1947 - February 24

Babs Gonzales’ 3 Bips And A Bop – February 24 1947 

 

Ira Gitler – Weird Lullaby CD Liner Notes 

Like many listeners in the 1940s, I was introduced 10 Babs Gonzales when Blue, Note released the first of Babs' Three Bips and a Bop. To learn how he got to Babs and Gonzales, and the three bips and a bop, you must begin with be Brown, born in Newark. New Jersey on October 27. Now Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz (1960 edition) gives 1919 as the birth year and all subsequent encyclopedias have held to this date. Babs never said anything about it but it didn't look right to me as I began to write these notes. l looked in his book, "I Paid My Dues" (Expubidence Publishing) and found two conflicting dates. First he mentions something about "10 years old" and "1936." That would make his birth year 1926. But then he tells a story of going to the Savoy Ballroom on his fourteenth birthday with his friend Ike Quebec, who went on to become a renowned tenor saxophonist, was born in 1918 which would place Babs' earth entry in 1922. This makes more sense to me but il will continue to search for the official records, being the encyclopedist that I am.  

Lee Brown became Babs Brown because, as he told it, "my two brothers and I were all Babs. Big Babs, middle-sized Babs and little Babs. Both of my brothers were football players. Weighed 210 and everything - took everything from me." 

While he never enlightened me about the derivation of Babs, he did explain Gonzales. Babs Brown had gone to Angeles with $100 in his pocket in 1943, wound a turban around his head, in the manner of film actor Sabu, and called himself 'Ram Singh'. A job at the West Side Country Club in Beverly Hills, where he ministered to the actors and directors when they came to play tennis, led to his becoming film star Errol Flynn's chauffeur.  

When Flynn got into trouble with an underage girl, Ram Singh was set to return to New York. However. a burst appendix left him in the hospital minus his wallet, courtesy of the cab driver who had taken him to emergency. Hipster Babs, now recovered, decided to beat the system again and avoid "being treated as a Negro," by assuming the identity of "Ricardo Gonzales." It enabled him to get a room at the Sheraton until "Don Byas and Harry Edison found me. and I got put out the next morning. C’est la vie. J.J. Johnson and Harry Edison still call me Ricardo," he told me.  
 
Back in New York in 1944, Ricardo Gonzales became Babs Gonzales. He had, at his mother's insistence. taken piano lessons from the age of seven. For the first five years he coasted by giving the teacher one dollar for not instructing him and using the other dollar to go to the movies. Ile had learned his mother's favorite hymns which kept her satisfied. A chance meeting with Jimmie Lunceford inspired him to practice the piano and stay in school. His reward was a road trip during the summer vacation, with the Lunceford Orchestra. “The musicians were very nice to me by giving me money to run their errands and showing me about chords," he wrote in "I Paid My Dues.” "l learned more. from them in two months than I had from my teacher in a year."  

Babs hooked up with a new teacher, studied his chords 'diligently' and began working around New Jersey with Pancho Diggs' group. I’m sure he did some singing in this group and on other gigs during his teen years, but his real breakthrough took place in the mid-40s when the new music called be-bop captured his soul. In 1965. some twenty years after the formal advent of bop, he guested on my WBAI radio show and revealed: "l formed the Bips because I felt bebop needed a vocal bridge to the people. The fire was there. Bird was cooking, and Oscar Pettiford and Dizzy with their little group. but it wasn't reaching the people. I had been doing some solo work with Lucky Thompson around New Haven - as a solo vocalist. but it was more of less a real imitation of B (Billy Eckstine), to tell you the real truth.  Everybody was going behind B in those days."  

The Pettiford-Gillespie group to which he referred was the band that appeared at the Onyx Club in early 1944. Babs had returned from California in August of '44, hung out at Minton's and then gravitated more and more to 52nd street as be-bop moved downtown in ernest. The Connecticut gigs with Lucky Thompson were in 1945. Then Babs decided to form his own group. In May of '46 he began rehearsing the Three Bips and a Bop with Tadd Dameron, piano; Pee Wee Tinney guitar; and Art Phipps, bass. Babs played on an abbreviated drum set, standing up in front of the group. Al Lion of Blue Note came to hear them at Minton's "he said we gassed him," wrote Babs, "but we were too far out for the people.” 

By early 1947 Lion had changed his mind and in February Babs' Three Bips and a Bop did its first date; Charles Simon was on drums and Rudy Williams was added on alto sax. Rudy, also a Newark native, made his name with the Savoy Sultans in the late '30s. His personal, eccentric, yet very swinging style captivated all who heard him. "He had a nice style going for him," Dizzy Gillespie told me..." and then Charlie Parker came to New York and ruined Rudy."  
 
Bird's influence turned a lot of musicians around. Here we find Williams wrestling with his own transition. A year after, with Tadd Dameron's band at the roost, he had it more under control. Williams drowned in a fishing boat accident in September 1934. Incidentally, I believe the 1909 birth year assigned to him by encyclopaedist John Chilton is ten years too early.  
 
Babs' vowel-oriented scat is in evidence on the opening 'lop-pow', particularly in his solo half-chorus. Tinney and Darneron split the other half; Williams has a whole one with a 'poinciana' quote thrown in before Phipps shares a bridge with the vocalists and the ensemble takes it out.  

"Oop-pop-a-da' was Babs' best-known number, due in no small part to the Dizzy Gillespie recording for RCA Victor six months after Babs cut (they cut records in those pre-tape days) his. Basically it's a blues but Babs has an explanatory bridge in the opening chorus and thereafter uses a spiraling break to launch the soloists. Diz made good of this part of the Gonzales arrangement. 'Oop-pop-a-da' became popular enough for the Kirby Stone Four to pay it parody tribute ‘Who Parked The Car?'  

In addition to his scat, Babs built his 'vocal bridge to the people' with reworking of jazz standards such as 'Stompin' at The Savoy,’ here decked out with the deliberately scramble 'great big gams and pretty hams' and bop harmonies. Rudy quotes ‘The Christmas Song' and 'Savoy' ends with the Don Byas line based on its changes. "byas-a-drink.” 
 
There's a pretty Dameron intro to Babs' "pay dem dues," which paraphrases "ornithology" in the beginning of its section. There's scat and a lyric espousing the philosophy that you've got to pay for whatever you in life. Babs ciaimed that the musicians' local liked him because they thought he was singing about union dues.  

Bill Gottlieb – From Heebie Jeebies to Bebop: Saturday Review 30 October 1948 Volume 31 Issue 44 

Most spectacular influence in vocal bop is Babs Gonzales, a super-hep character who has deliberately writ- ten specific sounds to go with bop music. Unlike conventional scatters, Babs never improvises. He calculates the precise nonsense syllable for each given note, then memorizes_ these “lyrics.” In addition to providing planned effects, these fixed syllables make it possible for several singers to scat in unison, a device well suited to bop, which uses many rapid, unison effects. Instead of flowing freely like conventional scat, Babs’s brand is painstakingly articulated and is almost as heavy with vowel sounds as the Hawaiian language. His masterpiece is “Oop-Pop-A-Da” (Bluenote 534), which was also recorded and sung by Dizzy Gillespie (RCA Victor 20-2480). The copyrighted words begin this way: “Oop-pop-a-da, bli ah bu du, la be bli bop.” A more recent bit by the Babs group, The Three Bips and a Bop, is “1280 Special” (Apollo 776); while a_ tongue-in-cheek take-off comes from singer Bunny Briggs on Charlie Barnet’s superb “East Side, West Side” (Apollo 1084) 

 

Seventeen July 1947 Volume 6 

Babs’ 3 Bips and a Bop may mark a new trend in jazz. We don’t know. The instrumental backing is good with some hot rhythm. Some of the lyrics, however, go a long, long way – the wrong way. It’s worth a try, though. Stomping at the Savoy is coupled. 

 

Session Information 

Tadd Dameron, piano, vocal; Pee Wee Tinney, guitar, vocal; Art Phipps, bass; Babs Gonzales, vocal; with Rudy Williams, alto sax; Charles Simon, drums. 

WOR Studios, NYC, February 24, 1947 

BN296-1, Lop-Pow, Blue Note 535 

BN297-1, Oop-Pop-A-Da, Blue Note 534 

BN298-3, Stomping At The Savoy, Blue Note 534 

BN299-2, Pay Dem Dues, Blue Note 535