In A Mellow Tone, July 31: Dizzy Gillespie and Chico O’Farrill at Camp Fortune, 55 years ago
55 years ago this week, Dizzy Gillespie played at Camp Fortune with the Chico O’Farrill Orchestra and Gene Lees
We return again to the CBC summer concert series at Camp Fortune, in Gatineau Park - just across the river from Ottawa. Last month I featured the Bill Evans Trio - this month it’s Dizzy Gillespie and Chico O’Farrill from August 3rd, 1969.
Chico O’Farrill, Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo
Peter Shaw, the CBC producer of the series, invited Gene Lees (a Canadian jazz journalist and songwriter) to come to Camp Fortune with an orchestra. Gene Lees picked Chico O’Farrill, a good friend of his, to come with him. When Shaw learned this, he asked if O’Farrill could perform The Aztec Suite - a piece he had composed for Art Farmer. Art Farmer was living in Europe at the time and not available, so Lees suggested one of his other good friends, Dizzy Gillespie.
Although the performances were recorded for later broadcast, the recording remains deeply buried in the CBC vaults. On the show I will recreate the concert, as best I can with the information available.
Lee Edwards of the Ottawa Citizen was there on that Sunday evening in early August:
Dizzy Gillespie once said about music: "It's not what you put in that counts it's what you leave out."
His words were thrown into revealing perspective by two weekend concerts at Camp Fortune...
...
The calculated modernism of the Kenton band, circa 1950, pervades O'Farrill's compositions, right down the brass explosions, heaving dynamic changes, strung-out trombone pedal tones. But it's good writing from one of the respected names in the business, and of four compositions, the Suite was the most challenging, for both listener and soloist.
Sunday evening John Birks Gillespie, described quite accurately by Gene Lees as "one of the great innovators in modern music," met the challenge, playing trumpet in that stark, flying apart at the seams style which was such a revolutionary force to jazz in the forties.
...
Though Augo [Algo] de Fumar and La Cucarracha Variations featured rather tentative, flawed work from Dizzy, by the time the Suite rolled around he was in full voice, snapping off spiralling, screaming phrases with the legendary ease that has discouraged two generations of trumpeters. And from an interpretive point of view his improvisations were models of sympathy and discipline.
The evening and the weekend concluded on a moving note, with Gene Lees returning to sing his beautiful Mirrors with surprising compass, backed by O'Farrill's band and Dizzy playing obligato, Gillespie's solo was short but sweet, leaving out everything but whatever it is that makes for good music.
Gene Lees remembers the audience of 5,000 or 8,000 (his estimate has varied) giving Gillespie a standing ovation and screaming in appreciation after the Aztec Suite performance. He was up next with a new song written specially for this concert. He recounts what a hard act Gillespie’s was to follow:
And at this point I was to walk out and do the song, a ballad, with him and Chico. My God! I could never walk out into that inferno of applause. That audience had forgotten I existed, and with good reason.
Dizzy, acting as if he weren't hearing them, got out the music for his part in the song we were to do. It was through-composed, and his music was in a long accordion-fold strip. Somewhat formally, still ignoring the applause, he pretended to put it on his music stand, but dropped it. It spilled on the stage. The audience laughed, and the applause died down a little.
He gathered it up, his horn under his arm, and then went through gestures of putting it back together, like a man who can't quite figure out how to refold a road map. At last he succeeded, and, with an air of ostentatious triumph, put the music up a second time. And it fell again.
This time he stood his horn on its bell, its body tilted at that odd forty-five degree angle. He got down on his knees, put the music together yet again, and had the audience helpless with laughter. He stood up, and put the music back. This time it stayed in place. He held up a hand for quiet, then said into the microphone, "Ladies and gentleman, Gene Lees."
And he and Chico and I did the song.
He had calculatedly broken the mood of his own success, changed the ambience entirely through laughter, and then handed me the audience as a gift. It was incredibly clever, not to say deeply generous, and ever afterwards I understood the meaning of the comedy in the midst of his great and serious art. …
Gillespie never recorded the Aztec Suite, so we will listen to the Art Farmer version.
“La Cucaracha Variations” was a composition that O’Farrill worked on for decades. We will hear the version he was most pleased with, recorded on his 1995 release, Pure Emotion as “”Variations on a Theme”.
“Algo de Fumar” (Something to Smoke) was composed by O’Farrill for the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra but never recorded by Gillespie. On his album Pure Emotion, O’Farrill recorded it under the title, “Chico and the Men”. The liner notes of that album state that Gillespie asked O’Farrill to write him a song like “Manteca” in the early 70s. Of course, we now know that Gillespie performed “Algo de Fumar” at Camp Fortune in August 1969 - so he must have requested the song sometime in the 60s, not the 70s. We will listen to the 1995 version.
Steven Cerra has written about Pure Emotion in his excellent Substack newsletter.
The Chico O’Farrill Orchestra, led by his son, Arturo O’Farrill have performed “Algo de Fumar” live. Here’s a 2011 performance.
The last piece performed on that Sunday night, 55 years ago, was a new song composed and sung by Gene Lees - apparently titled “Mirrors”. Gene Lees never recorded this song.
Chico O’Farrill was also doing little recording in the latter part of the 1960s. His career revived in 1995, with the release of Pure Emotion. He died of complications from pneumonia in 2001.
O’Farrill was a prominent force in the development of Afro-Cuban jazz - composing for and recording with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In the liner notes of Pure Pure Emotion, OFarrill says:
It was never my primary interest to preserve the authenticity of Cuban melody and harmonies just for the sake of preservation. When I started my career in the Forties, a lot of Cuban music was very simplistic. I was always more interested in jazz; and when I got to New York, I naturally gravitated to Dizzy and other bebop artists, that fusion of Cuban music with the jazz techniques of harmonic richness and orchestration. Of course, I have been determined to preserve Cuban rhythms, and I always have the rhythm section in mind when I write. You have to write horn parts that don't collide with the rhythmic concept.
In the 1960s, the world was passing Dizzy Gillespie by - which is perhaps one reason why he readily accepted the invitation to play at Camp Fortune.
Gene Lees recounts the story of Dizzy Gillespie admiring the dashiki that Lees was wearing at the rehearsal:
Living in Ottawa at that time was a fine saxophonist from Brooklyn named Russ Thomas. Russ had a Russian wife, an exceptional seamstress who had made him several dashikis, not in the exquisite cottons of Africa but in wool, suitable to the winter weather of Ottawa. (It is colder than Moscow, and the winter lasts longer.) I loved them on sight. Russ wore one to the dress rehearsal and brought another for me. They were in beige-and-dark earth tones. Russ and I were wearing them when Dizzy walked in, and all the musicians stood up in obeisance.
I said, "Now see here, Mr. Gillespie, I hope you realize you're now on our territory."
"Damn!" he said, ignoring this. "Where'd you get that?"
I introduced him to Russ and told him Russ's wife had made it.
"I want to wear that in the concert!" Dizzy said.
I took it off and gave it to him.
Then he rehearsed, reading the Aztec Suite flawlessly at sight.
Russ Thomas changed his name in 1971 to Sayyd Abdul Al-Khabyyr. We will hear him play with Dizzy Gillespie in a 1981 live performance at The Rising Sun in Montreal. He toured with Gillespie from 1983 to 1987. He lived and worked in Ottawa from 1957 to 1970, returning to Montreal in 1970 to teach. Al-Khabyyr returned to his birthplace, New York City, by the late 80s. He died in 2017.
Gillespie and O’Farrill did one last collaboration in 1975 - Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods.
We will listen to a track from this release.
O’Farrill composed a suite for another trumpet player in 1996 - Wynton Marsalis. We will hear a version of this composition from O'Farrill’s last album, Heart of a Legend.
You can listen to the show live in Ottawa at 93.1FM, or at CKCUFM.com on July 31 at 9 p.m. The show will also be available for on demand streaming.