Dizzy Gillespies Contributions To Jazz example essay topic

"Dizzy" Gillespie Dizzy Gillespie was one of the principle developers of bop in the early 1940's, and his styles of improvising and trumpet playing were imitated widely in the 1940's and 1950's. He is one of the most influential players in the history of jazz. Born in 1917 in a small South Carolina town, John Birks Gillespie was the son of a bricklayer who played the piano on the weekends with a local band. He died when Dizzy was only ten. The young Gillespie got his musical education from neighbors and at school. After the piano he soon chose the trumpet, but still with no formal training.

Dizzy taught himself by trial and error and with the help of his friends. Gillespie dropped out of junior high school during the depression in order to support the family. In 1935, he moved to Philadelphia where he got a job with the Frankie Fairfax band. This is where his clownish behavior earned him the nickname Dizzy. In May 1937, he recorded his first record. He moved to New York to join the Mills Blue Rhythm Orchestra, but the job never opened up for him.

Still in 1937 he was able to be part of Teddy Hill's band and its European tour. In 1938 Dizzy went back to New York where he then met again a dancer he had first seen in late 1937 on a brief trip to Washington. Gussied Lorraine Willis then became his regular girlfriend, and some years later- became his wife. In 1939, he went to New York and joined Cab Calloway's big band, one of the highest paid black bands in New York at the time, also one of the commercially most successful.

The two years he spent with them put Dizzy on the map as a trumpet soloist. While in this group he began to develop an interest in the fusion of jazz and Afro-Cuban music, largely due to his friendship with Mario Ba uzi, who was also in Calloway's band. While on tour in 1940, Gillespie meet Charlie Parker and soon began participating in after-hours jam sessions with him and others in New York. This group of experimenting players gradually developed the new more complex style of jazz called bop. Together with Charlie Parker (sax), Bud Powell (piano), and Kenny Clarke (drums), Gillespie was part of the 1940's jazz revolution known as bebop. Dizzy had first worked with Clarke in 1937.

This drummer was known for his unorthodox "k look-a-mop" style. A name used for a short while to describe what became bebop. Bebop was a revolution not only on the music level, but also because it was not dancing music. Jazz became a listening thing, probably one of the main reasons why jazz slipped out of the mainstream.

A dispute with Calloway led to Gillespie's dismissal in 1941. He then worked briefly with many leaders, including Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Earl Hines, and Duke Ellington. In June of 1945, he led his own small band witch later that year was transformed into a big band. During this time the band made some early attempts to fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with Afro-American jazz. During the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's, Dizzy alternated between leading small and big bands and also did concert tours as a soloist. Dizzy Gillespies contributions to jazz were huge.

One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time, Gillespie was such a complex player that somehow he could make any wrong note fit and sound harmonious. Dizzy was a 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. Early in 1953, someone accidentally fell on Gillespies trumpet, which was sitting upright on a trumpet stand, and bent the bell back. Gillespie played it, discovered that he liked the sound, and from that point on had trumpets built for him with the bell pointing upwards at a 45 degree angle. The design is his visual trademark- for more then three decades he was virtually the only major trumpeter in jazz playing with such an instrument.

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, and quick wit, Dizzy was a colorful character to watch. A natural comedian, Gillespie was also a superb scat singer and occasionally played Latin percussion for fun, but it was his trumpet playing and leadership abilities that made him into a jazz giant. In the naturally effervescent Gillespie, opposites existed. His playing was transiently brilliant, full of magnificent invention and grave seriousness. But with his endlessly funny sides, 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. John birks "Dizzy" Gillespie emerged as a trumpet player whose role as a founding father of modern jazz made him a major figure in 20th- century American music. His signature moon cheeks and bent trumpet made him one of the world's most instantly recognizable figures. In a nearly 60 year career as a composer, bandleader, and innovative player, Gillespie cut a huge path through the jazz world.

In the early 1940's along with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, he initiated bebop: the sleek, intense, high speed revolution that has become jazz's most in during style..