Dizzy Gillespie eventually pulled out of the race for president. He did eventually make it to the White House in 1978, when then-president Jimmy Carter invited him to play there.

Gillespie and Pozo shared other cultural bonds, too. “I think when you hear Dizzy and Chano play the Afro Cuban Suite, you hear the pattern of call and response,” Faddis added.

Dizzy Gillespie saw himself as a kind of musical prophet. “I’d like to be known as a major messenger to jazz rather than a legendary figure,” he writes in his 1979 memoir, to BE, or not to . . .