Title: The Birth of Dizzy Gillespie
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 48×48
Year: 2015
Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art. — Charlie Parker
I have always been amazed by the dazzling and maniacal music of jazz musicians such Lester Young, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker and Charlie’s partner in Bop, Dizzy Gillespie. Who begat whom is irrelevant, since they drank from the same rusty can and turned their black-and-white times into mad crazy beat American jazz dreams, man.
The painting’s square format refers to record packaging, but the format and ragged drag-line striping may also suggest a vintage vinyl floor tile, perhaps from an Uptown jazz nightclub in the 1950’s, if you’ve ever been drunk enough to observe a floor tile this closely.
Parker wears a rumpled jacket that could only come from the 50s, and his bowtie borrows colors from Dizzy’s dashiki and fez. Their skin tones were inspired by a vivid party scene I read when I was a teenager, in Langston Hughes’ debut novel “Not Without Laughter” (1930 – he was 21 and a recent college grad), where he describes flesh tones and much else in terms of rainbows of rich colors.