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4 High Note–Low Note  Dizzy and Miles W hile I was living at Howard McGhee’s in New York in 1949, I became close to Gil Fuller, the orchestrator for Dizzy Gillespie’s band. Bill Massey and I used to do handyman jobs for Gil. He was a landlord and had several apartments, and we helped paint some of them. He was also some kind of policeman, and I think he had a degree in engineering and one in music, and he was a real estate entrepreneur . He was a heavy. Gil showed us things about orchestration because he had studied the Joseph Schillinger system, maybe from the same teacher I eventually went to, Rudolf Schramm. I started working with Gil’s band in 1948. He had fallen out with Dizzy over money involving his music or arrangements. Gil’s band had a lot of the guys who had played with Dizzy. It might have been an interim period for Dizzy, who had gone to California with Chano Pozo that year and made a big splash. Gil was a super orchestrator. The band was rehearsing somewhere near the Savoy, or maybe in the Savoy. It was a song by Leonard Feather, “Signing Off”—it’s a ballad that Sarah Vaughan recorded—and while we were rehearsing the arrangement, he wrote an introduction for it and passed it out to the guys. It was sensational. I had never seen anybody write music as if writing a letter. He wrote all the parts, handed them out, and it was terrific. Things were going well for me musically, but personally I received a serious shock. On occasion, Bert did house work for some rich families in Philly. One day in 1948, she told me she was going on one of those jobs for 62 | second Chorus (1949–1969) a couple days and that her mother would take care of our son, so I thought nothing of it. However, she had fallen in love with Hen Gates and was actually going to New York to hang with him. They soon got married. I was completely wiped out. My piano player had taken my old lady. Even so, Hen Gates and I eventually ended up restoring our friendship. He was a nice man, a great stepfather to Mtume. In the summer of 1949, somebody hooked up a battle of the bands with Gil Fuller’s band and Dizzy’s band at the Audubon Ballroom. Dizzy, of course, had written “Things to Come.” Gil wrote another fast minor tune called “The Scene Changes,” which was a kind of answer to Dizzy’s composition . I took a solo on it, a fast D minor piece. Gil was trying to get back at Dizzy since Gil had orchestrated “Things to Come” for Dizzy’s band. In a way, Gil was saying, “I’ve got some new stuff; the scene changes.” Gil had a competitive spark, and there was always competition, but in this particular case, it was Gil against Dizzy. He was trying to pay Dizzy back for whatever happened to them personally. We played that night at the Audubon Ballroom and we played well; Dizzy’s band, with Teddy Stewart on drums, played well too. I don’t know what the opinion of the general public was or which one outblew the other. Dizzy had the rep. We couldn’t outblow Dizzy regardless of what Gil Fuller had. Back then, what happened with Bert hurt me so bad that I was vulnerable and open. The night that we played the battle of music with Dizzy’s band, Teddy Stewart said, “Man, Bert was over here with Hen Gates.” He said, “Look, man, I know how you feel. Try some of this. Snort some of this; you’ll feel better.” That was my first introduction to snorting heroin. From the first time you do it, it’s like an addiction because you get to like it and you start doing it more and more. In the beginning it didn’t affect my music, and I continued to pursue my life’s work. July 11, 1949, was the date of my first recorded big band arrangement , the Gil Fuller Orchestra’s Bebop Boys. The lineup was Dave Burns, trumpet, who had played with Dizzy and left; Bill Massey, trumpet; Abdul Salaam, trumpet; Mustapha Dalee, trumpet; Clarence Ross, Ripp Tarrent, Charles Johnson, and Haleen Rasheed, trombones; Sahib Shihab and me, alto saxophones; Billy Mitchell, Pritchard Cheeseman, tenor saxophones ; Cecil...

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