Players - Downbeat

52 DOWNBEAT April 2009
Dizzy Gillespie
Max Roach
Woodshed
Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach’s
Live Duet on ‘Bastille Day’
Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and drummer Max
Roach’s improvised duet “Bastille Day” can be
heard on their live album, Paris 1989 (A&M
Records), a concert recording from the only
occasion when the two bebop pioneers performed
together as a duo. The transcription is
written in concert pitch.
Roach begins the track by setting up a hiphop
groove with a strong backbeat and swung
16th notes. Entering after the opening vamp,
Gillespie begins his trumpet solo with a series of
two-bar phrases. During the first eight bars he
almost exclusively uses notes from the F-minor
pentatonic scale, except for some prominent
half-valved A-naturals on the upbeats to bars 5,
7 and 9. In the next four bars, measures 13–16,
he highlights a new bent blue note: the flattened
fifth, C-flat. Then, four bars later, he introduces
another new pitch, D, as a whole note in measure
21. This gradual expansion of his melodic
palette creates a progressive intensification over
the course of the solo.
Roach, meanwhile, uses just three elements
of his drum kit throughout the excerpt shown
SOLO
by Ben Givan
here: a closed hi-hat cymbal struck with sticks
(notated above the staff’s top line), bass drum
(bottom space) and snare drum (next-to-highest
space). At its simplest, his main repeating rhythmic
pattern consists of the bass drum on the
downbeat and the and-of-three, plus the snare on
two and four; it’s heard most clearly in bars 5–7.
Roach continually varies this basic pattern,
though, sometimes by reducing it down to a
bare minimum, as in bars 13 and 14, and more
often by adding embellishments. His most intricate
embellishments appear during the fills
toward the end of each four-bar section. One
especially recurrent motive, consisting of six
16th notes—snare/bass/rest/snare/bass/snare—
occurs at the end of bars 4, 10, 15, 22 and 26. In
measure 18, Roach displaces this same motive
an eighth note earlier in the bar, and in measure
28 he begins it on the and-of-two.
Featuring a small number of simple musical
ideas, “Bastille Day” is a case study in spontaneous
interplay, with Gillespie and Roach
sometimes exchanging short fragmentary
motives in close succession (measures 25–28)
JAN PERSSON HYOU VIELZ