Customer Reviews

The Winter in Lisbon

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One of the very best of latter-day Dizzy Gillespie albums! Originally intended as a movie soundtrack, "The Winter in Lisbon" is at once fanciful, playful, smooth and supremely elegant. The album features mostly slow, elegiac meditations like "Magic Summer" and "Lisbon," where Gillespie's muted trumpet intertwines beautifully with soft, shadowy piano to produce a feeling of introspection, winsomeness. Very often the songs conjure feelings of lost or unattainable love. This is jazz at its best--mostly quiet, contemplative and never once boring! Elsewhere, Gillespie is considerably more uptempo on the jaunty latin-inspired waltz of "San Sebastian." Oddly enough, this moody CD was recorded quite a few years before Gillespie's death, yet it feels as though he recorded his own epitaph here. If ever there was one essential Dizzy Gillespie album worth collecting, this one is it!!!

This is one of Diz's final recordings. It comes from the film by the same name. The film was pretty poor, but the music is sound! This recording also features some top jazz musicians in George Mraz on bass and Danilo Perez on piano.

Though Diz's chop ain't what they used to be, his ideas are strong. Dizzy Gillespie still looms large in all of the American music.