At Newport - Dizzy Gillespie

Dizzy Gillespie, a trumpeter, was one of the three jazz musicians to found the “bebop” movement (described in my review of Bud Powell) – the others were Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, also reviewed separately. Gillespie was the longest lived of all of these and probably the happiest, and this comes through in his ever-cheerful music. Though his output was not consistently brilliant throughout his career, I believe that it is unfair to view this in direct comparison with the much shorter careers of his contemporaries. In terms of the actual amount of fantastic music he produced (rather than the proportion of the total), he is on terms with ...