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9 years ago
Dizzy Gillespie was the first hipster. He was far from a beatnik. The beats liked bebop, but the beats portrayed themselves as laid back, "don't have to work unless I feel like it" types. They dressed in wool plaid shirts, faded low riding jeans, hobnail boots, and worked hard at shoving socialism into every crevice of your body. I know beatniks, I know hipsters, I know hippies. Diz was not a beatnik.The song, Night in Tunisia, was composed with Art Blakey being present, early one morning, after a gig (Blakey was the drummer for the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra. According to Blakey, which he repeated on several occasions, Diz had this melody going through his head and it was driving him crazy, so Diz asked Blakey to stop, and Diz took a piece of paper, and using a garbage can lid for a portable desk, the opening got penned with some notes on how to take it go from there. Dizzy heard an afro-cuban, North African sound and imagined that it felt like a night in Tunisia.I'm in my 80's and because of my nearly 70 year love of Jazz, I was able to see and hear the bebop, hard bop, post bop, modernists from hot to cool. Almost any modern jazz music you hear from the early days of bebop through the beginning of Ornette Coleman in the late 1950's was considered hip, Why hip? Because swingsters (Swing music jitterbugging Benny Goodman fans, used the word "hep" & "hep-cat" to describe the youth and musicians of prewar WWII. To get away from these moldy figs (what traditionalists were called), Dizzy's generation coined a new language, where Hip was Cool, because Hep was Hot, and Hot was Not. Bird & Diz & Monk were dug, you dig? Dig = to get with it without saying so, which is what traditionalists would say. Frankly, other than Lawrence Ferlingetti, knowing the San Francisco scene as I do, very few of trouble making beats had anything to say. And they were far from Hip or Cool, they were anti anything that was successful. If someone forces you to read Kerouac, pretend you are just reading a book about a societal dropout on a journey. Try not to laugh or throw the book through a wall, because if you do you will hit Allen Ginsburg who's on the other side with his ear pressed up against the wall, wondering why his poetry sucked.DIZZY was HIP. Beats are beat. Dizzy was counter culture, it's true,. But Cab Calloway, 10 years earlier, was the first to be far out as a showman. Dizzy was the hippest, but Cab was the wildest. Other than Moondog, and maybe Ken Nordine's word jazz, the artistic harvest from the beat generation was not much. Without Brando and James Dean, who pretended to be beat, despite their luxuries, the Beats had nobody to appreciate, because Beats can not be Beats if they appreciate any up and coming culture. Also, his cheeks were used to store an extra puff of air, and according to him, they just grew over time, and I doubt if he or Louis or Fats Navarro or MIles or Bix ever cared about playing the trumpet correctly. Far from it, which is why you can distinguish their sound, from just one or two notes. The same can be said for Don Cherry and Lester Bowie.