Gillespie, Dizzy - GILLESPIE, Dizzy: Dizzy Atmosphere

DIZZY GILLESPIE Vol.2‘Dizzy Atmosphere’ Original Recordings 1946-1952The bluff and pugnacious Dizzy Gillespie was, with Charlie Parker, the leading jazz innovator of the 1940s. One of the most colourful protagonists in that idiom he was variously bandleader, composer, conga-drumming experimenter, pianist-arranger and vocalist and, after Louis Armstrong, the single most influential trumpeter in jazz history. With Charlie Parker a prime mover in the emergence of bop, he became its most ‘far out’ exponent, conferring upon the revolutionary new form (via a winning combination of showmanship and organisational skill) a semblance of respectability.Dizzy was born John Birks Gillespie, the last of nine children, into a modest family background in Cheraw, South Carolina, on 21 October 1917. His father, a bricklayer, was an amateur musician who played piano and ran a band in his spare time. The regular presence of music in the Gillespie household fired young Dizzy’s musical imagination and, by the time of his father’s death in 1927, he was already proficient on trombone. In 1932, aged fifteen, Dizzy won a scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, where he studied theory and harmony. They needed a trumpeter in the college band and Diz soon filled the breach, although by most accounts he never made a formal study of that instrument either.In 1935, the eighteen-year-old Dizzy moved with his family to Philadelphia and between 1936 and 1943 made a name for himself as a sideman in big bands, gradually forging the new style which would alter the course of jazz history. In Philadelphia, this intelligent, autodidactic but over-assertive country youth found work first in local bands, including that of Frank Fairfax, where his fellow-trumpeters included Charlie Shavers and Carl ‘Bama’ Warwick. In 1936, his ear inclined to Teddy Hill’s NBC’s radio broadcasts from the Harlem Savoy Ballroom, he avidly followed the fluent playing of his idol, Hill’s star trumpet Roy Eldridge (1911-1989) and the following year, having already transferred to New York, he auditioned successfully for the place Eldridge had vacated in Hill’s outfit and, by mid-year, had toured France and Great Britain and made his first records with the band (for RCA Victor). Dizzy next freelanced with several New York groups, including Al Cooper’s Savoy Sultans and Alberto Socarras’ Afro-Cuban band before briefly rejoining Hill and working (and recording) with Lionel Hampton, in 1939. From later that year until 1941 the future ‘Clown Prince of Bebop’ remained a prominent and much-prized, if consistently wild, fixture of Cab Calloway’s band. With Calloway, working closely with Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauzá, he indulged his fascination with Afro-Cuban rhythms - until Calloway fired him for persistent bad behaviour. During the next couple of years brief sojourns with various bands followed, including