John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie by Susan Engle

Within a year, he was featured in a local band at $45 a week, a princely sum in 1936. ” Gillespie’s constant clowning, such as dancing in the trumpet section and wearing an overcoat and gloves to a May audition, solidified the use of the nickname in the months following. Too poor to buy a case-he carried his trumpet in a paper bag-the nickname “Dizzy” began in 1935 when the pianist Bill Doggett said, “That little dizzy cat’s from down south carries his horn around in a paper bag. Gillespie was an accomplished musician when he left Laurinburg at the age of seventeen to join his family in Philadelphia, where they had recently moved to escape the grinding poverty and racist environment of South Carolina. In later life, his cheeks became a visual symbol, a trademark, but he discounted their importance in his playing. Gillespie was almost entirely self-taught musically one consequence of this was that he allowed his cheeks to puff out-something professionally trained trumpeters are taught not to do-when he played. He used the piano to explore chordal harmony and began the harmonic innovations that became a key aspect of bebop. There he found economic security and the opportunity to spend almost limitless hours honing his skills on trumpet and piano.

Facing years of manual labor at age fifteen because his hometown black school ended at the ninth grade, he was fortunate to win a full scholarship at the Laurinburg Institute, an all-black North Carolina boarding school. His father’s death when Gillespie was ten threw the family into poverty. His professional performances joined music with showmanship, in the tradition of idols such as Fats Waller and Cab Calloway. When the young Gillespie saw how deeply comedy and music moved people, it stirred in him the desire to be a performer, to mount a stage and transform the emotions of an audience. He fell in love with the trumpet while playing in a school band at age twelve and was soon practicing several hours each day.

Gillespie was bathed in music as a child as he listened to rehearsals of his father’s band and absorbed ecstatic gospel music at nearby churches. Gillespie was the son of James Gillespie, a bricklayer and part-time bandleader, and Lottie Powe, a homemaker he was the youngest of seven children to survive infancy. 6 January 1993 in Englewood, New Jersey), virtuoso improviser on trumpet and a major figure in jazz history who led the bebop and Latin jazz revolutions. 21 October 1917 in Cheraw, South Carolina d.

John Birks &quot;Dizzy&quot; Gillespie by Susan Engle

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie by Susan Engle