gillespiana at The King's Head

WHEN Dizzy Gillespie's 1040s big band launched into its tour de force 'Things To Come', there were few sounds more audacious and modernistic in jazz. And half a century later, hearing Pete Long's 19-piece band hurl itself into the same piece, the beat faster than a sprinter's pulse, the brass playing impossibly fast and high, and solo trumpeter Mark Armstrong pirouetting through Gillespie's breaks quicker than a humming bird's wings, little has changed. The adrenaline-charged music of the world's first bebop big band is still some of the most demanding orchestral jazz ever written.

Back in 1946, when Gillespie's original group squeezed into the 52nd street basement of New York's Spotlite cub, its Oxford Street counterpart was also ajazz club, so there was a sense of continuity when on its London debut Pete Long's group spilt over the stage on to the 100 Club dancefloor in an equally tight fit. Long was the ideal man to front the band, his bonhomie and larger than life personality, not to mention an outrageous orange bandleader's jacket, capturing much of Dizzy Gillespie's avuncular stage presence.
But stage presence is one thing, meeting the technical demands of the music quite another. It took four solo trumpeters to take on the role of Gillespie himself.
It seems staggering that one man should have had the physical stamina, let alone the musical -

imagination to take the lion's share of the solos in every one-hour set, playing faster, higher and louder than the entire band. Steve Fishwick tested his lip on some of the band's medium-pace numbers, Johnny Scott excelled at the Afro-Cuban repertoire, and the star solo honours were shared between Armstrong and Guy Barker. Armstrong tackled the ballad I Can 't Get Started with the same technical assurance that he brought to the breakneck flag-wavers, while Barker fitted his own musical personality into the Gillespie style, with some dramatic half-valve effects on Minor Walk

In Gillespie's original band the rhythm section (which eventually became the Modern Jazz Quartet) gave the brass section a chance for their lips to recover by playing a number or two in mid-session, and singers scatted their way through the amiable nonsense of such hepster's jive songs as Ool-Ya-Koo and Oop-Pop-A-Da. Long had catered for this too, with Alan Grahame taking virtuoso vibraphone solos with the rhythm section, followed by some high-octane hokum from the singers Ray Gelato and Cohn Skinner.
Overall, a highly impressive first outing for a band that has dared to revive such challenging material. And getting their period accuracy right, there wasn't a single upturned trumpet in sight: Dizzy didn't add that accoutrement to his puffed-out cheeks and goatee until the 1950s.

Alyn Shipton. THE TIMES