Q: What kinds of problems did taking black musicians like Hot Lips Page into your band present?

A: Lips Page was a beautiful guy and I loved what he brought to my band. He was able to handle the issue of being a black guy in a white band much better than Roy Eldridge or Billie Holiday.

Lips wouldn't take any guff. I remember someone in the trumpet section was purposefully messing up behind him and Lips stopped and said, "Motherfucker, you fuckin' with my life when you do that!"

And that put a stop to it!

Q: How did you initially react to bebop?

A: The first time I heard Charlie Parker, I thought "Very interesting." He was doing some things chordally, that hadn't been done before. I came from the same people.

When I came to New York at the age of 19, I was listening to Stravinsky, Varèse, Bach, Debussy and Ravel, of course. People said, "What are you listening to that classical shit for?" Why not? It's all music....

Charlie and Dizzy were playing linear things based on different types of chord structures--altered chords. I tried to do it as far back as 1938 but nobody wanted it.

They'd say, "That's out of the chord!" In other words, you're playing an A flat against a G7^th. Today, you'd say minor 9^th, but then it was "out of the chord." What are you going to do?