Book description
You don't have to know John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie's songs to feel his influence. The self-taught trumpet player rose from a poor but musically driven upbringing to become a jazz mastermind, founding the bebop movement and giving rise to Afro-Cuban music.
This extensive biography is intertwined with reflections from famous…
Why read it?
2 authors picked To Be, or Not... to Bop as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
For the same reason I would recommend attending any musical performance by John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie: Sheer entertainment, surprisingly touching aspects of his personality, instant feelings of friendship shared, and his unbreakable optimism, with which to face and endure whatever life had in store for him. In Italy he was a beloved “Italian,” officially elected honorary citizen of Bassano del Grappa, where we had opened the “Dizzy Gillespie Popular School of Music” that carried an integrated section for blind students. When his memoirs were published he asked me to translate the book into Italian, therefore I had to read it…
From Lilian's list on to welcome you to the magical world of jazz.
Gillespie (1917-1993), who was Miles Davis’s idol, was another revolutionary figure in jazz. In the early 1940s, the great trumpeter and the tragic saxophone genius Charlie Parker co-created the new music called bebop — a genre that displaced swing, introducing complex new harmonies and lightning-fast rhythms, controversially changing jazz from the music you danced to, to the music you sat and listened to. Gillespie was a playful and genial spirit who could play his horn higher and faster than anyone, and his memoir, in the form of testimony by numerous musicians who knew and played with him, interspersed with his…
From James' list on jazz through the stories of jazz musicians.
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