When Buddha Swings-With Max Daddy Dizzy Gillespie In Mind 

By Seth Garth

 

No question Fritz Taylor was crazy for jazz, crazy for that swing music from the likes of Duke and Benny, crazy for the Dizzy and Charlie cool breeze be-bop daddy jazz blowing out that high white note to the China seas off some swag club in Frisco town although the more modern, techno-jazz left him somewhat cold. The jazz craze of Fritz got a workout, got a talk workout every time somebody mentioned a jazz name or hummed some be-bop beat and that would start a fire in his head, a good fire unlike the others fires which disturbed his peace, the fires of his anxious passions from which he had to run.  

One night, to give an example of how quickly Fritz could pick up the slightest thread if push can to shove, he had been sitting at a table in a church basement getting ready to have a dinner being prepared by the good folks of the Catholic Worker movement up in York, up in Maine seashore country, along the coast. These good folk had volunteered to feed Fritz and his companions. (Although this screed is not about Fritz’s history with the Catholic Worker movement just let it be said that he had a long association going all the way back to his Grandmother Riley who was a Catholic Worker supporter even though he himself had long ago given up the tenets of the Church.) Sitting at the table was a distinguished looking man about his age, maybe a bit younger who casually asked probably in the interest of table-talk if anybody liked jazz, liked the be-bop sounds of the likes of Dizzy Gillespie.

That was all Fritz needed, all he needed almost before that gentleman finished his sentence. Fritz yelled across the table (there was a lot of noise from other conversations at other tables as people waited on dinner), “You mean the be-bop max daddy of cool breeze jazz? Sure I do although I didn’t get around to digging Dizzy, digging jazz until about ten or fifteen years ago.” The man nodded probably assuming that would be the end of it.        

No so lucky, although as it turned out after Fritz laid down his screed that man and he continued comparing notes about likes and who they had heard in person or on vinyl (Fritz mainly on vinyl or discs really since he was a late starter). But not before this:

“Hey I, like a lot of you if I am not mistaken about ages here, was a child of rock and roll, of the original rock and roll what they now call the classic age of rock, you know Elvis, Bill Haley, Bo Diddley, Wanda Jackson, Jerry Lee, Carl, those guys who helped bring us off that soft-sell stuff our parents liked and expected us to like. So I had no time, no rebellion against time to listen to some of that jazz stuff that would have saxs once I got hip that made the rock sax players look sick, except maybe Bill Haley’s sax player.   

“I also went through the folk minute of the early 1960s you all know that with Dylan calling the tune for us about a new day coming and others calling on us to chuck the old ways, like Joan Baez and Phil Ochs, people like that who made us think. As part of that folk minute I got into blues, first country blues with Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell [a couple of people nodded in recognition] and then the wild men like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf who amped the music up with electricity [more nods of recognition]. Funny how that blues stuff once I got into jazz had a lot of what jazz had to offer especially with guys like the Duke and the Count but I never made the connection then.    

“Like a lot of people, maybe most people as far as music goes, I basically stayed with the music of my youth, mostly stopped looking for new sounds except for a quick stop at some outlaw country music and a little Cajun stuff. Then in 1999, and that year is  important to note, I was listening as I usually do to NPR, to a talk radio show I think when I heard this music, music that turned out to be Mood Indigo by Duke Ellington. See the show was featuring Duke’s work both because the radio host was into jazz and because that year was the centennial of Duke’s birth. Naturally once I got that beat in my head like has happened before when music “spoke” to me I continued to listen and was floored by the man’s work.

“Like a lot of things that I really like when I get the bug the next day I went out a grabbed a bunch of Duke’s stuff at a record shop in Harvard Square (really a CD shop at that point) and played them for the rest of the day. That was the start. Then I pushed on to guys like Benny Goodman, the Count, Big Early, Sweet Baby James, you know the big band stuff. Eventually to the be-bop daddies like Dizzy, Charlie, Fatha Hines, the cool breeze stuff that broke from the big band sound and got a lot more into improvisation, although not just random blowing but picking up from where another guy left off, picking up a chord change and running with it. The search for the high white note that blew right out the door and changed the climate. Funny about be-bop though I should have “dug” it a lot earlier if I thought about it since I was crazy for the “beats,” for the mostly white hipsters like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, of the 1950s who were searching for their own rebellions because the music that defined them was be-bop jazz, that cool stuff that got played in the background at the coffeehouses and clubs where they read their poems and writings.                    

“Funny too because from way back when I was seriously interested in Billie Holiday although I never really associated her with jazz but with the low-down blues, with getting me well from listening to her pain alleviate my own. One day I looked up who was backing her up and lo and behold there were Lester Young, the Prez, and Johnny Hodges blowing sexy sax to high heaven behind her. Who would have guessed.

With that Fritz had finished his rant. Then that distinguished man who started Fritz’s avalanche started talking about all the great he had seen back in the day before they passed away, Dizzy, John Coltrane, the Duke, Thelonious Monk, and a million other be-bop cats. Also had a ton of anecdotes about jazz that put Fritz’s own knowledge to shame (and looks of sincere admiration from the others at the table whose knowledge was somewhat less robust than his or Fritz’s)

Here is the wild part. That place, that church basement where the group Fritz and the jazz man were talking their talk while waiting for their supper was the place where a local group of Catholic Workers in York were hosting a group of walkers, Fritz and the jazz man included, who were walking in the 5^th Annual Maine Walk for Peace whose theme for the year was to “Stop the Wars Against Mother Earth.” The Walk had started up in Penobscot Nation over one hundred miles to north and would finish the next day with a vigil at the Portsmouth Naval Base in Kittery at river’s edge. Fritz had picked the Walk up in Lewiston ninety miles up a few days before.  The distinguished jazz man had started from day one at Penobscot Nation. See that man was not only a jazz aficionado but a Buddhist monk from Japan (now residing in a Buddhist monastery outside Seattle) who was leading the group of several Buddhist monks and nuns chanting and beating their drums who were leading the other Veterans for Peace and social activists who were co-sponsoring the event. He had “gotten religion” about jazz when a lot of the jazz greats he was knowledgeable about had hit Japan where they were treated like royalty at a time when they could hardly get a hearing in the United States, the quintessential homeland of jazz.

Yeah, Buddha swings.