For some jazz enthusiasts, the further a band strays from group improvisation based on spontaneous rather than written music, the less genuine and inspiring the performance. The great white cornetist, Bix Beiderbecke, was a poor reader for most of his life, yet few instrumentalists have ever matched the beauty of his sound or the inventiveness of his melodic improvisations. The question of which ability is preferable in jazz-reading or playing by ear-has always stirred up controversy among aficionados of the music. Unfortunately, this student musician was not a good sight reader and apparently gave up college when he failed to make his grades. I do recall that in 1958 at Lamar State, the city's College of Technology, there was a trumpeter-the first black musician I ever knew personally and the only one majoring in music-who could play in the style of Clifford Brown, the marvelous second-generation bebopper whose Pacific Jazz album from 1954 I had found in a neighborhood record shop. The black high schools may have produced many gifted musicians, but neither then nor since have I heard of black jazz players from Beaumont. Of course, my awareness of jazz activity in Beaumont was limited at the time by segregation. In 1955 I knew none of this, and the closest thing to a living bebop musician I could hear in Beaumont, or anywhere in Texas so far as I was aware, was Harold Meehan, who played “legit” violin in the symphony but jazz alto sax when he could find jobs with local bands. Both Smith and Gene Ramey had performed with Charlie Parker early in the Bird's career, and Ramey later recorded with such bebop greats as trumpeter Fats Navarro and baritonist Leo Parker. Featured in this film are Buster Smith of Dallas and Eddie Durham of San Marcos, two of the Blue Devils's major stars. In the early 1980s my son and I shook hands with Ramey after having viewed him on screen in The Last of the Blue Devils, a documentary film on that vital Southwestern territory band. But the only figure I would meet in person was bassist Gene Ramey, who in the 1970s returned from New York to his hometown of Austin. All of these jazz figures were alive and active in 1955, with the exception of Christian, who died in 1942 at age twenty-six. What I never suspected in 1955 or for many years to come was the fundamental contribution made to this “new” music by Texans, including even Harry James, but more notably by a number of black musicians: Buster Smith, Gene Ramey, Budd Johnson, Charlie Christian, and Kenny Dorham, among many others. All of this I could recognize even if I could not comprehend the differences between swing and bebop, could not know at that point the evolutionary developments that led to the emergence of the musical language designated as bebop. Also, Parker and Gillespie's playing of their intricate “contrafacts”-that is, tunes entitled “Anthropology or Ornithology” but based, as I would learn much later, on the pop songs “I Got Rhythm” and “How High the Moon”-was unlike anything James ever attempted in the late 1930s when he recorded with the Benny Goodman Orchestra or even in the 1940s and 1950s with his own big bands. Harry's virtuosic performance of “Flight of the Bumble Bee” was a mere showpiece with nothing of bebop's ingenious improvisational artistry. Not even trumpet star Harry James, who had grown up in Beaumont, came close to Dizzy's breathtaking, pyrotechnical brilliance. But as an aspiring trumpet player, I immediately felt on hearing such music that in terms of theory and technique it was beyond anything I could ever hope to understand or perform.ĭizzy Gillespie's phenomenally fast runs and his stratospheric high notes were to me completely inconceivable. Long before 1955, the year of Parker's death at age thirty-four, bebop had already established itself as required thinking for all avant-garde practitioners of jazz. Pictured on the covers of the albums Harold purchased with district funds were altoist Charlie “Bird” Parker and trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, the two inventors of that challenging 1940s form of African-American music. In 1955, Harold Meehan, my orchestra teacher at South Park High School in Beaumont, proved the open sesame to many a wondrous unknown world, and in particular to the recorded one of bebop. From Bebop to Hard Bop and Beyond: The Texas Jazz Connection

Birks works trombone position chart