WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . BABS GONZALES: The Boswell of Be-Bop

The first things we need to know about Babs Gonzales is his name wasn't Babs Gonzales. Nor was it Ricardo Gonzales or Ram Singh, names he also adopted.

And that he was man, although when called up for military service he arrived at the office dressed as a woman.

This Corporal Klinger cross-dressing ploy worked and he was declared unfit for service.

So who was the man we'll call Babs Gonzales?

“He was a hip-hop forefather, small time hustler, one-time drug pusher and the self-proclaimed Creator of the Be-Bop Language,” according to Aiden Levy in his 2022 biography Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins.

He was also “always living large or flat broke,” saxophonist Lou Donaldson said.

“Babs was like a Walter Winchell, he was a news reporter about music. He knew everything about musicians – where they played, where they came from . . . their girlfriends. Anything you wanted to know, he could tell you.”

Rather fewer people knew much about Babs himself who had been born with the more humble name Lee Brown and grew up in Newark, New Jersey.

He was a pianist and a saxophonist but settled on being a singer, “a little guy with a large voice”.

In 1939 he formed a sextet with Dizzy Gillespie and from then on was connected into the fast breaking world of bebop.

He changed his name to Babs Gonzales and learned a bit of Spanish (so as not to be treated as Negro he said), spent some time in Hollywood (he was Errol Flynn's chauffeur for a while), formed a vocal group and was an innovator when he put lyrics to melodies.

Some of the lyrics were nonsense phrases – he'd heard Slim Gaillard – but he was on his way when he appeared at Minton's in New York.

He became friends with the young Rollins, was signed to Capitol by Stan Kenton's arranger Pete Rugolo and had the 18-year old Rollins on two of his sides in 1949: Capitolizing (Babs knew who buttered the bread) and Professor Bop (he wasn't going to let others take the top spot).

Rollins wasn't pleased with his contribution – too derivative of Parker he thought – but the songs were acclaimed, Babs appeared on Perry Como's Chesterfield Supper Club television show then organised his own tours, renting halls to put on nights which also featured Dexter Gordon and others who would become luminaries in bebop.

He wrote and self-published two books on the jazz life and the street hustlers, pimps and ne'erdowells he'd encountered.

Song For Lady Day

 

He toured in Europe regularly, lived in Paris for a while and was known as a playboy, jive-talkin' self-promoter who could be litigious if he felt he was being ripped off by record companies or promoters.

He released a number of albums on various labels including his own. Titles included Tales of Manhattan; The Cool Philosophy of Babs Gonzales (with Kenny Burrell and Roy Haynes), and The Ghettosburg Address (with Johnny Griffin and Clark Terry).

He would do Duke Ellington's Satin Doll, Stomping at the Savoy and St Louis Blues alongside his own compositions like Keep An Ugly Woman, Be-Bop Santa Claus, the scattershot scat of A Lesson on Bopology . . .

Keep An Ugly Woman

 

His hipster writing (and his dictionary of bop) appeared in collections alongside Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and others.

When he died of cancer in 1980 at 63 – or 60, depending on your source – there was an obituary in the New York Times.

He may seem dated now but Babs Gonzales was one of a kind: an entertainer, entrepreneur, shyster and promoter of the new sound of bebop which he preferred to call “progressive music”.

“Be-bop is a symphony with a modern beat,” he once said.

And that's why we need to talk about Babs Gonzales.

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You can hear a lot of Babs Gonzales at Spotify here

For other articles in the series of strange or different characters in music, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . go here.