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https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2015/10/john-birks-dizzy-gillespie-1917-1993.html

PHOTO: DIZZY GILLESPIE (1917-1993)

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/dizzy-gillespie-mn0000162677

Dizzy Gillespie
(1917-1993)
Biography by Scott Yanow

Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time (some would say the best), Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying Miles Davis and Fats Navarroinstead, and it was not until Jon Faddis' emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy's style was successfully recreated. Somehow, Gillespie could make any "wrong" note fit, and harmonically he was ahead of everyone in the 1940s, including Charlie Parker. Unlike Bird, Dizzy was an enthusiastic teacher who wrote down his musical innovations and was eager to explain them to the next generation, thereby insuring that bebop would eventually become the foundation of jazz.

Dizzy Gillespie was also one of the key founders of Afro-Cuban (or Latin) jazz, adding Chano Pozo's conga to his orchestra in 1947, and utilizing complex poly-rhythms early on. The leader of two of the finest big bands in jazz history, Gillespie differed from many in the bop generation by being a masterful showman who could make his music seem both accessible and fun to the audience. With his puffed-out cheeks, bent trumpet (which occurred by accident in the early '50s when a dancer tripped over his horn), and quick wit, Dizzy was a colorful figure to watch. A natural comedian, Gillespie was also a superb scat singer and occasionally played Latin percussion for the fun of it, but it was his trumpet playing and leadership abilities that made him into a jazz giant.

The youngest of nine children, John Birks Gillespie taught himself trombone and then switched to trumpet when he was 12. He grew up in poverty, won a scholarship to an agricultural school (Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina), and then in 1935 dropped out of school to look for work as a musician. Inspired and initially greatly influenced by Roy Eldridge, Gillespie (who soon gained the nickname of "Dizzy") joined Frankie Fairfax's band in Philadelphia. In 1937, he became a member of Teddy Hill's orchestra in a spot formerly filled by Eldridge. Dizzy made his recording debut on Hill's rendition of "King Porter Stomp" and during his short period with the band toured Europe. After freelancing for a year, Gillespie joined Cab Calloway's orchestra (1939-1941), recording frequently with the popular bandleader and taking many short solos that trace his development; "Pickin' the Cabbage" finds Dizzy starting to emerge from Eldridge's shadow. However, Calloway did not care for Gillespie's constant chance-taking, calling his solos "Chinese music." After an incident in 1941 when a spitball was mischievously thrown at Calloway (he accused Gillespie but the culprit was actually Jonah Jones), Dizzy was fired.

By then, Gillespie had already met Charlie Parker, who confirmed the validity of his musical search. During 1941-1943, Dizzy passed through many bands including those led by Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Fess Williams, Les Hite, Claude Hopkins, Lucky Millinder (with whom he recorded in 1942), and even Duke Ellington (for four weeks). Gillespie also contributed several advanced arrangements to such bands as Benny Carter, Jimmy Dorsey, and Woody Herman; the latter advised him to give up his trumpet playing and stick to full-time arranging.

Dizzy ignored the advice, jammed at Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House where he tried out his new ideas, and in late 1942 joined Earl Hines' big band. Charlie Parker was hired on tenor and the sadly unrecorded orchestra was the first orchestra to explore early bebop. By then, Gillespie had his style together and he wrote his most famous composition "A Night in Tunisia." When Hines' singer Billy Eckstine went on his own and formed a new bop big band, Diz and Bird (along with Sarah Vaughan) were among the members. Gillespie stayed long enough to record a few numbers with Eckstine in 1944 (most noticeably "Opus X" and "Blowing the Blues Away"). That year he also participated in a pair of Coleman Hawkins-led sessions that are often thought of as the first full-fledged bebop dates, highlighted by Dizzy's composition "Woody'n You."

1945 was the breakthrough year. Dizzy Gillespie, who had led earlier bands on 52nd Street, finally teamed up with Charlie Parker on records. Their recordings of such numbers as "Salt Peanuts," "'Shaw Nuff," "Groovin' High," and "Hot House" confused swing fans who had never heard the advanced music as it was evolving; and Dizzy's rendition of "I Can't Get Started" completely reworked the former Bunny Berigan hit. It would take two years for the often frantic but ultimately logical new style to start catching on as the mainstream of jazz. Gillespie led an unsuccessful big band in 1945 (a Southern tour finished it), and late in the year he traveled with Parker to the West Coast to play a lengthy gig at Billy Berg's club in L.A. Unfortunately, the audiences were not enthusiastic (other than local musicians) and Dizzy (without Parker) soon returned to New York.

The following year, Dizzy Gillespie put together a successful and influential orchestra which survived for nearly four memorable years. "Manteca" became a standard, the exciting "Things to Come" was futuristic, and "Cubana Be/Cubana Bop" featured Chano Pozo. With such sidemen as the future original members of the Modern Jazz Quartet (Milt Jackson, John Lewis, Ray Brown, and Kenny Clarke), James Moody, J.J. Johnson, Yusef Lateef, and even a young John Coltrane, Gillespie's big band was a breeding ground for the new music. Dizzy's beret, goatee, and "bop glasses" helped make him a symbol of the music and its most popular figure. During 1948-1949, nearly every former swing band was trying to play bop, and for a brief period the major record companies tried very hard to turn the music into a fad.

By 1950, the fad had ended and Gillespie was forced, due to economic pressures, to break up his groundbreaking orchestra. He had occasional (and always exciting) reunions with Charlie Parker (including a fabled Massey Hall concert in 1953) up until Bird's death in 1955, toured with Jazz at the Philharmonic (where he had opportunities to "battle" the combative Roy Eldridge), headed all-star recording sessions (using Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and Sonny Stitt on some dates), and led combos that for a time in 1951 also featured Coltrane and Milt Jackson. In 1956, Gillespie was authorized to form a big band and play a tour overseas sponsored by the State Department. It was so successful that more traveling followed, including extensive tours to the Near East, Europe, and South America, and the band survived up to 1958. Among the young sidemen were Lee Morgan, Joe Gordon, Melba Liston, Al Grey, Billy Mitchell, Benny Golson, Ernie Henry, and Wynton Kelly; Quincy Jones (along with Golson and Liston) contributed some of the arrangements. After the orchestra broke up, Gillespie went back to leading small groups, featuring such sidemen in the 1960s as Junior Mance, Leo Wright, Lalo Schifrin, James Moody, and Kenny Barron. He retained his popularity, occasionally headed specially assembled big bands, and was a fixture at jazz festivals. In the early '70s, Gillespie toured with the Giants of Jazz and around that time his trumpet playing began to fade, a gradual decline that would make most of his '80s work quite erratic. However, Dizzy remained a world traveler, an inspiration and teacher to younger players, and during his last couple of years he was the leader of the United Nation Orchestra (featuring Paquito D'Rivera and Arturo Sandoval). He was active up until early 1992.

Dizzy Gillespie's career was very well documented from 1945 on, particularly on Musicraft, Dial, and RCA in the 1940s; Verve in the 1950s; Philips and Limelight in the 1960s; and Pablo in later years.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1021.html

January 7, 1993

OBITUARY

Dizzy Gillespie, Who Sounded Some of Modern Jazz's Earliest Notes, Dies at 75
by PETER WATROUS
New York Times

Dizzy Gillespie, the trumpet player whose role as a founding father of modern jazz made him a major figure in 20th-century American music and whose signature moon cheeks and bent trumpet made him one of the world's most instantly recognizable figures, died yesterday at Englewood Hospital in Englewood, N.J.

Mr. Gillespie, who was 75, had been suffering for some time from pancreatic cancer, his press agent, Virginia Wicks, said.

In a nearly 60-year career as a composer, band leader and innovative player, Mr. Gillespie cut a huge swath through the jazz world. In the early 40's, along with the alto saxophonist Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, he initiated be-bop, the sleek, intense, high-speed revolution that has become jazz's most enduring style. In subsequent years he incorporated Afro-Cuban music into jazz, creating a new genre from the combination.

In the naturally effervescent Mr. Gillespie, opposites existed. His playing -- and he performed constantly until nearly the end of his life -- was meteoric, full of virtuosic invention and deadly serious. But with his endlessly funny asides, his huge variety of facial expressions and his natural comic gifts, he was as much a pure entertainer as an accomplished artist. In some ways, he seemed to sum up all the possibilities of American popular art.

From Carolina To the Big Bands

John Birks Gillespie was born in Cheraw, S.C., on Oct. 21, 1917. His father, a bricklayer, led a local band, and by the age of 14 the young Gillespie was practicing the trumpet. He and his family moved to Philadelphia two years later, and Mr. Gillespie, though he thought about entering Temple University, quickly began a succession of professional jobs.

He worked with Bill Doggett, the pianist and organist, who fired him for not being able to read music well enough, and then Frank Fairfax, a big-band leader whose orchestra included the trumpeter Charlie Shavers and the clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton. Mr. Gillespie was listening to the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, copying his solos and emulating his style, and was soon performing with Teddy Hill's band at the Savoy Ballroom on the basis of his ability to reproduce Mr. Eldridge's style.

According to legend, it was Mr. Hill who gave Mr. Gillespie his nickname because of his odd clothing style and his fondness for practical jokes. Mr. Gillespie began cultivating his personality, putting his feet up on music stands during shows and regularly cracking jokes. But by May 1937 he was also recording improvisations with the Hill band and helping the performances by setting riffs behind soloists.

Two years later, Mr. Gillepsie was considered accomplished enough to take part in a series of all-star recordings with Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Chu Berry. He soloed on "Hot Mallets."

That year, 1939, he joined Cab Calloway's band, one of the leading black orchestras of the era. Though a dance band, its musicians, who included the bassist Milt Hinton and the guitarist Danny Barker, liked to experiment. Mr. Gillespie would work on the harmonic substitutions that eventually became be-bop. Mr. Gillespie was a regular soloist with the band, and by then his harmonic sensibility was beginning to take shape.

Joining With Parker To Mold New Style

It was while touring with the Calloway band in 1940 that Mr. Gillespie met Charlie Parker in Kansas City. And it was with him that Mr. Gillespie began formulating the style that was eventually called be-bop. Along with a handful of other musicians, including Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke, Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Parker would regularly experiment.

On live recordings of the period, especially the two solos on the tune "Kerouac," recorded in 1941 at Minton's Uptown Playhouse, a club in Harlem, can be heard his increasing interest in harmony, sleeker rhythms and a divergence from the style of Mr. Eldridge. Mr. Gillespie was blunt about his relationship with Mr. Parker, calling him "the other side of my heartbeat," and freely giving him credit for some of the rhythmic innovations of be-bop.

At the same time that Mr. Gillespie was experimenting with the new style, he was regularly arranging and recording for Mr. Calloway, including one of his better improvisations on "Pickin' the Cabbage," a piece he composed and arranged. In September 1941, at the State Theater in Hartford, Mr. Gillespie was involved in an incident that shaped his reputation and his career. Mr. Calloway saw a spitball thrown on stage and thought Mr. Gillespie had done it; the two men fought, and Mr. Gillespie pulled a knife and put a cut in Mr. Calloway's posterior that required 10 stitches to close.

Mr. Gillespie was fired from that job, but spent the next several years working with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Coleman Hawkins (who recorded the first version of Mr. Gillespie's classic "Woody 'N' You"), Benny Carter, Les Hite (for whom he recorded "Jersey Bounce," considered the first be-bop solo), Lucky Millinder, Earl Hines, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. For Mr. Millinder he made "Little John Special," which includes a riff of Mr. Gillespie's that was later fleshed out into the composition "Salt Peanuts," one of his best-known pieces.

The early 40's were a turbulent time for jazz. Be-bop was slowly making itself felt, but at the same time a series of disputes between recording companies and the musicians' union resulted in a recording ban, so Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Parker were rarely recorded. In 1943 Mr. Gillespie led a band with the be-bop bassist Oscar Pettiford at the Onyx Club on 52d Street in Manhattan. And in 1944, the singer Billy Eckstine took over part of the Earl Hines band and created the first be-bop orchestra, of which few recorded performaces exist. Mr. Gillespie was the music director, and the band featured his "Night in Tunisia."

It was in 1945 that Mr. Gillespie began to break out. He undertook an ambitious recording schedule, recording with the pianist Clyde Hart and with Mr. Parker, Cootie Williams, Red Norvo, Sarah Vaughan and Slim Gaillard. And he began series of his own recordings that have since become some of jazz's most important pieces.

Recording under his own name for the first time, he made "I Can't Get Started," "Good Bait," "Salt Peanuts" and "Be-bop," during one session in January 1945. He followed it up with a recording date featuring Mr. Parker that included "Groovin' High," "Dizzy Atmosphere" and "All the Things You Are."

These recordings, with their tight ensemble passages, precisely articulated rhythms and dissonance as part of the palate of jazz, were to influence jazz forever. Though Mr. Gillespie enjoyed playing for dancers, this was music that was meant first and foremost to be listened to. It was virtuosic in a way not heard before, and it was music that sent music students scurrying to their turntables to learn the improvisations by heart.

They were also the recordings that captured Mr. Gillespie at his most impressive. His lines, jagged and angular, always seemed off balance. He used chromatic figures, and was not afraid to resolve a line on a vinegary, bitter note. And his improvising was eruptive; suddenly, a line would bolt into the high register, only to come tumbling down.

Mr. Gillespie did more than just record in 1945. He put together the first of his big bands, and then formed a quintet with Mr. Parker that Mr. Gillespie called "The height of perfection in our music." It included Bud Powell on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Max Roach on drums. Later that year, Mr. Gillespie reformed the big band, called the Hepsations of 1945. Despitea tour of the South that was almost catastrophically unsuccessful, the band stayed together for the next four years. Another Revolution: Afro-Cuban Jazz

It was with this big band, whose name became the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, that Mr. Gillespie created his second revolution in the late 1940's. An old friend, the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauza, who had made it possible for him to join the Calloway orchestra, introduced Mr. Gillespie to the Cuban conga player Luciano (Chano Pozo) Gonzales.

"Dizzy used to ask me about Cuban rhythms all the time," said Mr. Bauza. "I introduced him to Chano Pozo, and they wrote 'Manteca.' It was a good marriage of two cultures. That was the beginning of Afro-Cuban jazz. That blew up the whole world."

Mr. Gillespie quickly produced the sketches for "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop," which were finished by the composer and arranger George Russell and included some of the first modal harmonies in jazz. And in "Manteca," Mr. Gillespie's collaboration with Mr. Pozo, he created a work that is still performed and quoted regularly, by both Latin orchestras and by jazz musicians. Without the sophisticated arrangements and the conjunction of Latin rhythms and jazz harmonies that Mr. Gillespie provided, both jazz and Latin music would be radically different today.

The band's highest moments, however, were when Mr. Gillespie -- in a move that characterized his career -- hired some of the young be-boppers on the scene. Among them were the pianist John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Kenny Clarke, who went on to form the Modern Jazz Quartet. "It was an incredible experience because so much was going on," Mr. Lewis recalled. "Not only was he using these great be-bop arrangements but he was so encouraging. It was my first job, a formative experience."

Mr. Gillespie's was the last great evolutionary big band, and during its tenure he hired the best soloists, from Jimmy Heath, James Moody and Sonny Stitt to John Coltrane and Paul Gonzalves. Arrangements like "Things to Come," with their exhilarating precision, were be-bop and orchestral landmarks, with dense harmonies and flashy rhythms.

And it was with his big band that Mr. Gillespie fully developed the other side of his musical personality. With songs like "He Beeped When He Should Have Bopped," "Ool Ya Koo", "Oo Pop A Da" and others, he began popularizing the Bohemian, Dadaesque aspects of be-bop.

Mr. Gillespie was a keen popularizer, and with his sense of comedy managed to make his shows into an extraordinary mixture of entertainment and esthetics. In so doing, he was following in the path of his ex-bandleader, Mr. Calloway, as well as Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller.

From then on, he cultivated an audience that went beyond the average jazz fan, and it was this reputation that helped in his later career. And at the same time, be-bop fashion made an appearance, with Mr. Gillespie, in thick glasses and a beret, leading the way.

The big-band business slowed down considerably in the late 1940's and early 50's, and Mr. Gillespie teamed with Stan Kenton's orchestra as a featured soloist. Then he began using a small group again.

He formed his own record company in 1951, Dee Gee, which folded soon after. Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Parker recorded for Verve, with Mr. Monk, and he and Mr. Parker performed at Birdland in Manhattan the next year. He toured Europe and in 1953 joined Mr. Parker, Mr. Powell, Mr. Roach and the bassist Charles Mingus for a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto that became legendary for its disorganization and for acrimony among performers.

It was also in 1953 that someone fell on Mr. Gillespie's trumpet, and bent it. When he played the misshapen instrument, Mr. Gillespie found he could hear the sound more clearly, and so decided to keep it. Along with those cheeks, it became his trademark.

During the 1950's Mr. Gillespie recorded with with Stan Getz, Stuff Smith, Sonny Stitt, Mr. Eldridge and others. In 1956, he formed another big band and, at the behest of the United States State Department, toured the Middle East and South America. In 1957, Mr. Gillespie presided over "The Eternal Triangle," a recording that includes Mr. Stitt and Sonny Rollins and some of the hardest trumpet blowing ever recorded.

Through the 1960's and 70's, Mr. Gillespie toured frequently, playing up to 300 shows a year, sometimes with an electric bassist and a guitarist, sometimes with a more traditional group. And in 1974 he signed with Pablo Records and began recording prolifically again. He won Grammies in 1975 and 1980, and he published his autobiography, "To Be or Not to Bop," in 1979.

In the last decade, Mr. Gillespie's career seemed recharged, and he became ubiquitous on the concert circuit as a special guest. He formed a Latin big band that performed with Paquito De Rivera, among others, and he constantly shuffled the personnel of his small groups.

Last year, in honor of his 75th birthday, Mr. Gillepsie played for four weeks at the Blue Note club in Manhattan, a stint that featured perhaps the greatest selection of jazz musicians ever brought together for a tribute. The month covered his career, from small groups, to Afro-Cuban jazz to a big band. As usual, he was his witty amiable self, in command of both the audience and his trumpet.

Mr. Gillespie is survived by his wife of 52 years, Lorraine.

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/dizzy-gillespie/

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Dizzy Gillespie

Dizzy Gillespie is an NEA Jazz Master

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, along with Charlie Parker, ushered in the era of Be-Bop in the American jazz tradition. He was born Cheraw, South Carolina, and was the youngest of nine children. He began playing piano at the age of four and received a music scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina. Most noted for his trademark "swollen cheeks", Gillespie admitted to copying the style of trumpeter Roy Eldridge early in his career.

He replaced Eldridge in the 'Teddy Hill' Band after Eldridge's departure. He eventually began experimenting and creating his own style which would eventually come to the attention of Mario Bauza, the Godfather of Afro-Cuban jazz who was then a member of the Cap Calloway Orchestra, joining Calloway in 1939, Gillespie was fired after two years when he cut a portion of the Calloway's buttocks with a knife after Calloway accused him of throwing spitballs (the two men later became lifelong friends and often retold this story with great relish until both of their deaths).

Although noted for his on and off-stage clowning, Gillespie endured as one of the founding fathers of the Afro-Cuban &/or Latin Hazz tradition. Influenced by Bauza, known as Gillespies musical father, he was able to fuse Afro-American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms to form a burgeoning CuBop sound. Always a musical ambassador, he toured Africa, the Middle East and Latin America under the sponsorship of the US State Department. Quite often he returned, not only with fresh musical ideas, but with musicians who would eventually go on the achieve world renown.

Among his proteges and collaborators are 'Chano Pozo'. the great Afro-Cuban percussionist; Danilo perez, a master pianist and composer originally from Pnama; Arturo Sandoval, trumpeter, composer and music educator originally from Cuba; Mongo Santamaria, an Afro-Cuban conguero, bongeuro and composer; David Sanchez, saxophonist and composer; Chucho Valdes, an Afro-Cuban virtuoso pianist and composer; and Bobby Sanabria, a Bronx, NY-born Nuyorican percussionist, composer, educator, bandleader and expert in the Afro-Cuban musical tradition. Indeed, many Latin jazz classics such as "Manteca", "A Night in Tunisia" and "Guachi Guaro [Soul Sauce]" were composed by Gillespie and his musical collaborators.

With a strong sense of pride in his Afro-American heritage, he left a legacy of musical excellence that embraced and fused all musical forms, but particularly those forms with roots deep in Africa such as the music of Cuba, other Latin American countries and the Caribbean. Additionally, he left a legacy of goodwill and good humor that infused jazz musicians and fans throughout the world with the genuine sense of jazz's ability to transcend national and ethnic boundaries—for this reason, Gillespie was and is an international treasure.

Awards

New Star Award, Esquire Magazine (1944); Handel Medallion, City of New York (1972); Paul Robeson Award, Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies (1972); Performs "Salt Peanuts" with President Carter at White House Jazz Concert (1978); Inducted into Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame (1982); Lifetime Achievement Award, National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) (1989); National Medal of Arts, President Bush (1989); Duke Ellington Award, Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (1989); Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1989); Kennedy Center Honors Award (1990); Fourteen honorary degrees, including Ph.D., Rutgers University (1972); Ph.D., Chicago Conservatory of Music (1978); Awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Artist Biography by Scott Yanow

Trumpet virtuoso and bop revolutionary whose desire to innovate helped invent and define the musical vocabulary for an entire genre.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/dizzy_gillespie_runs_for_us_president_1964_.html

Dizzy Gillespie Runs for US President, 1964.

Promises to Make Miles Davis Head of the CIA
October 1st, 2012
OPEN CULTURE

There comes a point in every national election year when I reach total saturation and have to tune it all out to stay sane—the nonstop streams of vitriol, the spectacles of electoral dysfunction, the ads, the ads, the ads. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. But imagine how differently we could feel about presidential elections if people like, I don’t know, Dizzy Gillespie could get on a major ticket? That’s what might have happened in 1964 if “a little-known presidential campaign… had been able to vault the millionaires-only hurdle.” What began as one of Dizzy’s famous practical jokes, and a way to raise money for CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) and other civil rights organizations became something more, a way for Dizzy’s fans to imagine an alternative to the “millionaire’s-only” club represented by Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater.

Gillespie’s campaign had “Dizzy Gillespie for President” buttons, now collector’s items, and “Dizzy for President” became the title of an album recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1963, from which the recording comes (see right below).

A take on his trademark tune “Salt Peanuts,” “Vote Dizzy” was Gillespie’s official campaign song and includes lyrics like:

Your politics ought to be a groovier thing
Vote Dizzy! Vote Dizzy!
So get a good president who’s willing to swing
Vote Dizzy! Vote Dizzy!

It’s definitely groovier than either one of our current campaigns. Dizzy “believed in civil rights, withdrawing from Vietnam and recognizing communist China,” and he wanted to make Miles Davis head of the CIA, a role I think would have suited Miles perfectly. Although Dizzy’s campaign was something of a publicity stunt for his politics and his persona, it’s not unheard of for popular musicians to run for president in earnest. In 1979, revolutionary Nigerian Afrobeat star Fela Kuti put himself forward as a candidate in his country, but was rejected. More recently, Haitian musician and former Fugee Wyclef Jean attempted a sincere run at the Haitian presidency, but was disqualified for reasons of residency. It’s a little hard to imagine a popular musician mounting a serious presidential campaign in the U.S., but then again, the 80s were dominated by the strange reality of a former actor in the White House, so why not? In any case, revisiting Dizzy Gillespie’s mid-century political theater may provide a needed respite from the onslaught of the current U.S. campaign season.

Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

http://www.popmatters.com/review/gillespiedizzy-career1937/

Dizzy Gillespie
Career: 1937-1992
by Will Layman
26 May 2005

PopMatters

Dizzy Gillespie is the greatest post-war musician never to make a truly great album.

Before bebop, of course, musicians did not make “albums”, but merely 78 RPM singles. They recorded these “sides” in batches certainly, but they were not conceived of as groups of songs, and so the great recordings of Armstrong, Ellington, and Hawkins were released piecemeal and today are collected in anthologies that we think of as “great albums.” But Dizzy Gillespie’s contemporaries in the bop movement each birthed a collection of songs that has become representative of their genius—Parker, Monk, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis all made untouchable albums. In the next generation such a feat was essentially required for the greats such as Sonny Rollins (Saxophone Colossus) and John Coltrane (Giant Steps).

Dizzy was as great a musician as any of these figures. Only Pops, Duke, and Trane rival him in importance, and no one—even Armstrong—can touch him as a pure trumpet player. It seems almost a paradox then that a musician who recorded throughout a career that lasted until the early 1990s never made a brilliant album. A handful of Gillespie platters were memorable—Sonny Side Up, Swing Low Sweet Cadillac, Dizzy’s Big Four—and of course he made a few classics with Charlie Parker. But Dizzy’s is a career of innovation, consistency, humor, intelligence, and integrity—but it’s also a career without a single shining moment.

All of this makes Shout Factory’s Career compilation a grand slam—an essential career retrospective from one of the 20th century giants of American music. The lack of a single must-have album from The Diz makes this two-disc set more than just good and better than great. This is theGillespie collection on the market today.

Career is so good because it collects highlights from nearly every phase of Dizzy’s storied career. For those who don’t know the Gillespie legacy, this collection lays it out, tune by tune. Dizzy started as a bright, crazy young trumpet star in the better big bands of the late 1930s. Here, we catch him with Teddy Hill on “King Porter Stomp” (1937), Cab Calloway on his own composition “Pickin’ the Cabbage” (1940), and then with the great Billy Eckstine band from 1944. Diz is clearly a disciple of Roy Eldridge in these early recordings, but the seeds of his own style are in evidence—an ease in the upper register and a penchant for chromaticism as he easily glides from chord to chord.

Dizzy’s career as an innovator, however, really takes off in the small group sides from the mid-‘40s. Career gives us seven sextet recordings from 1945 and ‘46 that show how Dizzy conceived of a bebop sound that came out of swing as much as reacted against it. The version of “I Can’t Get Started” included here is hardly boppish, with a very bland accompaniment, but you can hear Dizzy finding the most interesting notes from the harmony in building his solo. Only two months later, on “Groovin’ High”, Dizzy is teamed up with Charlie “Yardbird” Parker and the sparks are genuinely flying—with the two horns playing the unison head in perfect synch and Dizzy’s muted solo suggesting the puckish humor that would always be part of his style. The three tracks with this line-up (also featuring Slam Stewart on bass and Cozy Cole’s drums) are stone gems, none better than “Dizzy Atmosphere”, where the flow from Bird’s solo to Dizzy demonstrates why Dizzy said of Parker, “He is the other half of my heartbeat.”

While Dizzy’s small group work is justifiably famous, he did not abandon the big band sound as he was helping to invent bebop. Here, we get a heaping dose of Dizzy’s late-‘40s big band—particularly the sides that introduced the concept of Afro-Cuban jazz, featuring Chano Pozo on congas. “Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” and “Manteca” are diamonds that haven’t stopped shimmering in 60 years—brilliant essays in rhythm and arrangement (credited to George Russell and Gil Fuller) that still scream out of your speakers at full throttle. Dizzy’s lead on “Manteca” is one of the great sounds in American music.

When Dizzy returned to small group recordings in the 1950s, the bebop sound was no longer a scandal. “Bloomdido” is essentially from an all-star session with Diz, Bird, Thelonious Monk on piano, Curly Russell on bass and Buddy Rich on drums. There’s nothing to say about music this good other than: listen to it. Dizzy’s solos here, on “Birk’s Works” with Milt Jackson, and on the two tracks from the all-star concert with Bird, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach (“Salt Peanuts” and “Perdido”) are the pinnacle of jazz trumpet playing—virtuosic, subtle, sliding, blue, declamatory and fiendishly clever. It is standing ovation stuff, and don’t be surprised if you find yourself getting to your feet in your living room.

Disc Two of Career moves us into the more workmanlike stage of Dizzy’s career. Like a great physicist, Dizzy did his groundbreaking work early, but the career that followed was special if not consistently revolutionary. During this period, Dizzy recorded a great deal for Norman Grantz’s Verve label, appearing often with “special guests.” The “It Don’t Mean a Thing” included here, with Stan Getz, Roach, and the Oscar Peterson Trio, is a fine example of this kind of one-off meeting working wonderfully well for Dizzy. His solo is like scrambled eggs and salsa—whirling and hot as steam. The “Mean to Me” (1956)with Sonny Stitt and John Lewis shows a more conversational side of Diz, as he cools it, despite a double-time break at the start of this solo that reminds you how much fuel he has in the tank even on a medium swinger.

The later big band recordings are remarkable for their young star line-ups (Lee Morgan, Melba Liston, Al Grey, Benny Golson, Wynton Kelly, among others) and punch. Another from 1975 with Machito’s big band shows that, even late in his career, Dizzy was essentially a lead trumpeter with a bebop soul, riding over an electric bass and team of percussion. Disc Two also features an early ‘60s working group with Lalo Schiffrin on piano that was typical of some of the more faceless bands that Dizzy lead in the latter part of his career, but darn if they aren’t extremely hot recordings, demonstrating that Dizzy was a brilliant bandleader even when his talent was less than top-shelf.

Dizzy performed consistently for more than a half-century and, while this set properly focuses on the ‘40s and ‘50s, it includes two tracks from the great trumpeter’s twilight. “Wheatleigh Hall” pairs him with Cuban disciple Arturo Sandoval. Dizzy’s adoption of Cuban music made him a hero on the island, and Sandoval was one of many Cubans who owe their jazz careers to the Diz. But, as a trumpeter, Sandoval will always be Dizzy’s inferior, even on this 1982 track. The best of Dizzy’s imitators realized that, like Miles Davis, you could apprentice in Dizzy’s high-flying style but it was better to stake out your own ground artistically. Sandoval is a brassy imitation without nearly the humor and sly wit that Dizzy brings to even this late date.

The final track on Career is a tribute date recorded shortly before Dizzy left us to join Bird, Monk, Duke and Pops up above. Dizzy lived one of the longest and most productive lives in jazz. He was and is the role model for young guys in the music—no drug use, married for a half century to one woman, a good businessman, and incomparable combination of showman and artist. In this last recording, he’s frail, and the musician accompanying him surely knew it. But it hardly matters. The group plays the iconic tune “Bebop”—of course, Dizzy wrote it—and when it’s time for the master to take his turn everyone sets a smooth, swinging table for him.

He fumbles some, and the tone is hardly what it once was, but Dizzy still skitters over the changes with grace, a brilliant musical mind picking out the hip notes as it constructs one of his final solos. There’s nothing sad about it—because Dizzy’s life was one of the greatest solos of all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Will Layman is a writer, teacher and musician living in the Washington, DC area. He is a contributor to National Public Radio and frequently appears as a guest on WNYC's "Soundcheck" as a jazz critic. He plays both funk and jazz in the bars and clubs in and near the nation's capital. His fiction and humor appear in print and online.

https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/john-birks-dizzy-gillespie

Bio(active tab)
Audio

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie's effect on jazz cannot be overstated: his trumpet playing influenced every player who came after him, his compositions have become part of the jazz canon, and his bands have included some of the most significant names in the business. He was also, along with Charlie Parker, one of the major leaders of the bebop movement.

Gillespie's father was an amateur bandleader who, although dead by the time Gillespie was ten, had given his son some of his earliest grounding in music. Gillespie began playing trumpet at 14 after briefly trying the trombone, and his first formal musical training came at the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina.

Gillespie's earliest professional jobs were with the Frankie Fairfax band, where he reportedly picked up the nickname Dizzy because of his outlandish antics. His earliest influence was Roy Eldridge, whom he later replaced in Teddy Hill's band. From 1939-41, Gillespie was one of the principal soloists in Cab Calloway's band, until he was dismissed for a notorious bandstand prank. While with Calloway he met the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauza, from whom he gained a great interest in Afro-Cuban rhythms. At this time he also befriended Charlie Parker, with whom he would begin to develop some of the ideas behind bebop while sitting in at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem.

From 1941-43, Gillespie freelanced with a number of big bands, including that of Earl "Fatha" Hines. Hines' band contained several musicians Gillespie would interact with in the development of bebop, such as singer Billy Eckstine, who formed his own band featuring Gillespie on trumpet in 1944.

The year 1945 was crucial for both bebop and Gillespie. He recorded with Parker many of his small ensemble hits, such as "Salt Peanuts," and formed his own bebop big band. Despite economic woes, he was able to keep this band together for four years. His trumpet playing was at a peak, with rapid-fire attacks of notes and an amazing harmonic range. A number of future greats performed with Gillespie's big band, including saxophonists Gene Ammons, Yusef Lateef, Paul Gonsalves, Jimmy Heath, James Moody, and John Coltrane. The rhythm section of John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke, and Ray Brown became the original Modern Jazz Quartet.

He took various bands on State Department tours around the world starting in 1956, the first time the U.S. government provided economic aid and recognition to jazz. Those excursions not only kept Gillespie working, they also stimulated his musical interests as he began incorporating different ethnic elements into his music, such as the Afro-Cuban rhythms he weaved into his big band arrangements. Never losing his thirst for collaboration, Gillespie worked with a variety of jazz stars as well as leading his own small groups on into the 1980s.

Selected Discography

The Complete RCA Victor Recordings 1937-1949, Bluebird, 1937-49 Dizzy's Diamonds, Verve, 1954-64 Birk's Works: Verve Big Band Sessions, Verve, 1956-57 Gillespiana/Carnegie Hall Concert, Verve, 1960-61 Max + Dizzy, Paris 1989, A&M, 1989

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/07/arts/dizzy-gillespie-stays-put-but-not-for-long.html

Dizzy Gillespie Stays Put, but Not for Long
by PETER WATROUS
January 7, 1992
New York Times

Over the next month, Dizzy Gillespie will probably wade through "A Night in Tunisia" 50 more times. Considering that he's been playing the tune twice a night, 300 nights a year for the last 50 or so years, another 50 times won't mean a thing. The idea doesn't seem to bother him.

"Even 'Night in Tunisia,' doesn't bore me; I'm never bored," Mr. Gillespie said on Sunday afternoon before rushing off to perform "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. "There's always a new way to play anything."

What makes these last 50 so unusual is that Mr. Gillespie, one of the fathers of be-bop and an icon of jazz, will be playing them in the same place for a month. He is booked at the Blue Note in Greenwich Village, where 30 to 40 musicians both perform with him and pay tribute to him.

It's part of a yearlong celebration of Mr. Gillespie's 75th birthday, which will be on Oct. 21. He will also appear in Latin America, Europe and South Africa (in an appearance approved by Nelson Mandela), and this month he will release "The Winter in Lisbon," in which he stars. So the Blue Note performances are a good time to see and hear the country's best-known trumpet player amid rare musical splendor. Mr. Gillespie, who flies over 300,000 miles a year, doesn't stay in one place too long. Going Way Back

The first week begins tonight and brings together an extraordinary group of musicans: Jimmy Heath on saxophone, Slide Hampton on trombone, Kenny Barron on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. They have all, with the exception of Mr. Jones, put in their time under Mr. Gillespie's leadership.

Mr. Gillespie's pleasure in the group makes him grope for words. "Owww, that group is good," he said over lunch in a midtown restaurant. "I've been playing with Kenny since he was a little kid, and he and Jimmy know how I think better than I do. Cranshaw has a beat like a gorilla. And I want Elvin to play like he usually does, hard."

For Mr. Heath, who first joined Mr. Gillespie's big band in the early 1940's, the show will be a homecoming.

"Diz is my guru, my teacher," Mr. Heath said. "When I joined his band, after being in love with his and Charlie Parker's music, it was a dream come true. My brother Percy and I had followed the band around. We were even wearing his costume, berets and thin artist ties. It was a school in arranging and composing and true improvisation because Dizzy never played the same thing in the same place."

Mr. Heath said he and John Coltrane, who was also in the band, would note the way the trumpeter introduced his solo in "I Can't Get Started."

"He'd play it differently each time and we'd look at each other in amazement," Mr. Heath recalled. "In that period he was far superior to anybody that played trumpet, anybody. Dizzy was the master." His Own Band

The second week at the Blue Note will feature Mr. Gillespie's 13-piece Afro-Cuban jazz band, the United Nation Orchestra, which includes the saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, the trumpeter Claudio Roditi, the percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo, the saxophonist Mario Rivera, the drummer Charli Persip and the pianist Danilo Perez, Latin musicians who, Mr. Gillespie says, "love our music more than the original be-boppers."

"These guys play be-bop better than be-bop guys play Latin," he said, "but it's the mixture that I like. I love playing it. I'm not an authority, but I know it pretty well. I love the rhythm."

The third week has a slew of saxophonists, including a handful of younger players: Tim Warfield, David Sanchez, Vincent Herring, Antonio Hart -- to balance out the older masters. Benny Golson will appear, as will Jackie McLean, Clifford Jordan, David (Fathead) Newman, Hank Crawford and more.

For Jackie McLean, a member of one of the first groups of young musicians to absorb the lessons of Mr. Gillespie and Charlie Parker, the show is a way of getting closer to the source. "I first heard Dizzy and Bird on a tune called 'Sorta Kinda' on a record by Trummy Young, and then two days later I heard them on 'Koko,' " recalled Mr. McLean, who has begun to play occasionally with Mr. Gillespie at festivals and concerts. "I had heard all sorts of great music as a kid, but when I heard them I locked in and I knew what I wanted to say.

"Dizzy's one of my greatest heroes and idols. I've hungered to play with him and I couldn't be more motivated by the chance. Historically he belongs to the special club of only five trumpeters -- Buddy Bolden, Freddy Kepperd, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy. I'm so happy he's alive and reigning. As long as he's here, he's the king." Other Trumpeters

For his final week, Mr. Gillespie will be joined by trumpeters, including one of his first disciples, Red Rodney, his protege Jon Faddis and the be-bop trumpeter Donald Byrd. Doc Cheatham, who played along side Mr. Gillespie in Cab Calloway's orchestra, will be there, too, along with some of the better young trumpeters now on the jazz scene, Wynton Marsalis, Wallace Roney, Roy Hargrove and Terence Blanchard.

Like many younger musicians, Mr. Hargove has been on the receiving end of Mr. Gillespie's advice, musical or otherwise.

"Dizzy is my musical father," said the 21-year-old Mr. Hargrove. "Every time I see him, he has some advice about playing or on life in general. I hope I can play that much trumpet when I'm his age, because he's playing more than a lot of cats my age. His harmonic sense, the way he plays over chords, especially now, is on a really sophisticated level. He's definitely kept progressing, which is inspirational."

And through it all will be the clowning. Had Mr. Gillespie quit performing in 1950, he'd be remembered as an enormously influential and productive musician, someone who affected a sea change in American music with his innovations. But even before that Mr. Gillespie had done something more difficult. By mixing an infallible sense of humor with music, he had managed to combine serious expression with entertainment. With his trademark moon cheeks and his bent trumpet, he has become one of the country's most recognizable figures.

"I never looked behind me to find out what other people were playing or doing," Mr. Gillespie said. "I always liked a little fun. Charlie Parker was pretty funny himself. One time in Pine Bluff, Ark., a guy hit me in the head with a bottle. Charlie said, 'You took advantage of my friend, you cur.' I had to laugh even through I had blood coming out of my head. That's just the way I felt about it. It didn't bother me what everybody else was doing. I got fired out of Cab Calloway's band for fooling around too much. It still didn't bother me." The Schedule At the Blue Note

Here is the schedule of Dizzy Gillespie programs at the Blue Note, 131 West Third Street in Manhattan. For reservations, call (212) 475-8592.

JAN. 7-12, "Dizzy's Be-Bop Jamboree," with Kenny Barron, Bob Cranshaw, Slide Hampton, Jimmy Heath, Elvin Jones and James Moody.

JAN. 14-19, "Dizzy's United Nation," with Paquito D'Rivera, Ed Cherry, Danilo Perez, Charli Persip, Mario Rivera and David Sanchez, among others.

JAN. 21-26, "To Bird, With Love," with different guests each night, including Hank Crawford, Benny Golson, Jackie McLean, Clifford Jordan and David (Fathead) Newman.

JAN. 28-FEB. 2, "To Diz, With Love," with guest artists including Roy Hargrove, Wynton Marsalis, Doc Cheatham, Donald Byrd, Red Rodney and Jon Faddis.

Photo: "I never looked behind me to find out what other people were playing or doing," said Dizzy Gillespie, who is shown in Manhattan on Sunday. (David Gahr for The New York Times)

http://abartists.nyc/2015/07/21/the-dizzy-gillespie-tm-afro-cuban-experience/

The Dizzy Gillespie (TM) Afro Cuban Experience

Posted July 21, 2015

by admin

History has produced its share of great artists and great people—John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was both. As a performer, he left behind an incredible record of innovation and inspiration; as a composer, a broad repository of musical masterpieces; and as a man, a legion of friends, colleagues and compatriots who remember him with the same degree of love and esteem they reserve for his work.

The Afro Cuban Experience, a 6-8 piece ensemble led by Dizzy Gillespie’s long-term bassist John Lee, showcase the unique rhythms and well-loved melodies (such as ‘Manteca’ and ‘Tin Tin Deo’) of Gillespie’s oeuvre of Cu-Bop which he developed with Chano Pozo in the 40s and 50s. Their repertoire also explores the broader world of Latin-American music- the tunes that Dizzy would have been playing today.

The musicians are drawn from the high-calibre pool of New York-based talent that frequent the Dizzy Gillespie™ Big Band and All Star groups, such as trumpeter Freddie Hendrix, saxophonist Sharel Cassity, Brazilian pianist / vocalist Abelita Mateus, drummer Tommy Campbell and percussionist Roger Squitero. They perform with energy, verve, and style, putting their own fresh stamp on a well-known genre. The group can perform as various sizes from sextet to octet.

The Dizzy Gillespie Afro Cuban Experience - Burghausen Jazz Festival 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/17/arts/pop-view-dizzy-gillespie-more-than-the-man-with-the-bent-horn.html

POP VIEW

Dizzy Gillespie: More Than the Man With the Bent Horn
by Peter Watrous
January 17, 1993
New York Times

The trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie was an easy person to get hold of, if he was in this country, which wasn't often. It just took a telephone call and he'd speak with you, laconic and interested if you knew what you were talking about, monosyllabic if you didn't. Searching for answers to a musical question or for an eyewitness report on some of the more important cultural history of the 20th century would incite two types of replies -- the "Umm, yeah . . ." sort, a bit gruff, mostly bored, and obviously the response of a person watching television, or an articulate expression of what he had experienced in the course of a life that moved from rural South Carolina to the streets of the major cities of the world.

Nearly 60 years of involvement in show business in America left Gillespie, who died this month at age 75, a profound judge of character, somebody who had seen just about every type of scam, malfeasance and insincerity. An unprepared interviewer would turn into prey, and many were left with nothing. He had been burned in print before -- a long profile in The New Yorker in 1948 poked fun at him and be-boppers. He spent a good portion of the late 1950's and early 1960's a lost figure in a music he helped invent; be-bop was yesterday's music.

Being innovative in America isn't easy, especially when taking the route Gillespie chose, but the difficulties clearly helped form his immensely complicated personality. Partly his problems were of his own making: in presenting himself as both an entertainer and a brilliant musician, he was bound to be treated badly by people who were looking for either simple fun or art. For decades he was asked the same questions: Why did be-bop have such a funny name? What was Charlie Parker like?

Gillespie was expected to be witty and to maintain his stage persona even in private. He felt he was constantly under suspicion because of his race, constantly treated like a jester; the experience could have left scars. Be-bop itself, his own hard-won creation, had met with divisiveness, and its practitioners were often accused of ignoring audiences, fostering an elitist sensibility.

But Gillespie spent most of his time, oddly enough, being anything but divisive. His performances were about as inclusionary and unpatronizing as any in the history of American music, and he never excluded anyone. To his friends he was forthcoming and warm, and to other musicians he was a deity, always willing to sit down at the piano and share some of his copious insights. The writer Stanley Crouch remembers an occasion when Gillespie went to a black studies center in 1970 with a white friend and, after being challenged by the participants, stated flatly, "This is my brother."

His opened-armed affability reigned on stage. Charismatic personalities can coerce a club or concert hall, change its mood, and Gillespie regularly turned a nightclub or concert into his room, a place where absurdity and humor walked easily with musical excellence. The persona he created for the audience was full of mock aristocratic accents, raised eyebrows, gentle prods toward unruly or insensitive fans. He rid the air of pretensions; this from one of the more profound musicians to grace American music. He would begin a show by asking the audience if he could introduce the band; after people shouted yes, he would introduce the band members to one another. It suckered the audience, but in an unmalicious way, and automatically sealed a contract with the audience, showing that the audience played a role in the show.

What ensued musically during a show was, until the last few years of his life, always extraordinary. Gillespie embraced urbanity and turned the vitality of the metropolis into something enriching instead of something causing fear and despair. It is fascinating to listen to Gillespie and Charlie Parker together, to hear how Parker's use of narrative is more ordered, more calm and rural; it seems to come from an earlier period. In the tune "Dizzy Atmosphere," from 1945, for example, Gillespie's improvisations are radical in their sense of juxtaposition; they reproduce the extremes and velocity of urban life. Gillespie was a master of dynamics; he would let out shouts and follow them with a run, a whisper and a sudden burst of notes.

Jazz is often called the sound of surprise; in his hands, it was the sound of shock. And while he recorded perfectly logical improvisations over his career, his most personal improvisations were the ones in which the internal contrasts, jagged and sharp, always argued in favor of a literate conception of artistic activity. With their abrupt movements and bright flashes of sounds, Gillespie's solos were the sound of modernism, the relentless and erratic motion of a city in action.

His artistic legacy covered more ground than that of any other jazz musician aside from Duke Ellington. His small group recordings were definitive; his experiments with big bands and Afro-Cuban music gave the second half of his century a good portion of its musical profile. This was a man who well into his 70's regularly changed band members, and bands, moving easily between the Latin world and the jazz world, a man who frequently showed up as a special guest and charged the mood of concert hall after concert hall, reaping standing ovations around the world.

Nearly a year ago, Gillespie said in an interview: "I never looked behind me to find out what other people were playing or doing. I just keep going, looking for new ideas, practicing. Even a 'Night in Tunisia' doesn't bore me; I'm never bored. There's always a new way to play anything." That pretty much summed up his 60 years of change.

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/10/in-celebration-of-art-and-life-of.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on October 21, 2014):

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

IN CELEBRATION OF THE ART AND LIFE OF LEGENDARY MUSICIAN AND COMPOSER JOHN BIRKS 'DIZZY' GILLESPIE (1917-1993) ON HIS 97th BIRTHDAY

https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2015/10/john-birks-dizzy-gillespie-1917-1993.html

Saturday, October 17, 2015

JOHN BIRKS "DIZZY" GILLESPIE (1917-1993): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, music theorist, and teacher

All,

October 21, 2017 marks the centennial of the birth of John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (b. October 21, 1917) one of the greatest as well as most influential and inspiring musicians and composers of the 20th century who had a profound global impact on music and art and played a crucial role in the growth and development of modern music generally in a critically acclaimed career that lasted six decades until his death at 75 in 1993. In homage to and celebration of this extraordinary and groundbreaking musical virtuoso what follows is an extensive musical and video sampling as well as critical appreciation and examination of his brilliant and prolific artistry on trumpet as both an innovative small ensemble soloist and orchestral leader, composer, and arranger from 1940 to 1990. It's equally important to note that Dizzy was not only a great artist and teacher but a wonderful human being as well. ENJOY...

Kofi

http://wakeforestmuseum.org/2014/11/20/the-day-dizzy-came-to-town/

WAKE FOREST HISTORICAL MUSEUM

LOCATION: 414 N. Main Street Wake Forest, NC 27587 CONTACT: 919-556-2911

THE DAY DIZZY CAME TO TOWN

(Originally published in The Wake Weekly)

In one of the most spectacular, and possibly strangest, moments in Wake Forest’s holiday history, music legend Dizzy Gillespie bounded off a Greyhound bus on Owen Avenue to play an impromptu jam session at the town’s Community House just days before the 1948 Wake Forest Community Christmas Dinner. It was the last week of November, time to ring in the holiday season. Although still a new tradition, the annual Christmas Dinner was extremely popular; volunteers had started it the year before to give returning World War II veterans a warm welcome home and it was fast becoming a seasonal favorite. Now the civic clubs were once again ready to decorate the Community House with evergreen garlands, table centerpieces, and a large Christmas tree. But they couldn’t do it this particular afternoon—not after the historic entrance of Gillespie and his entire 18-piece jazz band.

In those days, Gillespie was a young trumpet virtuoso with an improvisational bebop style that made him the most controversial figure in American jazz. He was traveling on tour between West Virginia and Raleigh, and a group of Wake Forest College students who called themselves the “Friends of Jazz” had invited him to take a break near campus. Somewhat surprisingly, he accepted. It was a cold, rainy day when the bus drove into town on Highway 98, sloshed through mud to the Community House, and parked at the curb. Gillespie stepped out, dressed in a turtle-neck jacket, blue jeans, ostrich leather shoes, and a French beret. The students weren’t sure what to make of him. But he spoke in an easy, interesting way and, once inside the building, he quickly transformed that gray November afternoon into something extraordinary.

Student writer Harold Hayes (later the editor of Esquire magazine) reported on the event, vividly describing the scene inside the Community House. “Most of the students had gathered around him now and were trying to figure out what made him tick. At that time more than any other, perhaps, it was apparent that Diz was in a world of his own…. So it was with a feeling of encroachment that we asked him if three or four members of his band would play a few numbers…. From his horn ripped an incoherent stream of jumbled notes, beginning and ending where you wouldn’t expect, and touching on everything but the melody so that the suspense was unbearable.”

Gillespie and his musicians enjoyed a pleasant lunch of fried chicken, side dishes, and pie for dessert. Then they ripped into an unplanned concert. The band’s Cuban percussionist, Chano Pozo, straddled his Bongo drum and pounded out a rolling, erratic rhythm that rocked the house and could be heard from the campus Administration Building to Wooten’s Hometel on South Main Street. “We had expected them to be loud,” Hayes wrote, “but the word ‘loud’ used in reference to Dizzy Gillespie’s band is a gross understatement. Some students were left wondering if beams and timbers supporting the roof would be considered safe enough to keep the building from being condemned.”

Of course, Gillespie was a legend in the making. But that’s not the only reason his visit to Wake Forest is worth remembering. His concert for a handful of students was a special moment of shared appreciation and fellowship, the same two things that make the Wake Forest Community Christmas Dinner a cherished and longstanding tradition. The very event that was held a week after Gillespie’s visit to the Community House still happens every year, and it still remains Wake Forest’s best way of welcoming the holidays with friends and neighbors.

The 67th Annual Wake Forest Community Christmas Dinner will take place on December 1st at 6:30pm at the Forks Cafeteria, 339 S. Brooks Street. The menu will include roast beef, fried chicken, scalloped potatoes, carrots, apples, green beans, and a dessert bar. Committee Chair Carolyn Coordes will give away door prizes, and local civic groups will decorate tables with seasonal floral arrangements and centerpieces. There will be a performance and holiday sing-a-long led by 12-year-old vocalist Logan Harrison, the invocation will be offered by the Reverend Dr. Enoch Holloway of Friendship Chapel Baptist Church, and Wake Forest Mayor Vivian Jones will recognize the winners of the town’s Citizen of the Year, Organization of the Year, and Peggy Allen Lifetime Achievement awards.

Tickets are $15 and available through local civic clubs and locations including the Forks, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Wake Forest Historical Museum.

(Photo Caption: Dizzy Gillespie “limbers up his chops” at the Wake Forest Community House on November 29, 1948. Also pictured, from left to right, Evelyn Ward, Romulus Weatherman, and Ed Friedenberg.)

(Excerpts from Harold Hayes’ article are taken from the December 1948 edition of the Wake Forest College literary magazine, The Student, Vol. LXII, No. 3.)

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/modern-jazz-late-1940s

Article

Jazz in the Late 1940s: American Culture At Its Most Alluring

Jazz in the late 1940s moved away from big band jazz and morphed into a new expressive form that reflected social developments and post-war realities.

by John Gennari
September 15, 2021
Nationa World War 2 Museum

Top Image: Gottlieb, William P. Portrait of Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill, Minton’s Playhouse, New York, 1947. Courtesy of the William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

On February 22, 1946, jazz trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie led a recording date for RCA Bluebird. This was the first major label recording of a jazz style Gillespie and other African American musicians (notably alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Thelonious Monk, guitarist Charlie Christian, and drummer Kenny Clark) had pioneered earlier in the decade in after-hours jam sessions in Harlem clubs. Variously called rebop, bebop, or simply bop, the new approach was forged by restlessly innovative musicians who had grown dissatisfied with big-band swing, a dance-oriented style that required a predictable rhythmic groove, a sonic blend that favored tight section playing over improvised soloing, and an atmosphere of unfettered joy and gleaming optimism.

Heralded as “modern jazz,” the new music favored small combos playing an opening melodic theme (the “head”) that introduced a set of chords, followed by a succession of solos in which players improvised new versions of the theme with agile, quicksilver runs through the governing chord progression, free to enrich the harmonic texture with substitute and extended chords. The tunes were played at blistering tempos. Drummers accented the soloists’ fractured, serpentine phrasings with abstract, almost ironic, snare drum riffs and—in place of the martial four-to-the-floor style of swing drumming—the deft dropping of bass drum “bombs” in odd corners of the meter.

Freed from an obligation to accommodate dancers, these musicians now emphasized technical virtuosity and creative ingenuity. Modern jazz was a listening music, and many of its players insisted on being seen as artists rather than as entertainers.

From 1942 to 1944, as a member of the big bands led by Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine, Gillespie had worked side by side with Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, an extraordinary musician. He possessed an unmatched rhythmic fluency and harmonic intelligence steeped in the 12-bar blues-based, Kansas City swing style of the Count Basie band and its star tenor saxophonist, Lester Young. In 1944 and 1945, Gillespie and Parker led small combos in a series of club dates and recordings for small independent labels that turned the jazz world on its head. On tunes like “Ko-Ko,” “Thriving on a Riff,” “Anthropology,” “Salt Peanuts,” and “52nd Street Theme,” Diz and Bird, as they were popularly known, produced a music of asymmetrical, disjointed, yet bracingly lucid patterns that swung harder than even the best of the riff-based swing bands.

Many older musicians criticized the new approach—Louis Armstrong said it was “Chinese music” full of “weird notes”—but younger musicians like Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, James Moody, J.J. Johnson, Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Sonny Stitt, Don Byas, and Sarah Vaughan embraced it as the ultimate musician’s music.

Gillespie, however, wanted bebop to achieve popular commercial success. He had returned from a set of much-anticipated dates in California in 1945 distressed by the indifferent reaction of West Coast audiences, and deeply upset about Parker’s drug-induced erratic behavior (Bird, famously, was a heroin addict). The RCA Bluebird session represented a turning point, and not just because the company had a larger distribution network than Savoy, Continental, Dial, Apollo, and the other small labels, where bebop had resided up to now as a niche music confined to an in-the-know coterie audience.

While bebop had been incubated in small groups, Gillespie saw it as a language that could be effectively used by ensembles of any size, and in ways that could attract larger audiences. For this recording date, he added vibraphone and guitar to the standard bop quintet of trumpet, saxophone, piano, drums, and bass. He liked the texture these instruments added, especially on “A Night in Tunisia,” his own composition, written in 1942 as Allied troops invaded North Africa.

The tune starts with a nimble ostinato bass line, setting a different groove than the standard straight quarter note walking bass, and features an oscillating pattern of half-step chord changes. These elements, which gave the tune a seductively mysterious feeling, were common in Afro-Cuban music, a style that had been percolating in East Harlem, the Bronx, and other parts of New York City, where large numbers of migrants from the Caribbean had settled over the previous decade. After the recording session, Gillespie launched his own big-band, using “A Night in Tunisia” as its signature theme song.

In September 1947, at a well-publicized Carnegie Hall concert, Cuban master conga player Chano Pozo joined Gillespie’s band for the premier of “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop” and “Manteca,” tunes that inaugurated yet another modern jazz style, Afro-Cuban (or, later, Latin) Jazz. After being recorded later that year, “Manteca” quickly became a hit, its mambo cymbal bell pattern and 3/2 clave pulse proving at once irresistible to dancers and alluring to bebop connoisseurs. Critic Gary Giddins has said that “Manteca” is “one of the most important records ever made in the United States.”

Gottlieb, William P. Portrait of Dizzy Gillespie, 1947, depicting the be-bopper’s characteristic hat, spectacles, horn, goatee and slouch. Courtesy of William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

Gillespie’s path in 1946 and 1947 suggests that bebop was not so much a revolution as a bold reimagining of what was possible within jazz’s aesthetic framework. In his performance persona, as well, Gillespie complicated the notion of a strict dichotomy between jazz as art and jazz as entertainment. Not just a brilliant trumpeter, Gillespie was a gifted composer and arranger who worked out the complex harmonies of his tunes on piano before teaching them to his sidemen. He was, incontestably, a creative artist of the first rank. But he was also a jocular showman who loved working the crowd and sending up bandmates with his randy wit and unerring comic timing.

Though most of his concerts were not occasions for public dancing, he often broke into quirky, whimsical dances of his own, both to register bodily feeling for the music and to draw laughs. Many jazz musicians of Gillespie’s generation were uncomfortable with Louis Armstrong’s stage presence, seeing it as a vestige of old-time minstrelsy. Gillespie understood the criticism, but he also embraced Armstrong as a kindred spirit and jumped at opportunities to appear on stage with him for some good-natured hamming and breathtaking trumpeting.

Still, there was no question that the mood and atmosphere of jazz, and the meanings and social significance attached to it, had decisively shifted. In the years leading up to the war, America had taught itself and large swaths of the global population to swing. Millions of musicians, dancers, record collectors, and jukebox listeners thrilled to the streamlined locomotive-like rhythmic grooves and roaring brass of the great bands led by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Lunceford, Chick Webb, Artie Shaw, and others.

Defense workers attended “swing shift” factory dances. Bette Davis, Hedy Lamar, Betty Grable, and other movie starlets danced the jitterbug with servicemen at the Hollywood Canteen, and “All-Girl” swing orchestras filled the entertainment void created by the military conscription of male musicians. Teenagers devoured the latest issues of Down Beat and Metronome, the leading jazz fan magazines, hungry for news and pictures of their favorite stars. Swing’s pulsing energy and dynamism exemplified American modernity, while its spirit of egalitarian inclusiveness—its vision of the United States as both pluralistic and unified—presented an idealized model of American democracy-in-action and a symbol of wartime national consensus. But like the US war effort itself—a fight against international fascism waged by America’s racially segregated armed forces—swing’s assertive blare muzzled dissonances that expressed a different idea of America than the one propagated by the government and Hollywood.

Gottlieb, William P. Duke & Group on the Cover of Downbeat, 1946. William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

The end of the war brought relief and joy. But an honest recognition of its horrors, coupled with the onset of the Cold War and the fear of atomic warfare, changed national psychology in a way that registered deeply in literature and the arts. The ebullient atmosphere of wartime swing, exemplified in ethnically diverse crowds enjoying “battle of the bands” spectacles and the celebrated Lindy Hop troupe at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom (“The Home of Happy Feet”), represented jazz’s zenith as a populist youth culture. After the war, jazz could no longer symbolize only optimism, joy, and pleasure; now it had to also register fear, doubt, and disappointment.

This was especially true for African Americans, who contributed to the war effort with the promise of a “Double V”—victory abroad conjoined with the vanquishing of Jim Crow at home—only to find themselves still treated as second-class citizens. Black jazz musicians felt this acutely in their own industry. Their union, the American Federation of Musicians, continued to be racially segregated. Cover photograph choices, fan polls, and general editorial policy in Down Beat and Metronome, and jazz coverage in general interest magazines, heavily favored white musicians and bands over African American ones. White musicians like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Gene Krupa who had hired black musicians (Teddy Wilson, Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Roy Eldridge) were either condemned or lionized for breaking the color line; either way, media coverage largely centered on them rather than on the black musicians, who often experienced Jim Crow indignities while traveling the country with their white bandmates.

African American bebop musicians adopted a non-accommodating posture that boldly challenged and subverted racial norms. Sometimes this manifested in a public assertiveness that frankly astonished whites who had never questioned the racial system. More often it appeared furtively in a cultural style and attitude defined by an ineffable charisma, an air of mystery, a relaxed intensity, a paradoxical ability to create passion and excitement through aloofness and detachment. Called cool, even when the music itself burned hot, as with bebop’s fleet tempos and mercurial chord changes, it was an ingenious tactic for warding off the invasive white gaze by donning a mask of integrity and self-possession. Cool, as scholar Joel Dinerstein has shown, resonated strongly across the color line and permeated modern art and culture, informing the work of writers, intellectuals, and film noir actors alike.

For its supporters, the advent of modern jazz signified progress, both artistic and social, a necessary and inevitable evolution in creative vision and technique as well as in racial opportunity and parity. This position met with fierce and often bitter opposition from partisans of older jazz, the small-group collective improvisation model associated with New Orleans and Chicago in the 1920s. Proudly calling themselves “moldy figs,” this group argued that the earlier music evinced qualities of warmth, intimacy, and soulfulness that disappeared in the noise of mechanistic big-bands and the cool, detached, affectless posture of the beboppers.

The figs saw themselves as defenders of authentic jazz, which, in their unyielding formula, required proper instrumentation (a front line of trumpet, trombone, and clarinet, but not saxophone), blues harmony and tonality, and a natural swing feeling. Even their hero Louis Armstrong was accused of committing apostasy against real jazz when, in his Hot Seven recording of “West End Blues” in 1928, he used a saxophonist and allowed pianist Earl Hines to play non-blues, “sentimental” harmonies, and later, when he fronted his own big-band. A group of 14 or 16 players, in the traditionalists’ view, was simply too big to swing with the nimble and relaxed feeling of a group of five or seven rhythmically agile players. And bop groups, though properly sized, gave off a nervous, frustrated, neurotic vibe that countered the warmth and genial humanity that were the hallmarks of New Orleans and Chicago jazz.

Jazz’s modern-traditionalist polemical war played out in Down Beat and Metronome, the latter adopting a strong modernist orientation led by critics Leonard Feather and Barry Ulanov, and in newer, more specialized traditionalist publications such as Record Changer and Jazz Information. The traditionalists, led by Rudi Blesh, whose 1946 book Shining Trumpets, a purported history of jazz that took a staunch New Orleans absolutist stance—real jazz had died in 1926, he claimed—hatched an effort to revive the careers of New Orleans musicians like trumpeter Bunk Johnson and clarinetist Edward “Kid” Ory.

Proselytizing the older style as an authentic folk music (a “people’s music”) pitted against the alleged bourgeois, high-art pretensions of modern jazz, the revival attracted a mostly white, middle-class audience. Soon, large numbers of white musicians took up the traditionalist banner, launching a new jazz subculture calling itself “Dixieland.” Across the United States and Europe, “Basin Street Blues,” “When the Saints Come Marching In,” and other early New Orleans jazz tunes found mass popularity as instantly recognizable vessels of devil-may-care frolic and festivity. Younger African American musicians largely shunned Dixieland, put off by the name’s transparent association with the old-time South, and a sense that the music catered to the nostalgic desires of white audiences.

Here was a development fundamental to the racial dialectic of American popular culture. As with country music and what is now called “classic rock,” Dixieland was coded as “white” music, despite its origins in black culture. In each case, as younger African American musicians and audiences carve out a space of innovation and creative leadership (blues, bebop, R&B, soul, funk, hip-hop) that becomes the cutting-edge for American popular music writ large, large swaths of the white population gravitate to older styles. It is not just the sound of the new music that fractures the audience; it’s the larger cultural atmosphere and landscape shaped and signified by the music.

Bebop and Afro-Cuban jazz modeled a much more pluralistic concept of America than did Hollywood and the mass media, whose notion of American diversity and pluralism in this era was largely restricted to white European ethnicity. Dizzy Gillespie’s avid involvement in Afro-Cuban religion, and the fact that several bebop musicians converted to Islam, struck some as anti-American rather than what it was—an extension of American diversity and multiculturalism.

There were excellent white bebop musicians (Stan Levy, Al Haig, Buddy De Franco, Red Rodney, Tony Scott, and George Wallington among them) and legions of white bebop fans, many drawn to the music and its surrounding scene expressly because of its cool, hip, intellectual, and countercultural qualities. But the late 1940s also brought white-centered developments in modern jazz. The California-based bandleader Stan Kenton hatched a style of orchestral modernism he called “progressive jazz,” using big-band instrumentation and a language influenced by modern classical composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith replete with dissonance and atonality. Critics derided the style as cold and bombastic; enthusiasts ballyhooed the technical skill of the musicians and appreciated an orchestral sound that captured the feeling of living in the atomic age.

Pianist and composer Lenny Tristano played as a sideman with leading bebop musicians before forming his own small groups that performed his compositions featuring contrapuntal interaction within complex harmonic structures. Tristano’s music anticipated the avant-garde developments in late 1950s free jazz, but its abstract, intellectual quality won it only a coterie audience. He made his mark more as a teacher, where he achieved something close to guru status instructing his students in disciplined approaches to improvisation.

Jazz in the late 1940s was no longer the national popular music it had been in the heyday of the swing big-bands. It was no longer primarily dance music—that territory was now occupied by jump blues acts like Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, Big Joe Turner, Roy Brown, and Wynonie Harris, precursors to early rock and roll—and it no longer defined itself as a form of commercial entertainment. But it was still very entertaining, still deeply engaging, and still hugely important to its fans.

A new ecosystem was needed to facilitate the proper relationship between the musicians and their listeners. The small jazz club—Small’s Paradise, Birdland, the Royal Roost, Café Society, and the Famous Door in New York; the Hi-Hat in Boston; the Chatterbox in Cleveland; the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; Club DeLisa and Rhumboogie Café in Chicago; Club Riviera in St. Louis; the Down Beat and Billy Berg’s in Los Angeles; Bop City in San Francisco—with a stage just large enough to accommodate four or five musicians, a lively bar, and intimate seating for patrons, became an iconic cultural space where listeners witnessed at close range the magic of a band’s alchemy and the charisma and individuality of each performer.

In 1945, a former Hollywood film editor named Norman Granz launched “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” a traveling concert series with a loosely organized ensemble of marquee performers, including Gillespie, Parker, Young, Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and Oscar Peterson. Over the next decade JATP grew into a 150-performance-a-year series that spanned the globe, with concerts in Europe, Japan, and Australia. Granz was also a prolific record producer, owner of the Clef and Verve labels. After Columbia Records introduced the long-playing, 33 1/3 rpm disc (the LP) in 1948, Granz and Columbia’s George Avakian became two of the producers most responsible for turning a few jazz musicians into international stars.

Jazz, like all music, is an invisible art form. And yet jazz culture is intensely visual, its history not just one of dazzling sound but also of imagery replete with beauty, cultural meaning, and social importance. The late 1940s was a crucial moment in the history of jazz photography. Consider the case of Thelonious Monk. Monk had been the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem in 1941, where important breakthroughs in bebop had been made. But it was Parker and Gillespie who emerged as the public face of bebop—especially the amiable Gillespie, who started appearing in national magazines wearing a beret and horn-rimmed glasses, hip accessories Monk had introduced to the jazz subculture.

Monk eschewed the blistering tempos and flashy technical displays that became bop hallmarks in favor of medium tempo swing grooves and ballads tethered to the song’s melody. But even as Monk sounded sturdy and old-fashioned in his faithfulness to melody, he also waxed experimental and futuristic in his use of dissonant chord clusters, intervallic leaps, silences, hesitations, and disjointed phrasing. It was a paradoxical musical grammar at once angular and abstract, warm and witty. It seemed both amateurish and profound, a series of mistakes that added up (for those who dug it) to something perversely logical.

Monk remained a largely invisible, behind-the-scenes character until 1948. The breakthrough started the previous year with a profile in Down Beat magazine by the writer and photographer William Gottlieb. Titled “Genius of Bop,” the piece asserted Monk’s preeminence in the new music. A Gottlieb photograph that ran with the piece pictured Monk, resplendent in goatee, drape suit, beret, and heavy shell glasses, standing in front of the sidewalk awning of Minton’s alongside trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Howard McGhee and former Minton’s manager Teddy Hill.

Gottlieb’s photograph later achieved its own iconic status as part of jazz’s visual memory; in its own original context, it cleverly illustrated—in Monk’s hip attire and in his positioning closest to the club awning—Gottlieb’s brief for Monk as the “George Washington of bebop.” The publicity turned Monk’s career around. Within days, Alfred and Lorraine Lion and Francis Wolff of Blue Note Records were at his home to talk about cutting his first discs as a leader, which were released in 1948.

Photographs shot by Gottlieb, Wolff (whose expressionistic chiaroscuro style gave Blue Note album covers special value), and Herman Leonard (author of famous images of Billie Holiday and Dexter Gordon enveloped in noir-ish curls of cigarette smoke) became iconic representations of jazz’s special look, shaping how listeners see as well as hear the music. As scholar Benjamin Cawthra has argued, photographs of jazz musicians have been crucial in shaping black freedom and modern racial liberalism. They have provided images of dignity, humanity, and grace that powerfully countered images of black inferiority and servility that dominated US popular culture from blackface minstrelsy to Hollywood’s amiable “darkies.”

They have made jazz synonymous with hipness, cool, and charisma—in short, “American culture at its most alluring.” The visual personalities of legendary jazz musicians—the elegant Duke Ellington, the spellbinding Billie Holiday, the insouciant Benny Goodman, the ebullient Dizzy Gillespie—collectively constitute nothing less than the cultural DNA of urbane American modernity.

Jazz was born on riverboats and in the street parades and sporting houses of early twentieth-century New Orleans. By the late 1940s, the music had developed a profusion of styles, all of them still played, but just one of them—bebop—challenging and reinterpreting the jazz tradition in a way that would prove enduring. Jazz had also developed a new ecosystem and new cultural tools that secured its status as a leading force in American modernism. The jazz club, the jazz concert, and (soon) the jazz festival and the jazz school would reshape the music’s possibilities as an artistic practice and a social institution.

As America moved into the 1950s, the Cold War, suburbanization, and shifting gender dynamics would make the private home and the ideology of domesticity a locus of national belonging. With the advent of the LP, and with record companies keen on selling both their latest jazz projects and re-issues of older music, jazz was happy to cede youth audiences to R&B and rock-and-roll and to step in to its next role—as the music of the comfortably furnished, hi-fi audio-outfitted adult living room.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

John Gennari is Chair and Professor of English at the University of Vermont. His book Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006) won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Criticism and the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Book in American Culture Studies. His most recent book is Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge (University of Chicago Press, 2017). He is currently working on two projects, “The Jazz Salon: Photographer Clemens Kalischer at Music Inn,” and “The Kitchen Sessions,” a collection of music- and food-themed poems.

Further Reading:
Benjamin Cawthra, Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Joel Dinerstein, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the 40’s (New York: Da Capo, 1984 [1966]).

Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009).

Dizzy Gillespie, To Be, or Not…To Bop (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 [1979]).

This article is part of a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible by the Department of Defense.

Topics:

Home Front

Immediate Aftermath of World War II

African Americans in World War II

http://www.wbur.org/npr/4672361

THE LASTING IMPACT OF DIZZY GILLESPIE

May 30, 2005

NPR

AUDIO: http://embed.wbur.org/player/

A jazz legend's influence on the genre is detailed in Donald Maggin's book Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie. Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz included the flavor of Afro-Cuban rhythms and be-bop.

A jazz legend's influence on the genre is detailed in Donald Maggin's book Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie. Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz included the flavor of Afro-Cuban rhythms and be-bop.

Related NPR Stories:

Dizzy and Chet, a Jazz Odd Couple
Dizzy Gillespie: 'The Complete RCA Victor Recordings'
Dizzy Gillespie: 'Roy and Diz'

Copyright NPR. View this article on npr.org.

TRANSCRIPT:

ED GORDON, host: In the world of jazz, Dizzy Gillespie is an icon. Beyond its borders, he's a legend. His journey through music led him to revolutionize jazz by infusing bebop and Afro-Cuban rhythms. Donald Maggin is the author of a book titled "Dizzy: The Life and times of John Birks Gillespie," which takes us inside the jazz great's life. The author says Dizzy was an original.

Mr. DONALD MAGGIN (Author, "Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie"): He was the maker of two important revolutions in jazz. The first one was bebop and the second one was the Afro-Cuban revolution.

(Soundbite of music)

GORDON: Ofttimes he was such a character, with the cheeks and the horn that was his trademark. I don't know if he often gets the due, as you suggest, in terms of how he revolutionized music.

Mr. MAGGIN: No, I think that's true. He could not curb his comedic bent. He just loved to have fun out there. When they were traveling in Europe with the big band in 1948, John Lewis, the pianist, who was a very scholarly sort of conservative guy--Dizzy would do crazy things like lean on the bass player's strings while he was doing a solo and stuff, and John Lewis said, `These are great spiritual moments for the audience. Why are you doing that, Dizzy? You shouldn't do that.' But Dizzy didn't listen to him at all.

And the cheeks are because he was totally self-taught, he didn't realize that this was a no-no, and by the time he got to be a mature musician, he was so used to that that he stayed with it. The tilted trumpet was part of his genius for PR, because he claimed it sounded better.

GORDON: I don't know if this is folklore or not; I read that someone sat on the trumpet initially and bent it. Is that correct?

Mr. MAGGIN: Yes. It was at a birthday party for Dizzy's wife, and these two friends of his were horsing around on the stage and one of them fell and landed on the trumpet and tilted it, and when Dizzy came back he was initially angry, but he didn't want to spoil his wife's birthday party, so he went along with it. And then he started playing it and he claimed that it sounded better. And then he had trumpets custom made with the 45-degree angle.

(Soundbite of music)

GORDON: One of the things that I find also interesting about Dizzy Gillespie is the idea that he did marry so many cultures. His signature song, for instance, "Night in Tunisia," brings all of those elements together. What was it about this man that could do that kind of thing?

Mr. MAGGIN: He was fascinated by world rhythms, by the Afro-Cuban rhythms, by Indian tabla-playing rhythms, by African rhythms; like, he toured with Miriam Makeba. He told me that he first heard Afro-Cuban music when he got gigs with salsa bands in East Harlem when he was about 18 and he was starving. And he said in America the slave owners did not allow the black people to have drums because they were afraid they would foment a revolution by communicating with each other. But in Cuba and Brazil and places like that, they did have drums, and they kept the African drumming traditions alive.

(Soundbite of unidentified song)

Unidentified Man: (Singing) Oh, an El Dorado coming after me.

Chorus: (Singing) Coming for to carry me home.

(Soundbite of music)

GORDON: Interesting, this man that we know as Dizzy was in the fore, if you will, of understanding celebrity.

Mr. MAGGIN: That was just a natural thing with him. I mean, he was on Johnny Carson all the time and his contemporaries, like Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk or Charlie Parker, they had none of that. So Dizzy became sort of the poster child of modern jazz because he had such an ebullient personality.

GORDON: Do you believe that that is, to a great degree, to the novice, why perhaps he is not taken as seriously as a Monk or a Davis?

Mr. MAGGIN: It did detract, the fact that he was a comedian as well as a great musician. But his contribution in these two revolutions is immense.

GORDON: When you think about Dizzy Gillespie, what's the one thing that you think people don't know about this man?

Mr. MAGGIN: He was a revolutionary, and that's partly because of his father. He said, `My father made me a rebel against everybody but him.' And that's the thing that got to me, that behind this facade of camaraderie and fun and comedy was a revolutionary, somebody who would not accept what he was given and had to change it.

GORDON: We should note that there is also an accompanying CD that comes along with the book, "Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie," "Dizzy." The Verve years, if you will...

Mr. MAGGIN: Yes.

GORDON: ...perhaps his most productive.

Mr. MAGGIN: And there's a terrific variety of stuff there. I mean, it's the only recording with him and Monk and Parker on the same CD. There's stuff with Sonny Rollins, stuff with Stan Getz.

GORDON: And what's remarkable about what you have here--there are some real standards. I mean, when you talk about "Caravan" and "I Remember Clifford" and "Round Midnight," these are songs that are so familiar to those who love jazz.

Mr. MAGGIN: They're part of the canon, really.

GORDON: Well, the book is called "The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie," "Dizzy," and we thank you so very much for spending time with us.

Mr. MAGGIN: My pleasure to be here.

GORDON: That does it for the program today. To listen to the show, visit npr.org. NEWS & NOTES was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium.

I'm Ed Gordon. This is NEWS & NOTES. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

http://alyoung.org/2012/04/03/ava-gardner-and-dizzy-gillespie-poems-for-two-carolinians/

AVA GARDNER and DIZZY GILLESPIE: Poems for Two Celebrated Carolinians

© Life

Actress Ava Gardner in a Hollywood nightclub, 1948, wearing beret, horn-rimmed spectacles, and simulating a goatee, to signify her admiration for Dizzy Gillespie, Bebop King.

(That's Dizzy to Ava's right in LIFE magazine photo)

AVA, SHE WAS ONE OF YOUR WOMEN
by Al Young

An MGM property, as she later stated,
“None of us was ever very well educated.”
For one hundred bucks a week each,
the studio knew it could afford to reach
deep into future space for its heroines, its stars.
You can talk about your Hedy Lamarrs,
your Lanas, your Grables, your Ritas, your Janes,
but none of those well-screened women sustains
your interest the crazy way into Ava Garner
did and still does. Ava was your partner–
no satiny matinee idolatress, either.
She called the hot and heavy breather
in new. Sexual, intellectual, aristocratic,
she truly you woofully into the ecstatic,
where feeling and thought, like energy and mass,
squared up, imploded; imagination, class,
were everything; knowledge of way-station.
She filled in the blanks for you. Your education
old as much to The Snows of Kilimanjaro
as it did to the steamy straight-and-narrow that
contessas didn’t walk barefoot. With Artie Shaw
Ava learned how great books worked. She saw
how what you hear and see and say and feel
gross deep when you and you alone get real.
Ideas? You had to bounce them, see which way
they fell into your world. Ava moved to Spain
and then to London, where the supple pain
of being a star, a ghost impression, slowed.
What was it about Ava that pulled and glowed,
that yanks and warms the eye and heart today
in a century she never reached to shrug away?

© Al Young

© Life
Teen-age girls, taken with Dizzy and his music in 1948, wait to have his autograph.

DEPRESSION, BLUES, FLAMENCO, WINE, DESPAIR
by Al Young

Depression, blues, flamenco, wine, despair––
sunk in, they make you cross your heart and die
for hope. Dark times come at you; they don’t care.
“So deal with this,” they say. And so you buy
the pain and stress, the restlessness––the works:
low back pain, aches and limps, the twitch
of fear your face betrays.

ooooooooooooooooooooooJohn “Dizzy” Birks
Gillespie’s cheeks popped out (fat love an itch
scratched by the trumpet at his goateed lip),
they said: “Take chances, stretch, jump at the sun.
You just can’t spend your whole life acting hip.
Be corny sometimes. Have yourself some fun.
You can’t be cool forever, so relax.”

Diz knew puffed cheeks were anything but chic,
but when you closed your eyes you heard him axe
infinitives, split atoms, hairs. You speak
that tongue––curves, flatlands, all of it. You do.

You understand the hoodoo stab of hurt;
the blues, their messy messages, a few
trashed hopes, some lame goodbyes, her skirt,
your coat, the folded jeans, wet tights. Black night
is falling all around you in the rain.
Dark times, dark times can fix you in the light
of reason, recognition, lasers, pain.

© Al Young

From: Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry (Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2007)

All,

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (b. October 21, 1917) was one of the major as well as most influential and inspiring musicians and composers of the 20th century who had a profound global impact on music and art and played a crucial role in the growth and development of Jazz in an extraordinary career that lasted six decades until his death at 75 in 1993. What follows is an extensive musical and video sampling of his brilliant and prolific artistry on trumpet and as an innovative small ensemble and orchestral leader and composer from 1940 to 1990. Dizzy was not only a great artist and teacher but a wonderful human being as well. ENJOY...

Kofi

Solo duet: Dizzy & Christopher White on bass:

Dizzy Gillespie Quintet - "Tin Tin Deo"

(Composition by Gil Fuller and Chano Pozo):

Dizzy Gillespie performing his composition "Con Alma" (1954):

Con Alma is a jazz standard written by Dizzy Gillespie. It incorporates aspects of bebop jazz and Latin rhythm, and is known for its frequent changes in key centers (occurring every two bars), while still maintaining a singable melody. Versions have been recorded by Oscar Peterson, Wes Montgomery, Ed Bickert, Stan Getz and Kenny Burrell. The song was recorded by Chaka Khan in 1982 as part of the "Be Bop Medley" from her album "Chaka Khan"

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Live at Carnegie Hall on September 29, 1947 performing "Night in Tunisia" (Composition by Dizzy Gillespie):

Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra performing "Things to Come" (Composition by Dizzy Gillespie), 1946:

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie Live at Carnegie Hall on September 29, 1947 performing "Groovin' High"

(Composition by Dizzy Gillespie):

This superb performance of Groovin' High was recorded by Dizzy Gillespie (tp) Charlie Parker (as) John Lewis (p) Al McKibbon (b) and Joe Harris (d) at Carnegie Hall, NYC, September 29, 1947. Best Dizzy's solo in Groovin High ever.

Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra performing "Things to Come" (Composition by Dizzy Gillespie), 1948:

VIDEO:
https://archive.org/details/78_things-to-come_dizzy-gillespie-and-his-orchestra-fuller-gillespie_gbia0347289b

The Charlie Parker Quintet featuring Dizzy Gillespie perform "Hot House" at Dumont Television Studios in New York City on February 24, 1952:

Featuring Charlie Parker - alto sax; Dizzy Gillespie - trumpet; Dick Hyman - piano; Sandy Block - bass; Charlie Smith - drums

Dizzy Gillespie Quintet performing "Bebop" (Composition by Dizzy Gillespie), 1963:

Dizzy Gillespie Big Band [1968]:
Tivoli Koncertsal, Copenhagen - Denmark:

Dizzy Gillespie - Trumpet & Vocals
James Moody - Tenor, Flute & Vocals
Jimmy Owens - Flueghelhorn
Alphonse Reece - Trumpet
Victor Paz - Trumpet
Paul Jeffery - Tenor
Sahib Shihab - Baritone
Cecil Payne - Baritone
Curtis Fuller - Trombone
Michael Longo - Piano
Paul West - Bass
Candy Finch - Drums

Dizzy Gillespie's Dream Band Orchestra performing "Manteca" (Composition by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo) Live in concert at Lincoln Center in New York in 1982:

Dizzy Gillespie's Dream Band "Manteca":

Recorded in 1982 at Lincoln Center, captures legendary jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie performing with his Dream Band, consisting of a wide array of jazz music's finest musicians, many of whom worked with Gillespie during the evolutionary era of the early-'40s bebop period. It includes an all-star cast highlighted by pyrotechnic drum wizard Max Roach, Gillespie's protégé trumpeter Jon Faddis, and Modern Jazz Quartet cofounders John Lewis (piano) and Milt Jackson (vibraphone). The leader's crowd-pleasing persona, trademark puffy cheeks, and no-nonsense trumpet solos steal the show. Selections include Gillespie's Afro-Cubop favorite "Manteca"

"Con Alma" by Dizzy Gillespie:

One of the masterpieces of genius trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie:
Dizzy Gillespie Quintet (Jazz 625) 1966

Orlando Sanchez

October 28, 2013

In a restored and re-edited version of the 1960s jazz programme, Neneh Cherry introduces a session by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie accompanied by Rudy Collins, Christopher White, Kenny Barren and James Moody:

June 7, 2016

The Best of Dizzy Gillespie

1. TIN TIN DEO
2. ALONE TOGETHER
3. MANTECA
4. OOH-SHOO-BE-DOO-BEE
5. GROOVIN´ HIGH
6. BIRK´S WORKS

The Most Beautiful Songs by Dizzy Gillespie. For more bebop check out this Charlie Parker release of recordings from 20th & 22nd of November, 1950, in Hälsingborg and Malmö, Sweden: Physical:

http://dizzygillespie.com/

About Dizzy Gillespie

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, along with Charlie Parker, ushered in the era of Bebop in the American jazz tradition. He was born Cheraw, South Carolina, and was the youngest of nine children. He began playing piano at the age of four and received a music scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina. Most noted for his trademark “swollen cheeks,” Gillespie admitted to copying the style of trumpeter Roy Eldridge early in his career.
He replaced Eldridge in the Teddy Hill Band after Eldridge’s departure. He began experimenting and creating his own style, which would eventually come to the attention of Mario Bauza, the godfather of Afro-Cuban jazz who was then a member of the Cap Calloway Orchestra. Joining Calloway in 1939, Gillespie was fired after two years when he cut a portion of Calloway’s buttocks with a knife after Calloway accused him of throwing spitballs (the two men later became lifelong friends and often retold this story with great relish until both of their deaths).
Although noted for his on and off-stage clowning, Gillespie endured as one of the founding fathers of the Afro-Cuban and/or Latin jazz tradition. Influenced by Bauza, known as Gillespie’s musical father, he was able to fuse Afro-American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms to form a burgeoning Cubop sound. Always a musical ambassador, he toured Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America under the sponsorship of the US State Department. Quite often he returned, not only with fresh musical ideas but with musicians who would eventually go on to achieve world recognition.
Among his proteges and collaborators are Chano Pozo, the great Afro-Cuban percussionist; Danilo Perez, a master pianist and composer originally from Panama; Arturo Sandoval, trumpeter, composer, and music educator originally from Cuba; Mongo Santamaria, an Afro-Cuban conguero, bongeuro, and composer; David Sanchez, saxophonist, and composer; Chucho Valdes, an Afro-Cuban virtuoso pianist and composer; and Bobby Sanabria, a Bronx, NY-born Nuyorican percussionist, composer, educator, bandleader, and expert in the Afro-Cuban musical tradition. Indeed, many Latin jazz classics such as “Manteca,” “A Night in Tunisia,” and “Guachi Guaro [Soul Sauce]” were composed by Gillespie and his musical collaborators.
With a strong sense of pride in his Afro-American heritage, he left a legacy of musical excellence that embraced and fused all musical forms, but particularly those forms with roots deep in Africa such as the music of Cuba, other Latin American countries, and the Caribbean. Additionally, he left a legacy of goodwill and good humor that infused jazz musicians and fans throughout the world with the genuine sense of jazz’s ability to transcend national and ethnic boundaries. For this reason, Gillespie was, and is, an international treasure.

“In the naturally effervescent Mr. Gillespie, opposites existed. His playing — and he performed constantly until nearly the end of his life—was meteoric, full of virtuosic inventions, and deadly serious. But with his endlessly funny asides, his huge variety of facial expressions and his natural comic gifts, he was as much a pure entertainer as an accomplished artist. In some ways, he seemed to sum up all the possibilities of American popular art”

– Watrous, Peter. “Dizzy Gillespie, Who Sounded Some of Modern Jazz’s Earliest Notes, Dies at 75,” New York Times, January 7, 1993.

http://dizzygillespie.com/quotes/

Quotes About Dizzy Gillespie:

“In the naturally effervescent Mr. Gillespie, opposites existed. His playing — and he performed constantly until nearly the end of his life—was meteoric, full of virtuosic inventions, and deadly serious. But with his endlessly funny asides, his huge variety of facial expressions and his natural comic gifts, he was as much a pure entertainer as an accomplished artist. In some ways, he seemed to sum up all the possibilities of American popular art”. – Watrous, Peter. “Dizzy Gillespie, Who Sounded Some of Modern Jazz’s Earliest Notes, Dies at 75,” New York Times, January 7, 1993.
“His playing showcases the importance of intelligence. His rhythmic sophistication was unequaled. He was a master of harmony—and fascinated with studying it. He took in all the music of his youth—from Roy Eldridge to Duke Ellington—and developed a unique style built on complex rhythm and harmony balanced by wit. Dizzy was so quick-minded, he could create an endless flow of ideas at unusually fast tempi. Nobody had ever even considered playing a trumpet that way, let alone had actually tried. All the musicians respected him because, in addition to outplaying everyone, he knew so much and was so generous with that knowledge…” – Marsalis W. with Geoffrey C. Ward. Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life. New Work : Random House, 2008.
“The whole essence of a Gillespie solo was cliff-hanging suspense: the phrases and the angle of the approach were perpetually varied, breakneck runs were followed by pauses, Huge interval leaps, by long, immensely high notes, by slurs and smears and bluesy phrases; he always took listeners by surprise, always shocking them with a new thought. His lightning reflexes and superb ear meant his instrumental execution matched his thoughts in its power and speed. And he was concerned at all times with swing—even taking the most daring liberties with pulse or beat, his phrases never failed to swing, Gillespie’s magnificent sense of time and emotional intensity of his playing came from childhood roots. His parents were Methodists, but as a boy he used to sneak off every Sunday to the uninhibited Sanctified Church”. He said later, ‘The Sanctified Church had a deep significance for me, musically. I first learned the significance of rhythm there and all about how music can transport people spiritually.’” – Carr, I., Fairweather, D, Brian P, The Rough Guide to Jazz. page 291.
https://jazzonthetube.com/video/things-to-come/?omhide=true

The 1947 Gillespie Orchestra performs their most radical piece:
by Scott Yanow

Dizzy Gillespie was not only one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time but the co-founder of both bebop and Afro-Cuban (or Latin) jazz.

Always more than a trumpeter, Gillespie taught a countless number of musicians how to play bop (succeeding at making bebop the new mainstream of jazz), and his humorous showmanship helped to expand the audience for the once-forbidding music.
This clip from the 1947 short film Jivin’ In Bebop features Gillespie and his big band playing their most advanced arrangement, the perfectly-titled “Things To Come.”

The music (featuring Gillespie, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, altoist Scoops Cary, drummer Joe Harris, and the trumpet section) still sounds futuristic today.
http://dizzygillespie.com/discography/

Dizzy Gillespie Selected Discography:

1937-49 The Complete RCA Victor Recordings
1941: The Immortal Charlie Christian (with Christian, Thelonious Monk, Delta Music re-released on Laserlight cassette)
1950: Bird & Diz
1952: Dee Gee Days – The Savoy Sessions
1953: Jazz at Massey Hall
1953: Diz & Getz (with Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Max Roach, Herb Ellis)
1954: Afro
1956: Modern Jazz Sextet
1957: Sittin’ In (with Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins)
1957: Dizzy Gillespie at Newport
1957: Sonny Side Up (with Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt)
1957: Dizzy in Greece
1958: Birks’ Works (Dizzy Gillespie Big Band)
1959: Have Trumpet, Will Excite!
1959: The Ebullient Mr. Gillespie
1960: A Portrait of Duke Ellington
1961: An Electrifying Evening with the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet
1962: Dizzy on the French Riviera (Philips Records)
1963: New Wave (Philips Records) (with Lalo Schifrin, Bola Sete)
1963: Something Old, Something New
1963: Dizzy Gillespie and the Double Six of Paris
1964: Jambo Caribe (with James Moody, Kenny Barron)
1967: Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac (Impulse!)

1968: Live at the Village Vanguard (produced by Sonny Lester
1968: Reunion Big Band In Berlin (MPS Records)
1969: Strictly Bebop (with Babs Gonzalez, Tad Dameron, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, John Coltrane), rec. 1949 EMI Capitol
1971: Dizzy Gillespie and the Mitchell Ruff Duo In Concert (Mainstream Records)
1974: Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie
1975: Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods (with Machito, Chico O’Farrill, Mario Bauza)
1975: Jazz Maturity…Where It’s Coming From
1975: Oscar Peterson and The Trumpet Kings – Jousts
1975: The Trumpet Kings at Montreux ’75
1976: Dizzy’s Party
1977: The Gifted Ones (with Count Basie)
1981: Digital at Montreux, 1980 (Toots Thielemans, Bernard Purdie)
1985: New Faces (with Robert Ameen, Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Lonnie Plaxico, Charlie Christian)
1988: Oop Pop a Da (with Moe Koffman)
1989: Live at the Royal Festival Hall London July 10, 1989
1989: The Symphony Sessions (with Ron Holloway, Ed Cherry, John Lee, Ignacio Berroa) rec. August 25, 1989 ProJazz
1990: The Winter in Lisbon
1990: Rhythmstick (CTI Records)
1990: Live! at Blues Alley (with Ron Holloway, Ed Cherry, John Lee, Ignacio Berroa) rec. October 30, 1991 Blues Alley Music Society
1992: Groovin’ High
1992: To Bird With Love
1995: In Paris v.2 Vogue RCA 1995

Awards:

New Star Award, Esquire Magazine (1944)

Handel Medallion, City of New York (1972)

Paul Robeson Award, Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies (1972)

Performs "Salt Peanuts" with President Carter at White House Jazz Concert (1978)

Inducted into Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame (1982)

Lifetime Achievement Award, National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) (1989)

National Medal of Arts, President Bush (1989)

Duke Ellington Award, Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (1989)

Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1989); Kennedy Center Honors Award (1990)

Fourteen honorary degrees, including Ph.D., Rutgers University (1972)

Ph.D., Chicago Conservatory of Music (1978)

Awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

TO BE, OR NOT...TO BOP. Autoiography by Dizzy Gillespie (w/Al Fraser). University of Minnesota Press. 2009; originally published in 1979 by Doubleday

Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie. by Alyn Shipton. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie. by Donald L. Maggin. HarperCollins. 2005

http://life.time.com/icons/dizzy-gillespie-rare-and-classic-portraits-of-a-playful-genius/#1

Dizzy Gillespie: Rare and Classic Portraits of a Playful Genius

LIFE magazine

October, 1948

https://time.com/3881106/dizzy-gillespie-rare-and-classic-portraits-of-a-playful-genius/

LIFE

LIFE With Dizzy Gillespie: Rare and Classic Portraits of a Playful Genius

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948. Dizzy Gillespie, 1948. Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

by Steve Futterman

October 5, 2014

[Steve Futterman is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.]

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, who would have celebrated his 97th birthday on Oct. 21, was the very model of the modern American musical genius: a brilliant instrumentalist and stylistic innovator, he was also an extroverted performer with a wicked sense of humor.

One of the primary creators of bebop in the mid-1940s and an unparalleled trumpeter, Dizzy was a populist who wanted his music to be understood, appreciated and enjoyed. Audiences may have associated him with signature visual clues—the beret and goatee he sported in the 1940s, and the trumpet with the upturned bell he began playing in the 1950s—and adored his onstage clowning and dancing, but anyone with ears could tell how seriously he always took the music. An international star until his death on January 6, 1993 (the same day as Rudolph Nureyev), Gillespie was as fervently respected by fellow musicians, as he was beloved by generations of listeners.

A LIFE spread captured Gillespie in 1948, during bebop’s glory days. Conspicuous in his absence is Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop, and the man whom Dizzy called “the other side of my heartbeat,” but Gillespie’s vivacious personality was far more palatable to the mainstream. To see this magnificent musician in his youth, ready to convince the world that the music he and his not-yet-understood peers were making was the sound of the future, is still a glorious thing to behold.

**Caption from LIFE. "Bebop greeting begins as Gillespie (right) hails Benny Carter with 'Bells, man! Where you been?'"Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images**

**Caption from LIFE. "The Sign, The Shout, The Grip . . ."Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images**

**Not published in LIFE. Dizzy Gillespie, 1948.Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images**

Dizzy Gillespie and friends, including pianist Mel Powell1948. — **Not published in LIFE. Dizzy Gillespie and friends, including pianist Mel Powell, 1948.Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images**

**Not published in LIFE. Dizzy Gillespie and friends jam, 1948. Allan Grant—**

Caption from LIFE. "Cackling crooner Mel (Velvet Fog) Torme happily bites on his finger while he and a model, June Bright, dig Dizzy Gillespie (reflected in mirror)."Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Caption from LIFE. "Frenzied Drummer named Gonzales (but called Chano Pozo) whips beboppers into fever with Congo beat. Dizzy rates him world's best drummer."Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

**Caption from LIFE. "Merry actress Ava Gardner, a bop fan, dons beret and specs and pretends to wear goatee at Billy Berg's Hollywood nightclub as Dizzy (left) grins."**

**Not published in LIFE. Dizzy Gillespie and friends, 1948.Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images**

**Caption from LIFE. "Dizzy's fans sport painted goatees and berets."Allan Grant—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images**

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/22/dizzy-gillespie-forpresident.html

Culture

Gilles Petard / Getty Images

Dizzy Gillespie for president: When politics was a groovier thing
April 22, 2014
by Tom Maxwell @universalshow

There are many reasons to remember Dizzy Gillespie. His look, for one thing: the horn-rimmed glasses, pouched-out frog cheeks, and that trumpet, bent up at a 45-degree angle. The ground floor inventor of bebop, he had an unforgettable sound, a mastery of harmonic invention and implied chords, firing off fusillades of rhythmic phrasing. Gillespie was smart. He was funny. He played with Charlie Parker and influenced Miles Davis. Fifty years ago, he also ran for president.

It started as a joke, as so many serious things do. His booking agency had some “Dizzy Gillespie for president” buttons made around 1960, because, you see, it’s funny. Somebody even asked Gillespie why a black jazzman — a permanent member of the underclass if there ever was one — would even think of trying for the job. “Because we need one,” he said.

“Anybody coulda made a better President than the ones we had in those times, dillydallying about protecting blacks in the exercise of their civil and human rights and carrying on secret wars against people around the world,” Gillespie wrote in his autobiography “To Be, or Not ... to Bop.” “I was the only choice for a thinking man.” He went on to offer a little doggerel on the subject:

I never thought the time would come when
I’d vote for Lyndon B.
But I’d rather burn in hell than vote for
Barry G.

The campaign was conceived by Jean Gleason — wife of Ralph Gleason, a music critic and founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine — and Ramona Crowell, a devoted fan. A rally was held in Chicago in the summer of 1963, and “Dizzy for president” buttons were soon sold to raise money for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

The campaign got its official theme song in September at the Monterey Jazz Festival. As Gillespie’s band played one of his signature songs, “Salt Peanuts,” vocalist Jon Hendricks delivered a reworked lyric at blinding speed:

Your politics ought to be a groovier thing

Vote Dizzy! Vote Dizzy!

So get a good president who’s willing to swing

Vote Dizzy! Vote Dizzy!

Hear the music:

Hendricks understood the seriousness behind the campaign. “It shone a light on the whole thing,” he remembered. “Like, what about a black person running for president? It had never happened before ... It was to give both political parties, all those poseurs and jive talkers, a kick in the butt.”

“I had a real reason for running,” Gillespie wrote in his autobiography, “because the proceeds from the sale of buttons went to CORE, SCLC [the Southern Christian Leadership Conference] and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I could threaten Democrats with a loss of votes and swing them to a more reasonable position on civil rights.”

In 1964, Gillespie fans formed the John Birks Society (that being Gillespie’s real first and middle names, and a convenient swipe at the ultraconservative John Birch crowd) and tried, unsuccessfully, to get him on the ballot in California. Ultimately, the John Birks Society would have chapters in 25 states.

In the meantime, Gillespie perfected his stump speech. Many of his campaign promises, like changing the name of the White House to the Blues House, were humorous, but that was only sugarcoating the medicine.

“All U.S. attorneys and judges in the South will be our people so we can get some redress,” Gillespie said on the stump. “‘One man, one vote’ — that’s our motto. We might even disenfranchise women [sic] and let them run the country. They’ll do it anyhow.”

I had a real reason for running, because I could threaten Democrats with a loss of votes and swing them to a more reasonable position on civil rights.

Dizzy Gillespie

Members of a cabinet were named, not as secretaries but as “the more appropriately dignified ‘minister.’” Drummer Max Roach apparently volunteered as minister of war, “but since we’re not going to have any,” as Gillespie said, Roach was given another role. Miles Davis was tapped as head of the CIA. Malcolm X, “one cat we definitely want to have on our side,” would serve as attorney general.

Trumpet legend Louis Armstrong was slated to head the Ministry of Agriculture. This must have been an inside joke if not an olive branch. In earlier years, bop musicians were dismissive of Armstrong, who hated their new style, calling him an Uncle Tom. Gillespie went so far as to refer to his “plantation image,” which is likely what inspired his pick for the agriculture job. (By the end of the 1960s, that hard line had softened. “If it hadn’t been for [Louis Armstrong], there wouldn’t have been none of us,” Gillespie was quoted as saying during the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival. “I want to thank Louis Armstrong for my livelihood.”)

More plans were laid out for a Gillespie administration. The National Labor Relations Board would require people applying for jobs “to wear sheets over their heads so bosses won’t know what they are until after they’ve been hired. The sheets, of course, will all be colored!” A black astronaut would be sent to the moon; Gillespie volunteered if no one else could be found.

Barry Goldwater offered a lame response to the Gillespie campaign by citing white Dixieland trombonist Turk Murphy as his favorite jazz musician. “All I can say is I don’t blame Turk for that,” Gillespie retorted. “I’m glad he didn’t pick me.”

Of course, Gillespie never had a chance. He campaigned into early 1964 and then, as Ramona Crowell said, “it sort of fizzled out.” Gillespie declared again in 1972, but withdrew when he found out that running for political office was against the principles of his newfound Baha’i faith.

“I liked the idea of running for president, and it would’ve been nice to be elected,” he wrote in his autobiography, and then revealed the tremendous heart behind an apparent joke:

“I’d have fought for a disarmament program and the establishment of a world government, somewhere ... I would see that everyone had enough to eat and some clothes and a decent place to stay. Everybody, every citizen, is entitled to that. Education would be beautiful, free, subsidized by the government. All of it. Anytime you wanted to learn something, I’d pay you to do it. Hospitalization would also be free.

“The only bona fide politician who paid any serious attention to my political ideas,” Gillespie’s autobiography continued, “was a woman.” Barbara Jordan, a representative from Texas, wore a “Dizzy Gillespie for president” button on the floor of the House. In recalling this, Gillespie lamented that Jordan had not been nominated for a major post in Jimmy Carter’s administration, adding, “That would’ve been great, wouldn’t it?”

Sound Projections

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http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1021.html

January 7, 1993

OBITUARY

Dizzy Gillespie, Who Sounded Some of Modern Jazz's Earliest Notes, Dies at 75
by PETER WATROUS
New York Times

From Carolina To the Big Bands

Joining With Parker To Mold New Style