Passing it Down, Paying it Forward: Jon Faddis Celebrates Dizzy Gillespie

Trumpeter Jon Faddis was at the hospital bedside of his longtime idol, employer, and friend John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie during the Christmas holidays of 1992, when Gillespie whispered a request to him: he wanted to hear Nat ‘King’ Cole sing Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song." Faddis promptly phoned jazz station WBGO, and was told they didn’t take requests. He phoned again and insisted. “Nat was the musician who had taught Dizzy ‘How High the Moon,’ so I know Dizzy loved him,” Faddis, now 71, explained to me. We spoke between sets of his homecoming gig with Steve Turre and Roy McCurdy at Piedmont Piano this February. “So when Dizzy finally heard that song on the radio, he was lying there in bed with his eyes closed, and you could see the beginning of just a little smile.” Gillespie passed away from pancreatic cancer on January 6th, 1993, at the age of 74.

The bond between the two trumpeters, being celebrated on March 26th at SFJAZZ, dated back to Faddis’s elementary school years in Oakland, when he started on trumpet (at age seven) and went on to long-term study with Bill Catalano, a San Francisco veteran of Stan Kenton’s horn section. Catalano had him studying the solos of Dizzy Gillespie along with standard method books. “Because Bill told me that Dizzy was the greatest trumpeter in the world.”

At 12, Faddis didn’t have access to most nightclubs, but Catalano was able to usher him in to see Gillespie live in San Francisco at Basin Street West, because it was a supper club. Three years later, his mother, Millie Faddis, took him to the Monterey Jazz Festival, where they noticed Gillespie wandering among the concession stands outside the main stage. “So my mom ran to the car, like a mom should, where we had 55 of my Dizzy albums, and she came back. By that time, Dizzy and I had started talking. And he sat down on the grass and autographed each one of the albums, and we kept talking. Sometimes he’d say, ‘I don’t remember this one!’, and I’d start singing him a solo off it. I think Dizzy appreciated this kind of shy young man that loved him and collected his records, just like he had with Roy Eldridge. And then my mom and I got to hear Dizzy on the main stage that night.”

Faddis and his mom showed up a few months later at Gillespie’s gig at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop, and this time the youngster took his horn. When Gillespie walked by them in the audience, “I asked him, ‘Are you gonna play the ending to ‘A Night in Tunisia?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You got your horn, you play it!' I almost fainted when I got on the stage, this was my hero! But when my part came, I took a big breath and just started playing.”

Educator and civil rights activist Woody Faddis, Faddis’s father, encouraged his son’s academic performance, but Catalano pointed him in the direction of New York and on-the-job training with a big band. Catalano gifted his star student with what he thought to be a more fitting trumpet, a Schilke. The smaller bore of the instrument helped Faddis establish his trademark skill in the upper range, where Gillespie excelled.

While still in high school, Faddis played in an East Bay soul band with Steve Turre and in local big bands. After graduation, he was called to tour with Lionel Hampton and in Europe with Charles Mingus, who told him, “You’re in the best college you could be in, right now.” Nonetheless, Faddis enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, but dropped out after half a semester. He returned to hands-on experience with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, where he enabled fellow Oakland expatriate Turre to join him. In larger ensembles, Faddis played lead trumpet. But living in New York also allowed him to reconnect with Gillespie in a small group at the Village Vanguard, in 1972, where “I had to brush up on my improvisational skills.” He continued as Gillespie’s go-to horn partner in New York and on tour, “because I knew all of his music.”

Looking to more lucrative work after his first marriage in 1977, Faddis backed off gigging and immersed himself in the studio scene, creating bright moments in commercials, on movie and TV soundtracks (he’s noticeable in The Cosby Show theme), and in collaborations with pop artists, including Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, and Tina Turner. He was essential to the Latin flavor of Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down in the Schoolyard” and the disco dynamism of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”. His earnings helped him buy his own home in New Jersey. Studio work also “opened my ears up to different styles of music, and I learned a lot about tight ensemble playing, like attacks and cutting off right at the 29.2 second mark. But without the creative gratification.” In a separate interview, Faddis commented that, “a lot of it was about drugs and sex, and not much about music.”

The arrival in New York of a younger Wynton Marsalis inspired Faddis to “get out of the studio and start my own group” in the 1980s. In turn, “I invited Wynton over to my place and talked to him about proper clothes and diet.” Faddis went on to help his new friend get gigs and maintain his stamina and an interactive approach to audiences. Their relationship extended into the 1990s, when they became leaders of resident large ensembles at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, respectively.

Faddis also found himself freer to forge an ever-closer connection to Gillespie, whose influence on the music seemed somewhat eclipsed by younger trumpet titans. For his idol’s 65th birthday, Faddis gave him a golden Schilke trumpet, customized with an upturned bell. Gillespie, who’d been playing a King trumpet, told a journalist in 1984 that, “I’m surprising myself what I can do on that new horn.” Faddis also appeared with Gillespie at the White House in 1982, directed Gillespie’s United Nation Orchestra, and put together a band for his 70th birthday, in 1987.

Throughout their professional pairing, Gillespie “was like a watchful father, watching his kid grow up. One of the things that a lot of young students today don’t know is how great a teacher Dizzy was." In an interview with a colleague, Faddis pointed out that, “I wasn’t the only [trumpeter] Dizzy shared his gifts with — there were Miles, Fats Navarro, Red Rodney, Clifford Brown, and Lee Morgan. Dizzy was very generous; he wasn’t selfish at all.”

Under the influences of his blood and musical fathers, Faddis embraced education as a lifelong mission. He led the Chicago Jazz Ensemble at Columbia College Chicago, initiating programs in Chicago public schools focusing on the music of Louis Armstrong. His upcoming Wednesday gig at SFJAZZ falls between his teaching a class Tuesday at the Manhattan School of Music and Thursday at Purchase College-SUNY.

The February performance at Piedmont piano was a fundraiser for the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, with kids bringing their instruments and voices to join Faddis and the other veterans on stage. “Young students like to listen to what’s going on now, but I make them listen to Dizzy,” Faddis comments. “His legacy is cemented forever in this music, as are Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Miles Davis. These are people who really sacrificed during their lives so that we could play together and learn from each other.”

For fans of all ages in the Miner Auditorium, Faddis will offer composer and pianist Lalo Schifrin’s 1960 suite Gillespiana fashioned for a quartet featuring Faddis on trumpet with long-time colleagues David Hazeltine on piano, Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass, and Dion Parson on drums. For the rest of the program, “I’ll just have to see what the crowd is like. But we’ll probably do ‘A Night in Tunisia’, ‘Groovin’ High’, ‘Blue ‘n Boogie’, and ‘Woody ‘n You.’ And Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’ — because a lot of people don’t know that Dizzy wrote the intro and the coda to that.”

Jon Faddis and his quartet celebrate Dizzy Gillespie 3/26. Tickets and more information are available here.

As an award-winning veteran entertainment journalist and author, Jeff Kaliss has written for regional, national, international, and online publications about jazz, rock, blues, classical, and world music. He’s also a published poet, based in San Francisco, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.