>So, yes I am interested to see what he has to say about Parker,
>Gillespie, Monk, and then Miles Davis and John Coltrain.
***** The third link between jazz musicians and the left was the Popular Front jazz subculture, a network of aficionados, critics, promoters, and collectors, who organized concerts, nightclubs, record stores, magazines, and recording companies, and fought for an end to the color line in the music industry and the recognition of African American musics. In part, this grew out of the movement culture of the Popular Front. A number of jazz musicians played at dances sponsored by left-wing groups and at the left-wing summer camp, Camp Unity. "We used to play for all the communist dances," Dizzy Gillespie recalled. "The communists held a lot of them, in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan. At those communist dances, they were always trying to convert you. As a matter of fact, I signed one of those cards; I never went to a meeting, but I was a card-carrying communist because it was directly associated with my work, the dances, Camp Unity and all that kinda stuff." As late as 1951, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and J.J. Johnson were playing for a Labor Youth League Dance. [26]
[26] Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, _To Be, or Not...to Bop: Memoirs_ (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), p. 80
(Michael Denning, _The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century_, NY: Verso, 1996, p. 335-6) *****
not for Ken Burns, not for PBS,
Yoshie