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Gillespie, Dizzy
3 articles on Gillespie, Dizzy
Gillespie, Dizzy
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2117 Includes: Bibliography1917–1993
African American trumpet player and Afro-Cuban jazz innovator who was a cocreator of bebop. “Dizzy” Gillespie may have been the greatest trumpeter in the history of Jazz. His bravura trumpet playing featured a brilliant but sensitive tone, a wide range, and mind-boggling speed and articulation. To the public, Gillespie's name conjured up images of his distinctive trumpet with its upswept bell, his cheeks bulging out when he played, and his penchant for clowning that included a seriocomic presidential campaign in 1964. But Gillespie was extremely serious about his music and was a leader in two major developments in jazz. Beginning in the 1940s he played a key role in bringing Afro-Cuban music into American jazz. And during the mid-1940s Gillespie was a primary force—along with alto saxophonist ...
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Source: African American National Biography
(21 Oct. 1917–6 Jan. 1993), jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader, was born John Birks Gillespie at Cheraw, South Carolina, the ninth and youngest child of James Gillespie, a brick mason, builder, and amateur musician, and Lottie Powe, a laundress. The earliest musical influences on Gillespie were the sounds of the town band, in which his father played and whose instruments were stored in the family home, together with the singing and hand clapping of the parishioners of the Sanctified Church a few doors away from his house. James Gillespie was cruel and sadistic, regularly beating his sons, but he died from an asthma attack when Gillespie was ten. Not long afterward, he was formally introduced to playing music by Alice Wilson, a schoolteacher at the Robert Smalls School in Cheraw. Growing up ...
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Source: American National Biography Online
Word Count: 4440 Includes: Bibliographyjazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer, was born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, South Carolina, the son of James Gillespie, a mason and musician, and Lottie Powe. Gillespie’s father kept his fellow band members’ instruments at their home, and thus from his toddler years onward Gillespie had an opportunity to experiment with sounds. He entered Robert Smalls public school in 1922. He was as naughty as he was brilliant, and accounts of fighting, showing off, and mischief extend from his youth into adulthood. ...
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