Groovin' High: The Life Of Dizzy Gillespie [Paperback]

Alyn Shipton (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0756775981 | ISBN-13: 978-0756775988 | Publication Date: March 1999

Dizzy Gillespie was one of the most important and best loved musicians in jazz history. With his dark glasses, goatee, jive talk, and upraised trumpet bell, he was the hipster who most personified bebop. The musical heir to Louis Armstrong, he created the basic jazz trumpet-playing style and dazzled aficionados and popular audiences alike for over 50 years.
In this first full biography, Alyn Shipton covers all aspects of Dizzy's remarkable life and career, taking us through his days as a flashy trumpet player in the swing bands of the 1930s, his innovative bebop work in the 1940s, the worldwide fame and adoration he earned through his big band tours in the 1950s, and the many recordings and performances which defined a career that extended into the early 1990s. Along the way, Shipton convincingly argues that Gillespie--rather than Charlie Parker as is widely believed--had the greatest role in creating bebop, playing in key jazz groups, teaching the music to others, and helping to develop the first original bebop repertory. Shipton traces the Gillespie-Parker relationship, starting in the bands of Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine in the early 1940s, to their famous 1944-46 group that set the form for bebop, and culminating in their extraordinary concert at Massey Hall in Toronto in 1953. Shipton also explores the dark side of Dizzy's mostly sunny personal life, his womanizing, the illegitimate daughter he fathered and supported--now a respected jazz singer in her own right--and his sometimes needless cruelty to others.
For anyone interested in jazz and one of its most innovative and appealing figures, Groovin' High
is essential reading.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

British author and BBC radio host Alyn Shipton's biography on the world-renowned puffy-cheeked trumpeter/composer/bandleader John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie is the most comprehensive to date. It's an excellent follow-up to Gillespie's 1980 memoir, To Be or Not to Bop, and it contains new interviews with many of his associates, including pianist Dave Brubeck, author John Chilton, and bassist Milt Hinton. In addition to detailing Gillespie's South Carolina origins and his mid-1940s co-creations of bebop and Latin jazz (with drummer Kenny Clarke, saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Thelonious Monk, and composer Mario Bauza), the author penetrates his fun-loving, goatee-sporting, beret-wearing, and generally zany façade. "This was bizarre behavior indeed," writes Shipton, "but part of a pattern that led more than one commentator to the conclusion that Dizzy was 'crazy like a fox,' a shrewd operator who meticulously filed away in his mind any shred of fact or information that might come in handy some day." Shipton reveals him to be a man who sometimes angered and alienated his fellow musicians, as evidenced by trumpeter's infamous spitball affair with Cab Calloway; his fathering of a daughter by a white woman out of wedlock in 1958, and his spiritual quest for world brotherhood as a member of the Islam-based Baha'i faith. Shipton's portrait of Gillespie in his final years in the late '80s and '90s as the leader of his multiracial United Nation Orchestra is that of an elder statesman, cultural ambassador, and musical innovator. "With his death," Shipton writes, "the world lost a man who had revolutionized jazz, gave it a set of principles on which it could develop musically, and shown by example how to create within those principles at the highest level." --Eugene Holley, Jr. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Challenging the conventional view that saxophonist Charlie Parker set the pace for the bebop generation, this engrossing biography of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) makes the case that Diz was in many ways a "more original, wide-ranging and innovative" bebop pioneer. In a vibrant blend of meticulous scholarship, swinging anecdote and astute music criticism, London Times jazz critic Shipton charts Gillespie's creative evolution, from his heady plunge into New York's swing-era scene of the late 1930s, through his revolutionary experimentation of the 1940s and '50s, to his slide in the '60s and his reinvention of himself as the elder statesman of jazz. Born John Birks Gillespie in South Carolina, where he faced grinding poverty and racial prejudice, Dizzy's happy-go-lucky exterior concealed a quickfire temper and a mean streak that Shipton attributes to his sadistic bricklayer father. Beneath the hipster persona, the beret and goatee, Shipton shows, was a man of formidable intelligence. A contradictory figure, Gillespie prided himself on his outwardly exemplary life with his wife, Lorraine Willis, who acted as his personal manager; the public revelation in 1990 that he had fathered an illegitimate daughterAsinger Jeanie BrysonAwith white songwriter Connie Bryson ripped the lid off his secret life. Shipton credits Gillespie's embrace of the Baha'i faith by 1970 as key to the spiritual growth that allowed him to assume the roles of teacher and prophet for a generation of younger musicians. A must for jazz aficionados, this exhaustively researched biography features a supporting cast that reads like a who's who of jazz history: Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Max Roach and many, many more. Photos. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 422 pages
• Publisher: Diane Pub Co (March 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0756775981
• ISBN-13: 978-0756775988
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,885,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alyn Shipton is the author of several award winning books on music including A New History of Jazz, I Feel a Song Coming On (a biography of songwriter Jimmy McHugh) and Groovin' High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie. He is jazz critic for The Times in London and has presented jazz programs on BBC radio since 1989. In 2010 he was voted Jazz Broadcaster of the Year in the UK Parliamentary Jazz Awards. He is also an accomplished double bassist, having played with many traditional and mainstream jazz bands, and he lectures in jazz history at the Royal Academy of Music, London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars STEER CLEAR unless you are a jazz musician., September 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (Hardcover)

I am a voracious reader of jazz biographies. The fact that the name of this book includes the phrase "The Life of Dizzy Gillespie" is a shame, or sham. There is so little of his life in this book and so much discecting of every note of every solo that he ever played. It's maddening! If you're looking for a great jazz biography that is full of color, try the Louis Armstrong "An Extravagent Life" book. I read this approx. 600 page book twice just because it is such a colorful story about a jazz musicians LIFE. I will finish off by saying that this book is only the second one in my life that I had to stop reading because it was so BAD. That was after 250 pages.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable, painstakingly researched bio of jazz giant, May 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (Hardcover)

Shipton's biography of Gillespie is the first to reveal that the famously married Dizzy had a child out of wedlock. Rather than make this titillating tidbit the focus of his book, Shipton chose to keep the focus on the man and his music, where it belongs. A fine book about a wonderful man.

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable, painstakingly researched bio of jazz giant, May 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (Hardcover)

Shipton's book is the first to reveal the relationship with Connie Bryson and the existence of their daughter, singer Jeanie Bryson. He handles this bombshell with delicacy and restraint. If the Kirkus reviewer felt that this wonderful biography "disappoints", we loved it!