To Be, or Not... to Bop

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… show more.

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… show more.