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Dizzy Gillespie Autobiography
dizzy gillespie autobiography












One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time.To Be Or Not To Bop written by Dizzy Gillespie and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on with Biography & Autobiography categories. Allmusics Scott Yanow wrote, Dizzy Gillespies contributions to jazz were huge. Few legitimate music historians and commentators still adopt the rhetoric of insurrection when it comes to bop, pointing out instead that musicians are fundamentally molded by their traditions even if they choose to take those traditions in different, often difficult, directions.Dizzy Gillespie : biography. Legion are the books on jazz that wave the banner of “revolution” above the chapter devoted to bebop, the improvised American music of swerving light and impossible speed, incandescent optimism and brooding melancholy that transformed style—not only musically, but also sartorially, and, indeed, socially—from the early 1940s and into the 1950s. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie emerged in the middle 1940s as essentially the. According to Gillespies autobiography, this was originally the result of accidental damage caused by someone sitting on it during a job on January 6, 1953, but the constriction caused by the bending altered the tone of the instrument, and Gillespie liked the effect.

In the 1980s he led the United Nations.Dizzy Gillespie met his would-be wife, Lorraine Willis, in August 1937 while he was working in Washington DC. In 1979, Dizzy published his autobiography To Be or Not to Bop. Kelly puts it in his meticulous and moving biography of Monk, across “one the greatest revolutions and counterrevolutions in the history of the modern world”—the Civil War and its long, enduring aftermath.In 1960, he was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame. Each musician stemmed from a musical and cultural heritage forged, as Robin D. The Monk and Gillespie families joined the great interwar exodus from the Jim Crow South. Yet in this month of centennial commemorations—and condemnations—of the Russian Revolution, one can’t one help but note that two pioneering American musicians—the pianist Thelonius Monk and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie—were born within weeks of each other and just weeks before the October Uprising in St.

Their births are being marked this month with concerts and symposia at venues around the country, most prestigiously at the culture citadels of New York’s Lincoln Center and Washington’s Kennedy Center.Yet however radical the innovations of this these founding fathers of bop may have been, the storming of the Winter Palace was an event of rather greater geo-political significance than those after-hours jam session anchored by Minton and Gillespie at Minton’sPlayhouse in Harlem in the early 40s. They remained together until his death.2017 is the centenary of Boppers and Bolsheviks.Dizzy: the Autobiography of Dizzy Gillespie by John Birks Dizzy Gillespie Wilmot Alfred Fraser at AbeBooks.co.uk - ISBN 10: 049102276X - ISBN 13.Monk was born October 10 th, 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Gillespie eleven days later and a hundred miles away, across the state line in Cheraw, South Carolina. Although Willis was initially indifferent, Dizzy won her over and the two got married on May 9, 1940.

“You could foment revolution with the drums,” Gillespie writes. Hey man, can you play “There is a spectre haunting Europe ” in B-flat?But before we strip the revolutionary medals off the Monk and Gillespie lapels, we might recall that the trumpeter’s 1979 autobiography To Be or Not to Bop invoked the rhetoric of rebellion in describing the origins of jazz and its eventual global impact. Here’s betting that more teenagers around the world know the chord changes to Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” and Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” than they do the opening line to the Communist Manifesto.

It is not surprising, therefore, that a hymn-like devotion encloses some of his most famous compositions, “‘Round Midnight” and “Ruby, My Dear.” Even at the outrageous tempos so often demanded of novices aspiring for admission into the bop brotherhood, Monk maintained a priestly poise, adamantly dissonant, askew the beat but miraculously in time, as if cleaving to, or even creating, an alternate chronology of ongoing events. As a teenager Monk played the organ and toured with an evangelist. Still, the trumpeter’s triumphalist interpretation of his music—bop being responsible especially for the harmonic complexity he cites—is economically (in several sense of that word) summed up in the name of the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue that will host several Gillespie commemorations later this month: Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola.His clowning on-stage antics ranging from disarming modesty to multisyllabic verbiage to goofy dancing to raspy singing, Gillespie was bebop’s ebullient jester to Monk’s laconic oracle. We created a music that is now internationally known as having been created in the United States, and it gained acceptance and precedence over all the other music of the hemisphere and other parts of the world because of its rhythm, its harmonic variety, and ironically enough, because of the power with the United States had to disseminate and spread it.” Thus a musical expression of social discontent achieves global domination, Gillespie adopting the language of American cultural imperialism, but saving himself from charges of cooptation with a well-chosen “ironically enough”—an insertion not unlike a bebop melodic feint. Get ready.’”Gillespie goes on to claim that that such repression could not silence this outlawed music forever: “We tricked them, we tricked the white people. Aware of this African rhythmic language’s subversive power, slave owners suppressed drumming since their chattels could use their ad hoc instruments to “talk to somebody two miles over there and say, ‘Let’s get these muthafuckas.

Many have mistakenly attributed this distinctive musical style to technical insufficiency, but anyone who has tried to mimic some of Monk’s more demanding solos with their wide-ranging gestures and angular runs will quickly realize how difficult it is to play like the master. As Kelly points out it is difficult to know how much the heavy doses of Thorazine and other medications used in massive excess to combat Monk’s chronic mental health problems—now to be classified as severe bipolar disorder—contributed to the later sparseness that would become the hallmark of his unique pianism and his eccentric persona. It doesn’t sound like revolutionary zeal that pushes Monk on with an unstoppable gusto a long way from the reticent mode so often associated with him. Urged on by Christian’s relentless, spirited strumming on the swing standard “ Stompin’ at the Savoy,” Monk rips off crisp arpeggios with his right hand while his left romps through stride-like figures reminiscent of the older Harlem pianists he so admired.

dizzy gillespie autobiography

The editors apparently believed him a safely apolitical African-American musician during a tumultuous period of race relations. In the meantime Monk had been on the cover of Time in 1964 he became one of just a handful of jazz musicians granted that often dubious distinction. “Man, what’s going on here?” Unfazed by drummer Buddy Rich’s incessant bashing, Monk unfailingly keeps the pace—metrically tangential and essential, as Gillespie might have said in his comically pompous diction.The pair was not reunited on record for another two decades, when Gillespie led a group called Giants of Jazz on tours of Europe in the late 60s and early 70s. The trumpeter is even heard to say after one breakdown.

Monk appreciates your generosity. Gillespie lowers the microphone from the high position it always assumed so as to be on at the level of the high bell of his angled trumpet: “I’m sure Mr. After its over there is long and loud applause from the Danes, Monk standing solemnly, but appreciatively to face the audience. The short interview with Monk printed in Gillespie’s autobiography done runs like this:How did sound when you first heard him?Even on the page, the statement has the lapidary look of a larger truth.The television broadcast of the Giants of Jazz sextet concert in Copenhagen in 1971 begins with ‘ Round Midnight‘ in progress, Monk revisiting his most famous composition with the slow striding back-and-forth of the left hand and the jarring dissonances of the right hand, its little finger, as flat as the rest but schlepping a big gold ring so that the pinky jabs have even more punch: when that ringed finger lands on ivory or ebony sharp flares shoot into up through the tune’s melancholy moonlight. To be sure Monk was a man of few public words, but these, like his playing, implied much more than they made explicit.

dizzy gillespie autobiography