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206 • I Remember Jazz Now, after the intervening twenty years, I don't mind eating my prophecy at all, and Joe has been generous enough not to say "I told you so." As for Pete Fountain, Johnny Wiggs, his teacher, had explained that he'd told Pete to give up the music. "I told him," Johnny said, "that he'd never be able to play jazz. Its too bad. He loves it and he's got a nice tone, but he'll never be a jazz musician." Several years later, Wiggs and I were sitting in my living room watching Pete on the television as he performed on a network show. And Johnny said, "I told you he'd never be a jazz musician." Dizzy Gillespie In a book about the real jazz you wouldn't reasonably expect to find anything about Dizzy Gillespie, but I've included him to make a point. The point could be of interest to people who feel that the music began to decline roughly around the time it began to be recorded. It's only fair to confess, though, that I lost interest in the movies when they started to talk. In Philadelphia in 1940 or 1941—just before I got drafted, anyway —I had a concert going on in the Academy of Music. I don't remember who was playing, but it must have been an authentic New Orleans jazz band, with maybe a Chicagoan or two thrown in. I'm sure Joe Sullivan was on piano. A local entrepreneur named Nat Segal, who owned a club called the Downbeat in South Philadelphia, asked me if I would, as a favor to him, permit a young trumpet player and a girl singer to participate. In those days there weren't any major music controversies going on in the business. We were still saying, in our sublime ignorance, "It's all jazz." So I agreed to have Nat's people on stage briefly, to give them an opportunity to be exposed to the concert audience. The skinny little girl singer, whom I judged to be about sixteen, told me her name was Sarah Vaughan. And the trumpeter , whom I had met before in Minton's in New York where he had seemed to be only fooling around with the other musicians on the stand, Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker and, I think, Slim Caillard (its hard to remember for sure—after all, it was more than forty years ago), was Dizzy Gillespie. So, anyway, he played in one or two sets at the Academy, and he I Remember Jazz • 207 still seemed to be just fooling around. I talked to him for a while backstage , and it struck me that he was far more personable and intelligent than most of the musicians I had been associated with in the world of authentic jazz. On reflection, I admitted to myself that most of these younger musicians playing that strange music they were calling "be-bop" were superior folks, generally better educated, more civilized . Their manners were better, they were more polite, more considerate of each other. I found what they were playing very boring, and the more I heard it and understood it, the less I liked it. I said all that to young Dizzy, and he said, "Everything moves along, man. Its not a question of whether its better or worse, it just keeps movin'. There's no reason musicians, especially young ones, shouldn't experiment with the instruments—find out how far they can go." A few years later, I'd go far enough into it to actually produce a Lenny Tristano concert, featuring such newcomers as Fats Navarro and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. I made a record session with Percy Heath (long before the "Modern Jazz Quartet"). And at last I confronted the fact that while I enjoyed workingwith these really very nice people, I just couldn't stand what they were playing. That was what got me off on the whole complex business of jazz theory, about which I've written at length. All of my predictions about the music business—like how the public would never go for long playingrecords, how Stan Kenton was too complex ever to be a commercial success, and how the public would be sick of the Beatles in two months—didn't work out. But I was right about be-bop. It was a musical deadend. I hoped when it was over that some of the...

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