Welcome again to Listening Sessions!
For this edition’s essay, I’ve taken a look at two of my favourite recordings by Dizzy Gillespie from the 1950s: Sonny Side Up and Have Trumpet, Will Excite! The former is one of the most exciting jazz recordings from the era and the latter is a relaxed, lyrical affair. I feel they illustrate the wide range of Gillespie’s artistry and also occasion a bit of a comment on the reissue business in jazz. What was once relatively affordable is now a far more costly affair.
I hope you enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts too!
Coming next is another one of those essays I have long wanted to write. There was an explosion of songwriters in the late sixties whose songs soon were recorded by seemingly everyone. There was Jim Webb, Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Joe South, Jerry Reed and Tony Joe White. There was also Mac Davis, whom Glen Campbell christened the “Song Painter,” which also was the title of his debut album, one of the great unknown classics of the era. Looking forward to getting started on this one!
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
Two Sides of Dizzy Gillespie
By: Robert C. Gilbert
There is always a thrill when a concept and its execution are in glorious accord. Take ‘The Eternal Triangle,’ a variation on ‘I Got Rhythm’ written by Sonny Stitt and recorded in 1957 by him on an album co-led with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. It’s fast but no too fast. It’s also long. Fourteen minutes, 10 seconds of music—one of the declarations of freedom afforded jazz musicians by the emergence of the twelve-inch album.
I thought about ‘The Eternal Triangle’ recently after seeing an announcement that Sonny Side Up, the album on which it is the combustible centrepiece, is being reissued on vinyl as part of the new Verve Vault series by Universal Music Group. As reissues go, it’s not too costly: $27.99 in the States but about $40 here in Canada, but still not exactly cheap. To build a collection out of these albums with their heavyweight vinyl, glossy and tip-on covers requires either a steady chunk of change or the discipline to go at it slowly.
It was not always this way. The previous reissue of Sonny Side Up was in 1997 on compact disc as part of the first batch of Verve Master Editions. Housed in a sturdy, fold-out cardboard case with a booklet that reprinted Nat Hentoff’s original liner notes and added a supplemental essay by Loren Schoenberg, the package may not have been particularly glamorous but it still bore a sense of the prestige of its contents. Even more crucially, it didn’t cost all that much: $15 or so in Canada (equaling about $30 in 2025 dollars) and not much less than what a CD costs today.
There’s some sort of a comment here on culture as a physical commodity that feels increasingly out of reach in a time when the desirability of physical ownership of media is growing, especially as Blue Note’s Tone Poet series, ECM’s Luminessence series and Deutsche Grammophon’s Original Source series are all far more forbiddingly costly than what the reissue of Sonny Side Up will set one back.
Leaving aside economics, it’s a bit of surprise that it’s only now that the session is being re-introduced on LP. If there’s another album that more cogently expresses the raw excitement of long-playing jazz in the late fifties, I have yet to hear it.
Its excitation emanates from Gillespie, a player, similar to Louis Armstrong, in which persona sometimes overshadowed the player. The trumpet with the horn bent upwards. The elastic cheeks inflating and deflating. The hipster soul patch. The antic showman going toe-to-toe with Joe Carroll for chorus after chorus scatting infinitely delightful gibberish on ‘Ool Ya Koo’ from 1961’s Carnegie Hall Concert and yelling out “salt peanuts” again and again during Charlie Parker’s opening solo chorus during the performance of the bebop standard—one of many that Gillespie wrote—from the legendary Massey Hall concert of 1953.
All these, what would be the right word here—perhaps hi-jinks—found a comparable expression whenever Gillespie would unleash a phrase as fantastical as those inflated cheeks. On the Massey Hall show, for example, there’s the wailing motif that begins his third solo chorus on ‘Wee.’
This side of Gillespie dominates Sonny Side Up. It’s an album centered on the indominable and indefatigable solo line. The thematic material is there to provide the structures for the improvisations that follow as is, save for two brief moments and another more substantial, the rhythm section of the album, brothers Ray Bryant on piano and Tommy Bryant on bass, and Charli Persip on drums, who are principally there to cycle through them over and over. Sonny Side Up is the Gillespie, Stitt and Rollins show.
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‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ is the amiable, compact opener. Jimmy McHugh’s melody is more paraphrased than explicitly stated, especially on the bridge, and in the process is transformed into something that could very well have been written by Gillespie. The trumpeter solos in between Stitt and Rollins. Each favours an approach that intersperses riffs with quick, extravagant bursts of phrasing. Gillespie is particularly labyrinthine, getting so caught up in the intricacy of a line that one wonders how he will find his way out of the web.
Gillespie also sings an out chorus that is extra relaxed on the beat, only grazing the melody. It’s so carefree that it makes Dean Martin seem uptight by comparison. It’s a moment of lightness on an album that is anything but. That isn’t to suggest that Sonny Side Up isn’t pleasurable. It’s that and so much more. But, make no mistake, it’s serious in its musicality.
Sonny Side Up closes with the steeplechase of ‘I Know That You Know.’ the kind of standard known more for its changes than its melody or lyrics. On the brusque theme statement here, Gillespie rides high over the counterpoint of Stitt and Rollins, who takes the first solo. Except for brief punctuations by the rhythm section, Rollins’ improvisation is unaccompanied, an unrelenting, skittering three-chorus ride that just demolishes Vincent Youmans and Anne Caldwell’s tune. The Bryants and Persip kick into tempo for Gillespie’s statement. At first, he seems almost daunted to have to follow Rollins but he pours on the steam by the second chorus and unfurls a line to start his third that quickly reaches orbit. Stitt follows, line after line pouring out from his horn.
‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ and ‘I Know That You Know’ are both under six minutes, the bookends to Sonny Side Up’s two statements of maximalism.
Avery Parrish’s ‘After Hours’ is one. What results is a totemic interpretation—one of two recorded in the late fifties (the other is by Phineas Newborn, Jr., Paul Chambers and Roy Haynes for We Three, which I recently wrote about). It affords Ray Bryant’s one big moment on the album. He was a lithe, fast player (check out, for example, his speedy solo on Rollins’ staggering reimagining of the hoary ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ from Worktime, recorded in late 1955) and somewhat overlooked by the many other formidable piano players of the time.
His opening solo on ‘After Hours’ has a glorious architecture in its precise trade-offs between his left and right hands. The brittle, tinker-toy-like essays on the blues high up on the keyboard run against the recurring motif on the bass keys. It stands out, not simply because Bryant is more felt than heard throughout the rest of Sonny Side Up but also because it is the only long-form improvisation on the album that doesn’t set out to conquer form. It’s not a contrast that is necessarily needed but its difference furthers enshrines Sonny Side Up as an addictive, absorbing listen.
Gillespie follows Bryant, using a mute. He maintains the pianist’s laid-back approach but also digs deeper, relishing the turnaround to the final four bars of the blues form to bend notes, add pauses and wring every last ounce of soul out of his horn. In a sense, he is playing the trumpet like a guitar.
From there, the music gets more heated. Rollins goes next, dazzling in his building of choruses that clearly articulate sequences of notes that no one other than a genius like Sonny Rollins could create. Persip accents this deluge by doubling his cymbal work on the snare. Stitt follows, as elemental as Gillespie and as forceful as Rollins, taking the longest solo on the recording.
The tale goes out that both saxophonists on the date were ready to compete, Gillespie telling each that the other was inching to best the other. Stitt, in particular, seems ready to best his counterpart, his playing on the tenor bearing the edge of Rollins that it often takes a moment to be exactly sure which of the tenor men is soloing. It’s a confusion settled once Rollins lets out one of his trademark squelched honks.
It happens about forty-five seconds into ‘The Eternal Triangle.’ There’s something almost clinical in how the eight-and-a-half minutes during which Rollins and Stitt play unfold. The momentum never lags. There’s never a sense that either player is running out of ideas or coasting on riffs. There is a relentlessness to take the ‘I Got Rhythm’ form and pound away at it, jabbing at it like a boxer until it kisses the canvas.
Rollins is first. He takes five choruses, ending just as he seems to have finished warming up. Stitt then takes eight. He’s even more relentless than Rollins, only coming up for air to let out a shout before digging right back into his volley of ideas.
They then trade off each other for seven more. The most remarkable moment of a most remarkable performance. Rollins and Stitt progressively meld into together, each completing the other’s thought, the resulting improvisation not a commentary between two musicians but a deeply engaged stream of consciousness.
It’s notable that Rollins’ final phrase—eight bars of careening long notes—is not a concluding thought but a need to wrap up so that the result can fit on LP. Rollins and Stitt could have gone for ten more minutes—heck, even for eternity—and there is no doubt that the playing would have remained deeply exciting.
Gillespie then solos for seven choruses. He rightly doesn’t try to top his colleagues harmonically but if the ‘I Got Rhythm’ is form still, improbably, upright, he blasts away to make sure nothing of it will remain by the time he’s finished. Save for the opening 32 bars, Gillespie opens each chorus with a stratospheric explosion that surely is the result of the profound inspiration among Gillespie and his bandmates at that very moment.
It’s almost subversive that Ray Bryant is then given all of two choruses to move through the changes. He offers placid variations that pass by unnoticed—beyond charging through them like Horace Silver at full throttle, there’s little that Bryant could do but mark time. No matter, Bryant’s moment is up next on ‘After Hours.’ Gillespie and Persip trade fiery fours for two choruses, and then the frontline charges ahead for a final time to repeat the theme.
Even as Sonny Side Up credits all three of them on the front cover, it’s long been seen as a Gillespie date. Even as by the end of 1957, the trumpeter was receding as an innovator, ceding the crown to his many progeny, the album remains the primal example of how he could make jazz an ecstatic experience.
There was more to him than that, of course. On the Massey Hall show, his sensitive way with a ballad came to the fore on ‘All The Things You Are’ as well as his well-honed taste—dig how he weaves in a quote to David Raskin’s ‘Laura’ on both ‘Perdido’ and ‘Hot House.’ This side to Gillespie is the heart of an album he made fourteen months after Sonny Side Up, Have Trumpet, Will Excite!
It featured one of the most interesting working groups of the time. With Gillespie was guitarist and flutist Les Spann, pianist Junior Mance, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Lex Humphries. This was not an ensemble to shoot the lights out but to dim them and create some atmosphere. Save for a version of ‘Woody ‘N’ You,’ the program features a wide-range of standards and pop songs, from ‘St. Louis Blues’ to ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’
The figure played by Spann and the rhythm section that they return to with agreeable regularity during Gillespie's theme statement and the start of his solo on ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy,’ which open the album, sets a mood that continues throughout the 45 minutes of Have Trumpet, Will Excite! There is also the opening rubato on ‘My Man (Mon Homme)’ that resolves into a burst of ‘Moten Swing,’ Gillespie’s punctuations during Spann’s solo on flue on ‘Moonglow’ and Spann’s Flamenco-like break on a fragile interpretation of ‘There Is No Greater Love.’
There is some firepower with the handclaps that commence a danceable version of ‘St. Louis Blues,’ including a sequence where Mance answers Gillespie’s phrases as it moves into tempo, and after solos by the trumpeter, the pianist and Spann on guitar that keep things relatively cool, the handclaps return for a dialogue with Humphries on brushes that moves into a quick shout out-chorus.
Carlos “Patato” Valdés guests on congas for ‘Woody ‘N’ You.’ The tempo is fast but there remains that sense of control. I attribute it to the presence of Spann, who favoured octaves when playing guitar before Wes Montgomery came into prominence doing the same thing, Humphries, who even when he was playing with sticks sounded like he was using brushes as well as Mance, whose light touch dominated even when he was playing a muscular chordal passage.
The album concludes with lightly swinging takes on ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (And Dream Your Troubles Away)’ and ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In a Five and Ten Cent Store)’ with the sole ballad, ‘There Is No Greater Love,’ appearing in between.
Have Trumpet, Will Excite! was reissued on CD in 2001, as one of the final volumes of Verve’s Master Edition Series. It took the rest of the decade for reissues of classic jazz on CD by the major labels to peter out. What’s replaced them is a more costly way to build a physical collection of the jazz canon but no matter how one is able to hear Dizzy Gillespie in his fifties glory, the price is worth it and then some.
The ecstasy and delicacy of your subtitle describes these Dizzy Gillespie albums perfectly. Loved your comment about Dean Martin even as I too wonder about the economics of releasing this awesome music on vinyl so late in the game.
Great writing as always, Robert. I always learn something new from your descriptions, which increase my appreciation of these timelines pieces all the more.
Really enjoyed reading this - Dizzy is a favorite for sure. Thank you!