Jazz Articles about Dizzy Gillespie

The Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Alumni Big Band: Things to Come

by Jack Bowers
August 2, 2002

So who needs the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band anyway? Jon Faddis, whose whose widely acclaimed CHJB has been shown the door by the powers that be (its last concert will be presented this month at the Hollywood Bowl), has landed on his feet--and how!--as music director of the aptly-named Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Star Big Band. If Things to Come, recorded live in September 2000 at Pittsburgh's Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, can be taken as a measure of the band's proficiency, Faddis ...

Dizzy Gillespie: Odyssey 1945-1952

by Charlie B. Dahan
July 15, 2002

One of the first re-issues from the recently 60 year old, newly revived, Savoy label is a retrospective of the works of John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie that span the years from 1945 to 1952. During this pivotal time jazz moved away from the pop swing / big band music of the era into the newer exploratory, artistic style of bop. This collection offers the wide range of band formations (small group, big band, back-up for a blues ...

Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Star Big Band: Things to Come

by C. Michael Bailey
June 1, 2002

The Phoenix...out of the ashes of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band.

The Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Star Big Band has been an active entity since 1998. Steered by Jon Faddis and John Lee, the band consists of musicians who played with John Birks Gillespie sometime during his 50 years of music making. Also under the Faddis tutelage is the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars, a smaller band than the big band that has been recording since1997. This band has released two recordings ...

Dizzy Gillespie And The United Nations Orchestra: Live At The Royal Festival Hall

by Ken Hohman
January 1, 2002

As much a tribute to Dizzy Gillespie's pioneering bebop band in the forties as it is a testament to the trumpet master's ability to synthesize Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and Caribbean music into the jazz idiom, Live At The Royal Festival Hall is a real renaissance effort. Originally released in 1989 on the Enja label, this live set captures Diz and an all-star lineup bringing down the house with one startling arrangement after another. No one track from the opener “Tin Tin ...

Dinah Washington: Queen of the Juke Box "Live", 1948-1955

by Dave Nathan
January 1, 2001

Ted Ono's Baldwin Street Music has rescued Dinah Washington's live performances from New York's Birdland, Royal Roost and Basin Street. There are also a couple of cuts from the soundtrack of Harlem Variety Review. It was during this period that many of her recordings consistently appeared at the top of the R & B charts. But it wasn't until her classic “What a Difference a Day Made" that she broke through to the pop charts. The first performance on the ...

Dizzy Gillespie: Dizzy For President

by Derek Taylor
March 1, 2000

Gifted with one of the most amiable stage presences in the business Dizzy could work a crowd into a frenzy not only with the fireworks from his horn, but also with his glib vocal antics. Both are on sizable display during this concert taped at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Playing the audience with the same virtuosic skill he applies to his brass Dizzy’s in control for the get go. Fortunately he’s chosen a solid cadre of players to back him ...

The Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars: The Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars: Dizzy's 80th Birthday Party

by C. Michael Bailey
February 1, 1998

A few years preceding John Birks “Dizzy" Gillespie's death in 1993 through the present have seen the release of several tribute discs to the creator of Modern Jazz. The majority of these recordings have been basically live jam sessions with some moments of interesting music, but for the most part they are a self-indulgent bore. It was with no small amount of fear form my entertainment dollar that I picked up The Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars: Dizzy's 80th Birthday Party. ...