On October 7, 1949, Down Beat ran Dizzy Gillespie’s reply to his old partner under the headline “Bird Wrong; Bop Must Get a Beat: Diz.” A month earlier Charlie Parker had told the same magazine that bop had no roots in jazz, its distinguishing mark being “no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug.” Gillespie agreed about the beat and drew the opposite conclusion: “Bop is part of jazz, and jazz music is to dance to.” Dancers, he said, were not particular “about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.” After more than a year of dragging his big band around the country, he was cutting and splicing his book “like you would a movie” to remove the shifts in beat, and called George Shearing the greatest thing to happen to bop that year. Some of the pressure came from his wife Lorraine, a former dancer, who had spent the year circulating among the crowds at one-nighters and reporting which numbers left the dancers unhappy.
Charlie Parker and Red Rodney at the Downbeat club, New York, ca. 1947, with Dizzy Gillespie (plus Margie Hyams and Chuck Wayne) visible in the mirror behind them. (Photo: William P. Gottlieb; Public Domain, Library of Congress Gottlieb Collection, via Wikimedia Commons)
Sources: Down Beat, October 7, 1949 (Vol. 16, No. 19), front page: “Bird Wrong; Bop Must Get A Beat: Diz” (full scanned issue; quotes on dancing, the “ruptured 129th,” re-editing the book “like you would a movie,” George Shearing, Lorraine Gillespie and manager Willard Alexander) — Internet Archive , Down Beat, September 9, 1949: “No Bop Roots In Jazz: Parker” by Michael Levin and John S. Wilson (scan of the original article) , Charlie Parker Centennial — Weekly Posting, October 9th, 2020 (on the September 9 and October 7, 1949 Down Beat exchange between Parker and Gillespie)
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