Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie: The Birth of Afro Cuban Jazz

The year was 1946, and Be-Bop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie quite simply had the best big band out on the road at that time. The band was spreading its exciting new style of orchestral modern Jazz, mixed with a healthy dose of blues and swing, all over the country and was beginning to spill over into Europe; and the critics…the critics were raving about this daring and innovative group that was translating the speedy Be-Bop language into a big band style that people could dance to, understand, and enjoy. Not to mention the fact that their leader, Dizzy himself, was quite simply playing some of the best Jazz trumpet that could be heard anywhere. It was indeed a good year for Dizzy, so good in fact, that you would think he would be on top of the world at that stage in his career, but he was not satisfied. Ever the innovator, Dizzy was looking for a new style, and a new sound to create and conquer, and the answer strangely enough, was bubbling away behind many of his own compositions. Right there lurking within the framework of tunes like P

Well I was the cause of it, that marriage, that integration. I tell you what happened. When Dizzy left Calloway, he told me he wanna do something. I said, “Well why don’t you get on this kick?” We had this idea for a long time. We talked together in the band about it. So he said, “You got the man?” “I got the man for you to do the gig.” So I got a hold of Chano Pozo who was a friend of mine and another bongo player, and I arranged for him to rehearse with Dizzy. And Dizzy was so enthusiastic, he kept Chano. (Gillespie 318-319)

His most famous composition undoubtedly, was Manteca. Manteca means skin or grease in Spanish, and back then, everybody was saying, ‘Gimme some skin. This was Chano’s idea of saying ‘Gimme some skin.’ (Gillespie 321) He went to Dizzy with the concept for the tune and asked him to notate it for him. The tune was based on riffs; first an intro by the bass, then a saxophone riff, a trombone riff, and lastly the trumpets. That was really all he wanted to hear the band play, along with improvisation and some featured drumming by him, because he was not to thrilled by American music and the way that it was constructed. He wanted the tune to be strictly Afro-Cuban, but Dizzy was determined for the tune to have a bridge and harmony, and so he wrote a bridge using some chord progressions that he had been playing around with for a while. He had planned on writing an eight bar bridge, but at the end of the eight bars, he had not resolved back to the original key of B-flat, so he kept writing and ended up with a very famous sixteen bar bridge, featuring a beautiful trumpet melody. This bridge is one of the highlights of this tune, because it is in such contrast to the shouting and upbeat feel of the riffs that make up the beginning of the number. Dizzy made sure that Chano got composer credits and royalties for Manteca and other tunes that he composed along with Dizzy, like Tin Tin Deo and Guarachi Guaro, due to his mysterious reputation for being very aggressive when it came to his money.

There is no doubt that the exotic figure of Chano Pozo made a great impression on Dizzy, the band, and audiences, especially in Europe during the band’s tenure in the late forties, but he also did much to help formulize a basis for incorporating a rich vein of polyrhythm into the language of modern Jazz. Other musicians, notably Stan Kenton, who was known for constantly attempting to, and failing to keep up with the fresh and exciting ideas that Dizzy was incorporating into his big band, tried to infuse an Afro-Cuban sound into their music, but few were able to capture the authenticity of Dizzy’s collaboration with Chano, as well as the mixture of excitement, virtuosity, and the exotic nature of the compositions that Dizzy wrote and performed with Chano, and the compositions that he wrote after Chano’s death, that were without question, inspired by the rhythmic concepts introduced by him. Unfortunately, like many Jazz musicians that exhibited pure genius on the bandstand, Chano’s tragic and untimely death, has continued to overshadow his exceptional musical contributions. On the second of December in 1948, the press reported that “Pozo, rated as one of the nation’s greatest bongo drummers, was shot and instantly killed Thursday night, while drinking at the Rio Bar on Lenox Avenue at 111th Street. Rumor had it that the incident that led to the slaying was an argument over narcotics. This angle has not been confirmed by the police departments.” (Shypton 202)

He’d dance, sing, and play; he had a spot in the show but, most of the time, he played for other dancers. Boy, he could catch them. Every time they’d move, he’d do something, a drumbeat. And he’d keep going all the time. He was playing the quinto. It’s about two and a half feet high, and it looks like a small conga. It has a very high pitch, “a-ra-ta-ta-dah-broooo.” When I first heard him down there, we talked; I mean, w

Some topics in this essay:
Chano Pozo, Dizzy Gillespie, Needless Chano, Street Rumor, Cuba Chano, Manteca Manteca, Afro-Cuban Dizzy, Stan Kenton, Barrio He’d, Carnegie Hall, chano pozo, dizzy gillespie, chano dizzy, roll morton, african cuban, jelly roll morton, jelly roll, cubano be-cubano bop, swing low, low sweet, speak english, music dizzy, swing low sweet, dizzy cubano be-cubano,