Dizzy Gillespie

Cheraw to 52nd Street

John Birks Gillespie was born on October 21, 1917 in Cheraw, South Carolina, the youngest of nine children; his father led a local band. He started piano at four, taught himself trombone and then trumpet by twelve, won a scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, and moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1935, where his first professional job was with the Frank Fairfax Orchestra. His idol was Roy Eldridge. The nickname Dizzy, according to the University of Idaho's Gillespie collection, came while he was in Fairfax's band.

He played in the bands of Edgar Hayes and Teddy Hill, recording "King Porter Stomp" with Hill, and with Cab Calloway from 1939 until late 1941. In 1942 he wrote "A Night in Tunisia", built on a syncopated bass line. He worked in Earl Hines's band in 1943, where he met Charlie Parker, joined Billy Eckstine's big band in 1944, and on February 16, 1944 played on the Coleman Hawkins session that includes "Woody 'n' You", considered the first formal bebop recording.

Bebop and the Afro-Cuban turn

In 1945 he led sextets and small groups and then his first big band; sessions on January 9, February 9 and 28 and May 11, 1945, several with Parker, produced "Groovin' High", "All the Things You Are", "Dizzy Atmosphere", "Salt Peanuts", "Hot House" and "Shaw 'Nuff" for the small Guild label, whose masters passed to Musicraft and then Savoy. On June 22, 1945 he and Parker played a Town Hall concert in New York that presented bebop to a wider audience, and a December 1945 stand at Billy Berg's in Los Angeles got a mixed reception. From 1947 his big bands were a success, with arrangers including Tadd Dameron, Gil Fuller and George Russell.

In 1947 Mario Bauza introduced him to the conga player Chano Pozo, with whom he co-wrote "Manteca" and "Tin Tin Deo", and he commissioned George Russell's "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop". His trumpet's upturned bell came on January 6, 1953 at Snookie's in Manhattan, when dancers fell onto the horn, and Martin built his professional bent-bell trumpet in 1954. In 1956 the State Department sent him on a tour of the Middle East, earning him the name the Ambassador of Jazz; in 1964 he ran an independent write-in campaign for president; and in the 1980s he led the United Nations Orchestra. He met Arturo Sandoval on a jazz cruise to Havana in 1977. His memoir To Be or Not to Bop appeared in 1979.

Honors

He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, the Kennedy Center Honors and the ASCAP Duke Ellington Award in 1990 and the Polar Music Prize in 1993. His final performance was at Jazz Alley in Seattle on February 29, 1992, and he died on January 6, 1993; Roberta Flack sang "Amazing Grace" at his memorial at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Miles Davis, Jon Faddis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan and Chuck Mangione are among those named as his students and heirs; Wynton Marsalis said he was a master of harmony.