Gillespie, Dizzy [John Birks]

(b Cheraw, SC, 21 Oct 1917; d Englewood, NJ, 6 Jan 1993). American jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader. He was one of the principal developers of bop in the early 1940s, and his styles of improvising and trumpet playing were imitated widely.

1. Life.

Gillespie taught himself to play the trombone and the trumpet and later took up the cornet. His musical ability enabled him to attend Laurinburg Institute, North Carolina, in 1933, for the school needed a trumpet player for its band. During his years there he practised the trumpet and piano intensively, still largely without formal guidance. In 1935 he moved to Philadelphia and soon joined a band led by Frankie Fairfax, which also included the trumpeter Charlie Shavers. Shavers knew many of the trumpet solos of Roy Eldridge, and Gillespie learnt them by copying Shavers. While he was in Fairfax’s band his clownish behaviour led to the nickname Dizzy.

Moving to New York in 1937, Gillespie earned a job with Teddy Hill’s big band, largely because he sounded much like Eldridge, who had been Hill’s trumpet soloist; the band toured France and Great Britain for two months. On his return to New York Gillespie worked with Al Cooper’s Savoy Sultans and the Afro-Cuban band of Alberto Socarras as well as with Hill. In 1939 he joined Cab Calloway’s big band, where, largely because of his friendship with Mario Bauzá, who was also in the band, he began to develop an interest in the fusion of jazz and Afro-Cuban music. During the same period he was beginning to diverge from Eldridge’s playing style both formally, in his solos with the band – such as Pickin’ the Cabbage (1940, Voc./OK) – and in an informal context, with the group’s double bass player Milt Hinton.

While on tour in 1940 Gillespie met Charlie Parker in Kansas City. Soon he began participating in after-hours jam sessions in New York with Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and others. This group of young, experimenting players gradually developed the new, more complex style of jazz that was to be called bop. Recordings, such as Kerouac (1941, on the album The Harlem Jazz Scene, Eso.), made at Minton’s Playhouse, exemplify this emergent style.

A dispute with Calloway led to Gillespie’s dismissal in 1941. He then worked briefly with many leaders, including Lucky Millinder and Earl Hines (whose band also included Parker). With Millinder he recorded a near-bop solo within a swing-band context on Little John Special (1942, Bruns.). After his solo the band plays a riff which he developed into the composition Salt Peanuts. During the winter of 1943–4 Gillespie led a small group with the double bass player Oscar Pettiford. In 1944 Billy Eckstine, the singer with Hines’s band, formed a bop band and engaged Gillespie to play and to be musical director. At about the same time Gillespie made some of the first small-group bop recordings, including Salt Peanuts (1945, Guild) and Hot House (1945, Guild), under his own name with Parker.

In 1945 Gillespie organized his own short-lived big band and in March formed a bop quintet with Parker. He later expanded the group to a sextet, but his desire to lead a big band inspired him to try once more in 1946. The following year the band made pioneering attempts to fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz (seeAfro-Cuban jazz). Gillespie added percussionist Chano Pozo to the band which recorded Cubana Be/Cubana Bop (1947, Vic.; written by George Russell) and Manteca (by Gillespie, Pozo and Gil Fuller). In addition to Pozo the band included, in 1946, John Lewis, Milt Jackson and Kenny Clarke, who, with Percy Heath, went on to form the Modern Jazz Quartet. After disbanding in 1950 Gillespie organized a sextet.

Gillespie toured as a featured soloist with Stan Kenton from late 1953 to early 1954 and then resumed his role as leader. In 1954 he began using a trumpet built for him with the bell pointing upwards at a 45° angle. The design became his visual trademark (see illustration).

In 1956, after several years leading small groups, Gillespie formed another big band specifically to tour the Middle East and South America on cultural missions for the US State Department. Two years later he returned to leading small groups, with which he continued to perform and record extensively into the late 1980s. In addition he appeared occasionally in all-star groups such as the Giants of Jazz (1971–2), a sextet with Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Thelonious Monk, Al McKibbon and Art Blakey, and was a regular performer on Caribbean cruise ships that featured jazz artists. In 1988 he formed the Latin-jazz orientated United Nation Superband. He became an elder statesman of jazz, and his outgoing personality and impish sense of humour endeared him to the general public through appearances on television.

2. Musical style.

Gillespie’s first recorded solos sound much like those of Roy Eldridge. But during the years 1939 to 1944 he established his own style: he began using a lighter vibrato; his phrasing contained both swing quavers (ex.1a) and even quavers (ex.1b) instead of being dominated by the former; his melodies became more chromatic (sometimes self-consciously so), especially in his extensive use of the lowered second degree of the scale (used more sparingly by his swing-era elders Eldridge and Coleman Hawkins); and early versions of some of his characteristic melodic formulas (such as the phrase in triplets in ex.2) began to appear. By the mid-1940s his mature style was fully formed.

Gillespie’s was a dramatic style, filled with startling contrasts. Simple, almost folklike phrases could suddenly give way to long, complex phrases filled with fast notes (ex.3). Similarly, soft, mid-register phrases could suddenly give way to high notes played fortissimo. And the drama was visual as well as aural, for he allowed his cheeks to fill with air when he played; over the years his cheek muscles stretched, and the increase in the size of his face when he played was striking. His tone was less full and rich than that of some of his predecessors and many of his followers, and sometimes he seemed little concerned about accurate intonation. But his fertile melodic and rhythmic imagination, his technical facility and his tireless dedication to bop earned him a place among the great figures of jazz history.

Gillespie wrote and collaborated with others on a variety of well-known pieces: the chromatic Woody ’n’ You, filled with half diminished seventh chords, one of his favourite harmonic sonorities; the simple, humorous and riff-like Salt Peanuts (based on I got rhythm and written in collaboration with Kenny Clarke); the frantically fast Bebop; the Latin-tinged A Night in Tunisia and Manteca; the melodically complex Groovin’ High (based on Whispering) and Anthropology (based on I got rhythm and written in collaboration with Charlie Parker); the harmonically ingenious Con Alma; and the basic blues theme Birks Works.

WORKS

(selective list)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Feather: Inside Be-Bop (New York, 1949/R1977 as Inside Jazz), 19–32

R.O. Boyer: ‘Bop: a Profile of Dizzy’, Eddie Condon’s Treasury of Jazz, ed. E. Condon and R. Gehman (London, 1957), 223–38

M. James: Dizzy Gillespie (London, 1959); repr. in Kings of Jazz, ed. S. Green (South Brunswick, NJ, 1978), 175–207

M. James: Ten Modern Jazzmen (London, 1960), 27–38

G. Hoefer: ‘The Glorious Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra’, Down Beat, xxxiii/8 (1966), 27–30, 47 only

J. Burns: ‘Dizzy Gillespie: the Early 1950s’, JJ, xxii (1969), no.1, p.2 only

J. Burns: ‘Early Birks’, JJ, xxiv/3 (1971), 18–23, 40 only

J. Burns: ‘Dizzy Gillespie: 1945–50’, JJ, xxv/1 (1972), 12–14

L. Feather: ‘Diz’, From Satchmo to Miles (New York, 1972/R), 147–70

R. Wang: ‘Jazz Circa 1945: a Confluence of Styles’, MQ, lix (1973), 531–46

R.J. Gleason: Celebrating the Duke, and Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy, and other Heroes (Boston, 1975)

S. Dance: The World of Earl Hines (New York, 1977) [interviews]

D. Gillespie and A. Fraser: To be, or not … to Bop: Memoirs(Garden City, NY, 1979/R)

J. Evensmo: The Trumpets of Dizzy Gillespie, 1937–1943, Irving Randolph, Joe Thomas (Oslo, c1982) [discography]

R. Horricks: Dizzy Gillespie and the Be-Bop Revolution (Tunbridge Wells, 1984) [incl. discography by T. Middleton]

P. Koster and C. Sellers: Dizzy Gillespie, i: 1937–1953 (Amsterdam,1985) [discography]

J. Woelfer: Dizzy Gillespie: sein Leben, seine Musik, seine Schallplatten (Waakirchen, nr Bad Tölz, 1987)

B. McRae: Dizzy Gillespie: His Life and Times (New York, 1988)

L. Clarke and F. Verdun: Dizzy atmosphere: conversations avec Dizzy Gillespie (Arles, 1990)

G. Lees: Waiting for Dizzy (New York and Oxford, 1991)

W. Enstice and P. Rubin: Jazz Spoken Here: Conversations with Twenty-Two Musicians (Baton Rouge, LA, 1992/R)

G. Giddins: ‘Dizzy Like a Fox’, Faces in the Crowd: Players and Writers (New York, 1992), 176–87

L. Tanner, ed.: Dizzy: John Birks Gillespie in his 75th Year (San Francisco, 1994)

T. Owens: Bebop: the Music and its Players (New York, 1995)

S. DeVeaux: The Birth of Bebop: a Social and Musical History (Berkeley and London, 1997)

A. Shipton: Groovin’ High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie (New York, 1999)

Oral history material in US-NEij

THOMAS OWENS