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I. YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT
Sometime in 1958 in Birdland, the New York jazz club named in honour of Charlie “Bird” Parker, the white saxophonist Phil Woods was overcome by a terrible sense of having taken more from black music and black musicians than he could ever repay. Not only had Woods modelled his entire playing style on the recently deceased Parker's, he had married Parker's widow, adopted Parker's children, and inherited Parker's legendary King alto sax, which, in the eyes of certain critical observers, he had the temerity to bring to the bandstand. On this particular night, openly tearful and self-medicating with heroin (Parker's narcotic of choice), Woods was so visibly distressed as to alarm fellow musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey, who took him to Gillespie's home in order to calm and counsel him. There, as Woods remembers it, he was able to share his acute sense of racial guilt:
I asked them if a white guy could make it, considering the music was a black invention. I was getting a lot of flak about stealing not only Bird's music but his wife and family as well … And Dizzy said, “You can't steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.”1
Woods was comforted. That his African American peers – both close Parker associates and as integral as Parker himself had been to creating the sound of modern jazz – accepted that he had as much right to this “black invention” as they did gave him the confidence to persevere with the music and, ultimately, feel at home in it.Yet what Woods's account doesn't reveal is whether Gillespie was aware that his words of solace directly echoed an idea initially formulated half a century before by W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Du Bois defined the music of African Americans as “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”2 Presenting black music as a gift to America from those it had enslaved and continued to scorn was part of Du Bois's strategy of promoting black culture as a vehicle for earning the respect of...