No melody." Louis Armstrong couldn’t hear what we were doing. Pops wasn’t schooled enough musically to hear the changes and harmonics we played. Pop’s beauty as a melodic player and a "blower" caused all of us to play the way we did, especially trumpet players, but his age wasn’t equipped to go as far, musically, as we did. Chronologically, I knew that Louis Armstrong was our progenitor as King Oliver and Buddy Boldern had been his progenitors. I knew how their styles developed and had been knowing it all the time; so Louis’s statements about bebop didn’t bother me. I knew that I came through Roy Eldridge, a follower of Louis Armstrong. I wouldn’t say anything. I wouldn’t make any statements about the older guys’ playing because I respected them too much.

Time 1/28/47 quoted me: "Louis Armstrong was the one who popularized the trumpet more than anyone else - he sold the trumpet to the public. He sold it, man.

"Nowadays in jazz we know more about chords, progressions, and we try to work out different rhythms and things that they didn’t think when Louis Armstrong blew. In his day all he did was play strictly from the soul, just strictly form his heart he just played. He didn’t think about no chords, he didn’t know nothing about no chords. Now, what we in the younger generation take from Louis Armstrong … is the soul."

I criticized Louis for other things, such as his "plantation image." We didn’t appreciate that about Louis Armstrong, and if anybody asked me about a certain public image of him, handkerchief over his head, grinning in the face of white racism. I never hesitated to say I didn’t like it. I didn’t want the white man to expect me to allow the same things Louis Armstrong did. Hell, I had my own way of "Tomming." Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of Tomming, of accommodating itself to a basically unjust situation. Take the comedians from Step ‘n Fetchit days, there are new comedians now who don’t want to be bothered with "Ah yassuh, boss …" But that doesn’t stop them from cracking a joke about how badly they’ve been mistreated. Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pop’s grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile. Coming from a younger generation, I misjudged him.

Entrenched artists, or the entrenched society, always attack anything tha’ts new coming in, in religion, in social upheavals, in any field. It has something to do with living and dying and the fear among the old of being replaced by the new. Louis Armstrong never played our music, but that shouldn’t have kept him from feeling or understanding it. Pops thought that it was his duty to attack! The leader always attacks first: so as the leader of the old school, Pops felt that it was his duty to attack us. At least he could gain some publicity, even if her were over whelmed musically.

"It’s a buncha trash! They don’t know what they’re doing, them boys, running off."

Mezz Mezzrow knocked us every time he’d say something to the newspapers over in Europe about bebop. "They’d never play two notes where a hundred notes are due."

Later, when I went to Europe in 1948, they put a knife in my hand, and Mezz Mezzrow was holding his head down like I was gonna chop it off. They printed headlines: DIZZY IS GONNA CARVE MEZZ MEZZROW…. Thank goodness this is the age of enlightenment, and we don’t have to put down the new anymore; that ferocious competition between the generations has passes.

In our personal lives, Pops and I were actually very good friends. He came to my major concerts and made some nice statements about me in the press. We should’ve made some albums together, I thought, just to have for the people who came behind us, about twenty albums. It seemed like a good idea some years later, but Pops was so captivated by Joe Glaser, his booking agent, he said, "Speak to Papa Joe." Of course that idea fizzled because Joe Glaser, who also booked me at the time, didn’t want anybody encroaching on Louis Armstrong. Pops really had no interest in learning any new music; he was just satisfied to do his thing. And the Hello Dolly! Came along and catapulted him into super, super fame. Wonder if that’s gonna happen to me? I wonder. Playing all these years, then all of a sudden get one number that makes a big hero out of you. History repeating itself.