Dizzy Gillespie | Artist
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer, born 1917 in Cheraw, South Carolina. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the classic style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. The youngest of nine children of Lottie and James Gillespie, his father was a local bandleader so instruments were available to the children. Gillespie started to play the piano at the age of four. Gillespie's father died when he was only ten years old so he taught himself how to play the trombone as well as the trumpet by the age of twelve. From the night he heard his idol, Roy Eldridge, on the radio, he dreamed of becoming a jazz musician. He won a music scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina which he attended for two years before moving to Philadelphia with his family in 1935. In the 1940s, Gillespie, with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop, which was the first modern jazz style. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Fats Navaro, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Chuck Mangione and Johnny Hartman. Gillespie compositions like "Groovin' High", "Woody 'n' You" and "Salt Peanuts" sounded radically different, harmonically and rhythmically, from the swing music popular at the time. "A Night in Tunisia", written in 1942, while he was playing with Earl Hines' band, is noted for having a feature that is common in today's music: a syncopated bass line. Starting in 1947, Gillespie's big bands, with arrangements provided by Tadd Dameron, Gil Filler and George Russell, popularised bebop and made him a symbol of the new music. As a recording artist Gillespie released over 100 studio albums, as soloist, collaborator, and with his orchestras, plus ensembles The Quintet and The Modern Jazz Sextet. A selection of essential albums includes Bird and Diz (1952), Afro (1954), Diz and Getz (1955), For Musicians Only (1958), Sonny Side Up (1959), At Newport (1957), New Wave! (1962), The Cool World [Soundtrack] (1964), and Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods (1976). Diz also features in the classic Jazz at the Massey Hall series alongside Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell and Max Roach. In 1989, Gillespie was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Duke Ellington Award for 50 years of achievement as a composer, performer, and bandleader. In 1989, Gillespie was awarded with an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music. In movies, Samuel E. Wright played Dizzy Gillespie in the Charlie Parker biopic Bird (1988), and Kevin Hanchard portrayed Gillespie in the Chet Baker biopic Born to be Blue (2015). As a matter of interest, Gillespie's trademark upturned trumpet came about when he threw a party for his wife Lorraine at Snookie's, a club in Manhattan, where his trumpet's bell got bent upward in an accident, but he liked the sound so much he had a special trumpet made with a 45 degree raised bell.
Artist Website: wikipedia/Dizzy_Gillespie
Featured Albums: Dizzy Gillespie
Related Artists: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, The Quintet
Video Clips: The Quintet 1966, He Beeped When He Shold Have Bopped, Let me Outta Here
