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Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band: Dizzy's Business
by Dr. Judith Schlesinger
The second recording by the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band offers seventy minutes of superb, often legendary talents doing full justice to timeless material. While only three of the eleven tracks are technically Gillespie compositions, his spirit lives on in joyous, swinging arrangements and sparkling trumpet solos by Claudio Roditi, Roy Hargrove, Randy Brecker and Greg Gisbert. His signature playfulness is also expressed in two Monk tunes which blend nicely into the mix.
Many of the band members ...
Continue ReadingDizzy Gillespie: Dizzy Digs Paris
by Nic Jones
If indeed Dizzy did dig Paris, then the opposite was also true, and the Parisians who were at the Salle Pleyel in February of 1953 made that abundantly obvious in their responses to the music.
They knew what it was all about. They were witnessing one of the greats in any field of music, the yin to Charlie Parker's yang and without a doubt one of the few creative people in any field to make revolution sound not only like ...
Continue ReadingDizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker: Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945
by Samuel Chell
After the recent bonanza discovery of the 1957 Monk-Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert, this previously unissued recording of a 1945 Gillespie-Parker concert may strike some listeners as anticlimactic if not somewhat disappointing. There's no denying its historical significance--the only extended “live" recording of Diz and Bird from this seminal period--but collectors who have the Parker Dial and Savoy studio dates along with the 1947 Diz and Bird Carnegie Hall performance, the 1951 studio session on Verve, and the celebrated Massey Hall ...
Continue ReadingDizzy Gillespie: Town Hall, New York City; Dizzy
by Ernest Barteldes
Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker Town Hall, New York... Uptown Jazz 2005
On a new release on Uptown Records, we hear a long-lost recording made at the Manhattan music hall 60 years ago. The digital transfer is mostly untouched, so as a result some of the crack and hiss of the acetate recording is still there, as are the initial soundcheck mishaps that still happen today. Apart from that, we have a historic ...
Continue ReadingDizzy Gillespie: Sittin' In
by George Harris
Looking back in awe, it seems impossible that anyone could get such a collection of jazz giants into one studio for a recording like this, but that was the genius of Norman Granz. Using his successful Jazz at the Philharmonic formula of grouping together an all-star collection of musicians for a jam session consisting of ballad medleys and full blown swingers, Granz outdid himself on this gem by grouping together Dizzy Gillespie with the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz, ...
Continue ReadingDizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker: Town Hall, New York City 1945
by Norman Weinstein
This is absolutely a find, a well-recorded (for 1945) live concert of Bird and Diz and Max Roach in peak form. The numbers were quite familiar to these artists at the time ("A Night in Tunisia," “Salt Peanuts," “Groovin' High"), but these are slashingly brilliant versions to be treasured.Gillespie sounds unusually florid and assured, with his roots in Roy Eldridge's extroverted trumpeting brashly apparent. Bird enters the recording a little late (literally--on the first tune, “Bebop," Don Byas ...
Continue ReadingDizzy Gillespie: Career 1937-1992
by David Rickert
Even people who don't listen to jazz know who Dizzy Gillespie is. His black beret and cock-eyed trumpet were a familiar image of cool to a generation of hipsters who grew up idolizing the jazzbo lifestyle. And of course, along with Charlie Parker and others who gathered at Minton's, he helped shape the direction that jazz would take after the Swing Era. But he was one of the few who managed to make a lucrative and distinguished career out of ...
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