Dizzy Gillespie

1917 - 1993

About

Dizzy Gillespie was an american jazz trumpeter, bandleader, singer, and composer. He was one of the principal innovators in jazz, who along with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Kenny Clarke, pioneered the harmonic and rhythmic advances of the early 1940s that became known as bebop. His exceptional talent for playing higher, faster, and more accurately than anyone who preceded him set a new standard for jazz musicians and his style of playing was widely imitated, especially by trumpeters. Gillespie wrote such early bebop compositions as Woody ’n’ You, Groovin’ High, and Salt Peanuts, and his most enduring piece, A Night in Tunisia, is one of the most frequently recorded in jazz. His career spanned almost six decades, and it is difficult to overstate his impact as one of the most influential musicians in jazz history.

Gillespie was born the youngest of nine children to a poor, rural Southern family. His father was a bricklayer who also played various musical instruments with groups on the weekends, but died from an asthma attack when Gillespie was ten. Gillespie was given a trombone at school and taught himself to play it even though he was too small to reach fifth position. After a neighbor received a trumpet, Gillespie visited the house repeatedly to play it until he was allowed to exchange his trombone for a trumpet. He performed locally at rent parties and school dances and his ability allowed him to attend Laurinberg Technical Institute in nearby North Carolina on a music scholarship. Although he received little formal instruction, he practiced trumpet and piano incessantly, and taught himself basic theory. In 1935 his family moved to Philadelphia, and after failing physics he left school without graduating to rejoin the family. In Philadelphia, a brother-in-law gave him a trumpet, which he carried around in a paper bag. In 1936 he was hired to work in Frankie Fairfax’s band, where he played alongside Charlie Shavers and earned the nickname Dizzy for his prankish behavior on and off the bandstand. After Shavers introduced him to the trumpet playing of Roy Eldridge, he quickly learned to imitate Eldridge’s style. In 1937 he moved to New York to find greater musical opportunities and at the age of 19 he secured a job with Teddy Hill’s orchestra. On the eve of an overseas tour, he made his first recordings with the band, sounding especially like his idol, Eldridge, in his solo on 'King Porter Stomp'. Gillespie stayed with Hill for two years, during which time he also worked with Edgar Hayes’s orchestra, the Savoy Sultans, and the Cuban flutist Alberto Soccaras. In 1939 he joined Cab Calloway’s orchestra, one of the highest paid black orchestras in New York; he played with the group locally and on lengthy nationwide tours. During a stop in Kansas City in 1940, Gillespie met Charlie Parker, who was working with Jay McShann’s band, and the two formed a close personal and musical bond. After returning to New York, he jammed after hours at Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. Amateur recordings made at Minton’s by Jerry Newman in 1941 reveal swing men Gillespie, Charlie Christian, and Don Byas experimenting with melodic lines that extend beyond swing conventions. By this time Gillespie had almost completely replaced his Eldridge-inspired style with an individual approach which can be heard especially on 'Kerouac'

Gillespie’s unconventional solos and clownish behavior in the Calloway band led to tension with his boss. Following a performance in Hartford, Connecticut, Calloway accused his trumpeter of hitting him with a spitball. The ensuing argument grew so heated that Gillespie cut Calloway with a knife and was immediately fired from the band. He spent the next two years playing with orchestras led by Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Les Hite, and Lucky Millinder. On Millinder’s recording of 'Little John Special' (1942) his solo exhibits novel harmonic choices and a rhythmic sensibility that anticipates the complex vocabulary of bebop. From January through August 1943 Gillespie worked with Earl Hines’s orchestra, a now legendary ensemble that included Charlie Parker and other proto-boppers; the band did not record owing to the American Federation of Musicians ban. Gillespie formed a quintet with Lester Young (who was later replaced by Don Byas), George Wallington, Oscar Pettiford, and Max Roach to play at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street. He briefly did double-duty, playing with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Capitol theater in the evening and with his quintet late at night. In February 1944, in a group nominally led by Coleman Hawkins, Gillespie made what are widely considered to be the first bebop recordings, including 'Woody ’n’ You'. In June 1944 Billy Eckstine, the singer with Hines’ band, formed a new orchestra and hired Gillespie as a trumpet player and the band’s musical director with the charge to build a repertory of progressive, bop arrangements. The band also included Parker, Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon, and Art Blakey, but did not record while Parker and Gillespie were in it together.

Gillespie left Eckstine and briefly led his own big band, the Hepstations, before co-leading a quintet with Parker. A recording of the band performing at Town Hall in New York in 1945 was released for the first time in 2005, having been lost in the meantime. The brilliant and shocking artistry of Gillespie and Parker had a profound impact on jazz history, but their differing personalities and artistic agendas led to only occasional work together between 1945 and Parker’s death in 1955. Gillespie returned to leading a big band in 1946 and managed to keep the band together for four years. As well as introducing bebop innovations to its music, he hired the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo. Their collaboration led to the popularization of another jazz idiom, Afro-Cuban jazz, and the landmark recordings 'Cubana Be/Cubana Bop' and 'Manteca' in 1947.

In June 1950 Gillespie broke up the big band and returned to combo work and recordings, the first of which was a quintet session with Parker, Monk, Curly Russell, and Buddy Rich. In 1951 he founded his own Detroit-based record label, Dee Gee, which was financially unsuccessful and short-lived. Although still playing at a high level, his recordings for Dee Gee records, which included novelty songs and silly duets with the vocalist Kenny Hagood, are among his least adventurous projects. Before it folded in 1952, Dee Gee made recordings of the first version of the Modern Jazz Quartet, which consisted of John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Ray Brown, and Kenny Clarke, all alumni of Gillespie’s big band.

In 1954 Gillespie joined Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic tours as a soloist, which led to a prolific recording relationship. For Granz he recorded a dueling trumpet album with Roy Eldridge, blowing sessions with younger beboppers such as Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and Sonny Stitt, and documented his next big band’s entire repertory. He toured internationally in 1956 for the US State Department with a big band culled by Quincy Jones. This diverse ensemble, which included white and black players and the female trombonist Melba Liston, played in Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, among other countries, to promote good will and American achievement. Following a South American tour, the group performed domestically until diminishing profits forced it to disband in 1958. Throughout the 1960s Gillespie led a sextet that variously included James Moody, Leo Wright, Lalo Schifrin, Kenny Barron, Mike Longo, Chris White, and Rudy Collins, among others. From the 1940s numerous young musicians, including John Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, and Lee Morgan, achieved important careers after playing in Gillespie’s bands. Two trumpet protégés who followed particularly closely in the master’s footsteps were Jon Faddis and the Cuban-born Arturo Sandoval.

Along with his music, Gillespie’s exuberant personality and individual style contributed to his being one of the few jazz musicians recognizable to the general public. In the late 1940s he codified a distinctive appearance wearing a beret, horn-rimmed glasses, and goatee, a style that was adopted by advertisers as an iconic representation of the jazz modernist or beatnik. His clownish stage manner, nimble dancing, tendency to puff out his cheeks and neck while playing, and unusual instrument—a trumpet with the bell turned upward at a 45-degree angle—all left a strong impression on the public. During the 1980s guest appearances on Stevie Wonder’s disco single 'Do I Do' (Motown, 1982) and television programs such as The Muppet Show (1979) and The Cosby Show (1984) introduced him to a new generation as a living legend, especially to those who did not listen to jazz.

In 1989 Gillespie formed the United Nations Orchestra, a group of international virtuosos who toured internationally and played concerts that were more showcases for young talents like Sandoval, Paquito D’Rivera, David Sanchez, Danilo Pérez, and Steve Turre than for Gillespie, whose tone and technique were no longer as strong as they had once been. On 26 November 1992 he was scheduled to appear at a concert at Carnegie Hall celebrating his 75th birthday and featuring Faddis, Longo and other Gillespie alumni, but illness prevented him. He died shortly thereafter of pancreatic cancer. Parker’s memory was honored in New York when the nightclub Birdland was named for him. Gillespie was similarly honored in 2004 when Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola opened as part of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center complex at the Columbus Circle in Manhattan.

Related Information

Grove Music Online

Works by Dizzy Gillespie