Along with Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie was one of the three great jazz trumpeters. An exceptional instrumentalist, he and Charlie Parker were among the principal instigators of bebop, a genre that revolutionized the history of jazz. Passionate about rhythm, he was also one of the pioneers of Afro-Cuban jazz; he and percussionist Chano Pozo introduced the conga into jazz orchestras. In the early 1960s, he popularized the bossa-nova and the samba in the United States before Stan Getz, Charlie Byrd, Mongo Santa Maria, the Modern Jazz Quartet or others.
Cutting an endearing figure, with his oddly bent trumpet and his puffed-out cheeks, throughout his life Gillespie was both an indefatigable ambassador of jazz and a generous humanist, a staunch defender of human dignity and freedom.
This book traces his brilliant career, from his modest origins in a small town in South Carolina to the world’s most prestigious stages.