Who Plays The President?
by Wrongtom
With the current furore surrounding Kanye’s presidential campaign, I was reminded of the time Dizzy Gillespie ran for head office. What started out as a joke when the trumpeter’s agent printed “Dizzy Gillespie for President” badges became a fully fledged campaign in the wake of JFK’s assassination in ’63, with Dizzy as a write-in candidate for the ’64 US election.
Like Ye, many saw the bebopper’s bid as a publicity stunt, but Dizzy, in the thick of the civil rights movement, wanted to promote change. He began wearing dashikis on his campaign run which called for “a more progressive outlook towards Africa and the Third World” and “the need to eliminate racism in music, and all other fields.” He was accused of potentially stealing the black democratic vote, but in his own words he “had a real reason for running”. Aside from giving his badge sale proceeds to CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality), Dizzy actively wanted to “threaten Democrats with a loss of votes and swing them to a more reasonable position on civil rights.”
Despite stern calls for free education and healthcare, total disarmament, and an end to the FBI, the campaign still had a little swing of its own. He pledged to rename the White House the Blues House, and fill it with his jazz associates including Max Roach, Mingus and Mary Lou Williams as ministers of defence, peace, and ambassador to the Vatican, respectively. Comedian and activist Dick Gregory was approached. He suggested Miles Davis for Secretary Of State. Dizzy chose Miles for director of the CIA.
The campaign had a theme tune too. At the Monterey Jazz Festival in ’63, Jon Hendricks joined Dizzy’s quintet for a reworked version of the trumpeter’s standard ‘Salt Peanuts’ in which Hendricks and Diz go back and forth on a call and response workout.
You wanna good president who’s willing to run?
Vote Dizzy, vote Dizzy!
You wanna make government a barrel of fun?
Vote Dizzy, vote Dizzy!
At one point Dizzy pledged to send a black astronaut to the moon, volunteering his own services if no one else was up for the job. The first black president… IIIIIIN SPAAAAACE!!! The public couldn’t work out if he was serious or not, and the campaign eventually “sort of fizzled out” according to running mate Ramona Crowell.
Luckily Dizzy had another string to his bow which would keep him busy. For the past few years he’d been working with experimental animators John and Faith Hubley, and their second collaboration The Hole won an Oscar for best animated short at the ’63 Academy Awards. The Hole depicts two men, voiced by Dizzy and George Matthews, working on a building site. It’s a semi-improvised conversation which starts with Dizzy’s character describing an insurance prank on his wife, then quickly switches to his rights as a citizen of the United States, “who pays the president?” Diz doggedly quizzes Matthews.
Soon Dizzy’s construction worker addresses nuclear disarmament through a line of loaded questions and statements about dancing, moving out of New York, and heart disease. It’s a surprisingly funny exercise, and offers a rare chance to hear Dizzy singing a capella.
The next Hubley and Diz collaboration hit screens just before the ’64 election. The Hat features Dizzy and Dudley Moore as two soldiers guarding their respective sides of an unidentified border. When Dizzy’s hat drops across the line, the two get into a heated discussion about identity, ownership, imaginary borders, and the futility of war. It’s intercut with the Hubleys’ stylised illustrations of wildlife, and features Diz and Dud — a fine jazz pianist himself — teaming up on the soundtrack too.
If for some reason you just had a feverish flashback to watching the nightmarish hallucination sequences from Watership Down as a child, there’s good reason. John Hubley was hired to direct Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel. Hubley backed out after various disagreements, leaving Rosen to finish it off himself, though his unique style remains in Fiver’s hallucinations, and in the introductory fable, the tale of Lord Frith and El-ahrairah the prince of rabbits.
Hubley died in ’77 before the film was completed, but his wife and animation partner Faith continued their work, directing another 20+ films up until her death in 2001. She expanded on their studies of spirituality and political activism, something which the couple shared with their friend Dizzy who converted to the progressive Baha’í religion in the late 60s. He once again teamed up with Faith for a feature film based around a short they’d released in ’74, the Oscar nominated Voyage To Next starring Dizzy as Father Time and Maureen Stapleton as Mother Earth.
Diz supplied the soundtrack again, this time featuring wigged-out jazz-funk with soon-to-be disco chanteuse Dee Dee Bridgewater on vocal duties. Dizzy dabbled in disco himself in the 70s, and while most remember him as the archetypal beatnik bebopper in his beret and thick rim glasses, he was a dab hand as bandleader and producer of a stack of fantastic funk, soul, boogaloo and disco records. I’ve compiled a playlist if you fancy a listen.
Faith Hubley re-enlisted Diz and Maureen to reprise their roles when she spliced Voyage To Next into her 1986 feature The Cosmic Eye. Her most ambitious work, The Cosmic Eye sees Earth visited by celestial beings who, dismayed at the our warring population, offer an ultimatum of peace or total destruction. The aliens convulse and sway to a Benny Carter soundtrack, looking like an animated Miro painting. If you’re free for the next 112 minutes, I can highly recommend this fuzzy, psychedelic dream of film.
Faith enlisted her daughters Emily and Georgia to help bring this one to life. Emily had followed in the family tradition making a series of animated shorts in the early 80s, including her 1982 film The Delivery Man which tackles mortality and birth, and features a soundtrack by Don Christensen of The Contortions, creating an intersection between the Hubleys’ psychedelic films, jazz and no-wave. The Delivery Man doesn’t appear to be online, but there’s never a bad time to sit through all seven and a half minutes of Christensen’s claustrophobic industrial jazz opus ‘Holland Tunnel Dive’.
Emily continues to push the boundaries of animation. You can find her films in the permanent collection at MOMA, including her 2008 feature The Toe Tactic which combines her hand drawn illustrations with live action. Meanwhile, her sister Georgia took a musical path, forming Yo La Tengo in the mid 80s. I last saw them at Glastonbury in 2014 as back-up band for Yoko Ono who wailed her way through a set which left audiences divided. Mark Baumont wrote in The Guardian that Yoko was “impossible to take as seriously as she’d like” which seems a strange take considering at one point she paused her ululations to turn a page on a music stand, only to immediately launch back into another flurry of primal screams. Funny Lady. Great show.
Getting back to Dizzy, who considered getting back on the campaign trail in ’71 to take on Nixon. He soon discovered that Baha’í forbids taking political office, and focussed on jazz-funk instead. During the previous election, Diz’s ally Dick Gregory had himself run against Nixon, as did Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. To confuse matters, Cleaver ran as leader of the socialist Peace & Freedom Party, while Gregory was chosen as head of their splinter group, the Freedom & Peace Party. They both of course fell short. Nixon took office, searching for a middle ground between segregationists and integration, Gregory continued his activism, and, not unlike Kanye, Cleaver wound up starting a questionable fashion line.
Eldridge De Paris’ pièce de résistance, or should I say pénis de résistance, was a pair of virility pants, of which the recently converted born again Christian told Newsweek in 1975 “clothing is an extension of the fig leaf… my pants put the sex back where it should be.” The end.
