Dizzy Gillespie

The instruments were in the house because his father led a local band and kept them there. James Gillespie died when his youngest son was ten, and by 12 the boy had taught himself trombone and trumpet, having started on piano at four. On Sundays he slipped away from his family's Methodist church to the Sanctified Church, where he said he first learned what rhythm was for. A scholarship took him to the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina for two years, and in 1935 he left it to follow the family to Philadelphia. He was working professionally within months, chasing the sound of Roy Eldridge, whom he had heard on the radio and decided to become.

Charlie Parker was the greater improviser. Gillespie was the one who wrote it down. He notated the flatted fifths and the substitute chords, sat other players at the piano and showed them where the changes went, and made a music invented nightly at Minton's Playhouse teachable. Then he built what carried it — Town Hall in 1945, the big bands from 1947, his own label, decades of young players schooled on his bandstand. In 1947 he also hired the Cuban drummer Chano Pozo and began a separate music, Afro-Cuban jazz, that owed bebop nothing.

The beret, the horn-rimmed glasses, the upswept bell, the cheeks ballooning like a frog's, the scat singing and the patter between numbers made him the most recognizable jazz musician alive, and carried bebop to audiences that would never have sat still for it. It also cost him. Critics and some younger Black musicians saw a man mugging for white listeners — modernism made safe, a minstrel bargain struck by the one person who had written down the harmony that was supposed to end all that. Miles Davis, who learned those changes from him, built a stage manner that was the exact negative: back to the room, no announcements, no jokes. Gillespie never conceded the point, and his New York Times obituary kept both halves in one sentence, calling him as much a pure entertainer as an accomplished artist.

He died of pancreatic cancer on January 6, 1993, 40 years to the day after the horn got bent. Thousands came to the funeral at St. Peter's Lutheran in Manhattan, where Roberta Flack sang Amazing Grace. His grave in Flushing Cemetery, Queens, is unmarked. What he made is easier to find: the Smithsonian holds one of his upturned trumpets, another sold at Christie's in 1995 for 63,000 dollars with the proceeds going to jazz musicians with cancer, and the Afro-Cuban line he opened with Chano Pozo runs through salsa and Latin jazz. The argument about the clowning has softened since he died without ever being settled.

Dizzy Gillespie's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Night in Tunisia song
  Written in the Earl Hines band and built on a syncopated bass line 1942
• Woody 'n' You song
  Cut at a Coleman Hawkins session on February 16, 1944 — the first formal bebop recording 1944
• Groovin' High song
  Harmonically unlike anything in the swing repertoire it displaced 1945
• Salt Peanuts song
  The bebop calling card, complete with the two-note vocal 1945
• Manteca song
  Co-written with Chano Pozo — a founding document of Afro-Cuban jazz 1947
• Cubana Be, Cubana Bop song
  Commissioned by Gillespie from George Russell and featuring Pozo 1947

• October 21, 1917 aged 0 Born in Cheraw, South Carolina, the youngest of nine children
• May 1937 aged 19 Joins Teddy Hill's band and makes his first recording He replaced Frankie Newton as second trumpet. The record was King Porter Stomp.
• 1941 aged ~24 Cab Calloway fires him after the spitball fight Calloway blamed him for a spitball thrown at rehearsal, called his soloing Chinese music, and was cut on the leg with a knife when Gillespie refused the blame.
• June 22, 1945 aged 27 Puts bebop in front of a general audience at Town Hall in New York The recordings of the concert were not released until 2005.
• 1947 aged ~30 Hires Chano Pozo and opens the Afro-Cuban line Mario Bauza made the introduction. Manteca and Cubana Be, Cubana Bop followed within the year.
• January 6, 1953 aged 35 A trumpet bent at his wife's birthday party becomes the trademark Dancers fell onto the horn at Snookie's in Manhattan. He liked the tone enough to have Martin build him one at 45 degrees.
• 1956 aged ~39 Tours the Middle East for the State Department The trip earned him the name Ambassador of Jazz.
• 1964 aged ~47 Runs for president as a write-in candidate, mostly as a joke The White House would become the Blues House, with Duke Ellington at State and Miles Davis at the CIA. Button proceeds went to CORE, the SCLC and Martin Luther King Jr.
• January 6, 1993 aged 75 Dies of pancreatic cancer in Englewood, New Jersey, at 75 His touring career had run 56 years and ended only 13 months earlier.

• Charlie Parker 1920–1955
  Saxophonist whose virtuosity and harmonic innovations made him a principal creator of bebop and modern jazz. bebop counterpart
• Miles Davis 1926–1991
  Trumpeter and bandleader who repeatedly redirected jazz through bebop, cool jazz, modal music, and fusion. taught
• Thelonious Monk 1917–1982
  Pianist and composer whose distinctive harmonies, rhythms, and repertory became central to modern jazz. fellow regular at Minton's
• Ella Fitzgerald 1917–1996
  Singer whose technical command and interpretations helped define jazz and the Great American Songbook. played in her orchestra
• Duke Ellington 1899–1974
  Composer and bandleader who expanded the artistic ambition and vocabulary of jazz. named to his 1964 joke cabinet
• Louis Armstrong 1901–1971
  Trumpeter and singer whose innovations and worldwide fame made jazz a central American art form. named to his 1964 joke cabinet