Groovin' High
The Life of Dizzy Gillespie
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
Dizzy Gillespie was one of the most important and best-loved musicians in jazz history. With his horn-rimmed glasses, goatee, jive talk, and upraised trumpet bell, he was the hipster who most personified bebop. The musical heir to Louis Armstrong, he created the modern jazz trumpet-playing style and dazzled aficionados and popular audiences alike for over 50 years.
In this first full biography, Alyn Shipton covers all aspects of Dizzy's remarkable life and career, taking us through his days as a flashy trumpet player in the swing bands of the 1930s, his innovative bebop work in the 1940s, the worldwide fame and adoration he earned through his big band tours in the 1950s, and the many recordings and performances which defined a career that extended into the early 1990s. Along the way, Shipton convincingly argues that Gillespie--rather than Charlie Parker as is widely believed--had the greatest role in creating bebop, playing in key jazz groups, teaching the music to others, and helping to develop the first original bebop repertory. Shipton also explores the dark side of Dizzy's mostly sunny personal life, his womanizing, the illegitimate daughter he fathered and supported--now a respected jazz singer in her own right--and his sometimes needless cruelty to others.
For anyone interested in jazz and one of its most innovative and appealing figures, Groovin' High is essential reading.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Challenging the conventional view that saxophonist Charlie Parker set the pace for the bebop generation, this engrossing biography of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) makes the case that Diz was in many ways a "more original, wide-ranging and innovative" bebop pioneer. In a vibrant blend of meticulous scholarship, swinging anecdote and astute music criticism, London Times jazz critic Shipton charts Gillespie's creative evolution, from his heady plunge into New York's swing-era scene of the late 1930s, through his revolutionary experimentation of the 1940s and '50s, to his slide in the '60s and his reinvention of himself as the elder statesman of jazz. Born John Birks Gillespie in South Carolina, where he faced grinding poverty and racial prejudice, Dizzy's happy-go-lucky exterior concealed a quickfire temper and a mean streak that Shipton attributes to his sadistic bricklayer father. Beneath the hipster persona, the beret and goatee, Shipton shows, was a man of formidable intelligence. A contradictory figure, Gillespie prided himself on his outwardly exemplary life with his wife, Lorraine Willis, who acted as his personal manager; the public revelation in 1990 that he had fathered an illegitimate daughter--singer Jeanie Bryson--with white songwriter Connie Bryson ripped the lid off his secret life. Shipton credits Gillespie's embrace of the Baha'i faith by 1970 as key to the spiritual growth that allowed him to assume the roles of teacher and prophet for a generation of younger musicians. A must for jazz aficionados, this exhaustively researched biography features a supporting cast that reads like a who's who of jazz history: Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Max Roach and many, many more. Photos.
