Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie - Hardcover

Maggin, Donald L

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9780688170882: Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688170889 ISBN 13: 9780688170882

Publisher: It Books, 2005

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Dizzy Gillespie has secured his place in the jazz pantheon as one of the most expressive and virtuosic improvisers in the history of music. But he was much more than that. As one of the primary creators of the bebop and Afro-Cuban revolutions, he twice fundamentally changed the way jazz improvisation was done. And he later extended his revolutionary reach by transforming the aesthetic of big band jazz.

This vivid biography chronicles Dizzy's saga from the lowest rung on the American social and political ladder to the highest. Born black in fiercely racist Cheraw, South Carolina, in 1917, Dizzy combined great energy, a furious drive to succeed, and a one-in-a-million talent to climb quickly out of rural poverty to a role among the Swing Era jazz elite before his twenty-first birthday.

Author Donald L. Maggin shows how, with bebop during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Dizzy and four colleagues -- Charlie Parker, Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Christian -- radically expanded the rhythmic and harmonic foundations of jazz. And he illustrates how Dizzy and Mario Bauz� recast the music duing the late 1940s by enriching it with invigorating and exciting Afro-Cuban polyrhythms. He also relates how Dizzy and his colleagues endured a torrent of criticism before their innovations were accepted into the mainstream.

Dizzy's story takes us on the road with the great Calloway, Hines, and Eckstine bands and to Cheraw's cotton fields, Harlem's afterhours clubs, the teeming 1940s Fifty-second Street jazz scene, the rhythmic barrios of Havana, Rio's samba festivals, the White House, and the world's great concert halls as Dizzy teamed up with prodigious talents to make great music during a career spanning fifty-five years. It also records his spiritual growth over the decades and the intense love he earned from those close to him.

As an entertainer Dizzy combined his electrifying musicianship with an infectious warmth and rare comedic skills, becoming beloved worldwide and achieving a popularity that few jazz musicians have ever enjoyed.

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About the Author:

Donald L. Maggin is the author of Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz. A writer and businessman, he has produced jazz concerts by such artists as Max Roach, Sonny Stitt, James Moody, Roland Hanna, Eubie Blake, and Roberta Flack. He was a board member of the American Jazz Orchestra, served in the Carter White House for three years, is an editor of the literary journal The Reading Room, and is a trustee of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

From Booklist:

It's been 60 years since Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Kenny Clarke, and a handful of other bebop pioneers reinvented the art of jazz improvisation, and in those six decades, Parker--thanks to both his virtuosity and his premature heroin-induced death--has achieved near-mythic status in the minds of jazz lovers. Maggin, in this long-overdue, full-dress biography, reestablishes Gillespie's premier role in not one but two jazz revolutions--the bebop movement and the development of Latin jazz. He capably traces Gillespie's life from its beginnings in the racist South of the 1920s through the trumpeter's musical internship in various big bands, and on to his emergence, with Parker, in New York's Fifty-second Street nightclubs as the standard-bearer of what was then known as modern jazz. Equally important, Maggin gives plenty of space to Gillespie's signature work with his own big band--not a format favored by most beboppers--and his continual evolution over a 57-year career. It isn't all flatted fifths and rhythmic innovation, however; the full force of Gillespie's mercurial personality shines throughout this important contribution to American musical history. Bill Ott
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