Dizzy Gillespie - Live at Ronnie Scott's II

Dizzy Gillespie Live At Ronnie Scott's By Doug Ramsey Coming off 30 days of one-nighters in Europe, Dizzy Gillespie arrived in London with his quintet for a two-week engagement at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club on Frith Street in Soho. It was August of 1973. That summer, London was in the throes of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's terror campaign. The troubles moved from Ireland to England in March when the IRA planted four car bombs. Two exploded, killing one person and injuring 180 others. Following a series of fatal explosions and bomb threats, the city was on edge, never knowing when or where the next blast might be. Gillespie, pianist Mike Longo; guitarist Al Gafa; bassist Earl May and drummer Mickey Roker found a city in apprehension. "There was a bomb scare that day," Gafa remembered. "I think a mailbox had blown up. Taking a cab to work, we had to go through police lines. There was a high amount of tension in the club. Everything was really quiet. The place was packed, but it just had a weird feeling." Gillespie's ebullience and musicianship and the quality of his band would dispel the anxiety. In any event, tension was rarely a feature of Scott's club on Frith Street in Soho. The proprietor was as celebrated for his askew humor and laconic stewardship of the club as for his musicianship. His band introductions and asides to the audience were often standup comedy. A typical opening routine: 'It was very quiet last night. We had the bouncers chucking people IN. A guy rang up and asked, 'What time does the show start?' I said, 'What time can you get here?' No, but I really love this place. It's made a very happy man old.' When he was barely out of his teens, Scott was a tenor saxophonist infected by bebop. His first trip to New York, for the express purpose of hearing the new music played by it's creators, was in early 1947. Later that year, he went to work as a cruise ship musician and made several voyages to the US. Bop was in it's ascendancy, and on the New York end of his crossings he wasted none of his 48 hours of turnaround time before he sought out the music. He encountered Gillespie and other heroes he had heard only on records. Scott told of a night on 52nd Street when he listened to Charlie Parker's quintet with Miles Davis. He then went to the club next door, where Gillespie's big band was playing and Davis dropped by to sit in. Even then, Scott dreamed of owning a London club that would present jazz. In 1959, Scott and his fellow saxophonist Pete King realized the dream with the original Ronnie Scott's on Gerrard Street, not far from the club's present location. They opened with tenor saxophonist Tubby Hayes and his quartet plus two others whom Scott identified in the publicity as, "A young alto saxophonist, Peter King, and an old tenor saxophonist, Ronnie Scott. The first appearance in a jazz club since the relief of Mafeking by Jack Parnell.' Scott was 32. In their new club, the pair presented the United Kingdom's best modern jazz musicians. Two years later, King and Scott managed to persuade the American Federation of Musicians to lift it's longstanding ban on it's members performing in clubs in the UK. Until then, jazz exchanges were limited to formal concerts by Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Stan Kenton and a few others. AFM president James Petrillo allowed tenor sax star Zoot Sims to appear in Scott's club in exchange for Hayes playing an engagement at the Half Note in New York City. It was a breakthrough that helped lead to Ronnie Scott's becoming one of the premier jazz establishments in the world. Before long, Ben Webster, Roland Kirk, Stan Getz, Johnny Griffin, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Buddy Rich and Ella Fitzgerald followed Sims in the parade of major artists who have continued to perform at the club. Scott died in 1996 at the age of 69. In 2005, King sold Ronnie Scott's to Sally Greene, a theatre impresario. Recalling the IRA-induced anxiety surrounding the band's opening in August of 1973, Gafa said, "Even that first night was great because Dizzy commanded a happy audience. Lots of people would come and we'd go straight ahead. He loved just to show up and play. He was there to make music and we were there to make music, too." For Scott, it was not hyperbole when each night he introduced his hero of a quarter-century as "the world's greatest trumpet player." His wife Mary laughed as she recalled in 2012 that her husband told her, "You know, I really can hardly believe that I've got a club and Dizzy Gillespie is playing in it." Pianist Mike Longo, who composed many of the pieces in Gillespie's repertoire, is a Floridian who was an early protégé of Cannonball Adderley and later a student of Oscar Peterson. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge took Gillespie to hear Longo in a duo with bassist Paul Chambers at a New York club in the early 1960s. Dizzy hired the young pianist the next day. Longo served as his music director for nine years. In addition to the taxing round of gigs the band played before they opened at Scott's, Longo fondly remembers the ocean voyages on either end of the European adventure. "We traveled on the SS France, the ship that later became the Norway and made so many jazz cruises. Dizzy had arranged for us to get passage free if we'd play concerts coming and going. In addition, on the way over Dizzy offered to play for the crew, down near the bottom of the ship where they had their meals. They took a piano down there and we played a whole concert. They really appreciated that. All of us in the band had nice staterooms on a higher deck, but Dizzy was in one of the suites on the top. It looked like a villa. Mickey Roker and Dizzy and I used to play poker up there." Roker had been drumming with trumpeter Lee Morgan when he joined Gillespie. He had worked with guitartist Gafa in the trio backing singer Carmen McRae. Roker recommended Gafa to Gillespie. "I knew he was capable of good guitar playing," he said. "He played it like the piano, knowing how to accompany a singer." The drummer was also delighted to be working again with Earl May. "He was a great player," Roker said, referring to May's bass lines. "He walked like Ray Brown." Gafa knew May from his days at the New York Playboy Club and, later, The Cellar, in a quartet that also included pianist Larry Willis and drummer Al Foster. When Alex Blake left Gillespie, Gafa recommended May for the bass slot. Such were the tight interconnections in the New York jazz brotherhood that led to the creation of the Gillespie quintet we hear on these recordings. Longo recalls that during the tour the band crossed paths with McRae. She decided to travel with her close friend. "She just wanted to hang with Dizzy, and she'd sing every night for us. Carmen loved that rhythm section. She'd start singing and say, "Oh, my god, instant groove." We hear no Carmen McRae vocals in this swath of living history from Ronnie Scott's, but there is plenty of groove, instant and otherwise. It starts with "Sunshine," the first Mike Longo composition in the collection, and does not subside until after Dizzy's little blues surprise that ends the collection. In one form or another, Gillespie's and the band's rhythmic mastery is constantly at work. Mickey Roker has a drummer's appreciation for Dizzy's grasp of rhythm's essential importance. "A lot of people you work with don't know what to tell you; don't know what they want. They know melody and harmony, but they don't understand rhythm. Dizzy Gillespie was a master of understanding rhythm. He knew what he wanted from the drums, and he would tell me-exactly. He'd give you the rhythm, but you'd be free to embellish on it. He wanted you to really ring it out." Roker remembered the stimulation the audience at Ronnie Scott's provided Gillespie and his sidemen. "The crowds loved that band," he said. "The band was strong then, and new, and everybody was excited about playing. Oh, we had so much fun, man." Part of the fun during the engagement had not