Maggie Haley

Brass Techniques
Brass Artist Research Project
12/3/16
John Birks Gillespie was born on October 21st in 1917 as the youngest of nine children in
Cheraw, South Carolina. Gillespie was born into a musical family and began playing the piano at
age four, at twelve, he began to play the trombone and trumpet. By the time he was fifteen years
old, Gillespie showed enough promise on the trumpet to receive a scholarship for the Laurinburg
Institute in North Carolina.
When John Gillespie was eighteen, the Gillespies moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
where John joined the Frankie Fairfax Orchestra. Throughout the 1930s, Gillespie moved
through more and more impressive ensembles. He became known for his immense talent and
free spirit and earned the nickname, Dizzy (history.com staff).
During the 1940s, Gillespie started performing with big name talents like Charlie Parker
and Thelonious Monk. Together, they developed a new style of jazz, bebop. Bebop uses
harmonies and rhythms that are more sophisticated than earlier jazz styles (Gammond). Along
with being one of the founding fathers of bebop, Dizzy Gillespie is also considered to be the first
musician to bring Latin elements to jazz. His first composition Pickin the Cabbage is believed
to be his first experiment with Latin music.
His most notable Latin compositions are A Night In Tunisia (1946), Manteca (1947),
and Guachi Guaro (1965). Gillespie incorporated elements of Afro-Cuban, Caribbean and
Brazilian music- mainly the rhythms- into his style of jazz (biography.com staff).

For much of his life, Gillespie travelled with his ensembles and composed jazz pieces, he
collaborated with many other musicians along the way such as, Charlie Parker, Thelonious
Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway to name a few of the big names in the
jazz world.
In 1953, someone accidentally sat on Dizzy Gillespies trumpet and bent the bell at a
forty-five-degree angle. After playing on the bent trumpet, Gillespie decided he loved the way it
sounded so much that he had the bells on all of his trumpets bent at a forty-five-degree angle
from then on. Six year after his newly improved instrument, Gillespie worked with Charlie
Parker on their song Leap Frog (1959).
Dizzy is also very recognizable for his puffy cheeks when he plays. His cheeks puff out
like a frogs belly when they ribbit. Throughout his life, Gillespie was very anti-substance. In an
industry where many of his colleagues died young due to substance abuse, Dizzy Gillespie
stayed above the herd and was able to be successful for many years until he passed away in
1993. He was survived by his wife, Lorraine Willis, and daughter, Jeannie Bryson, who is a
singer of jazz, Latin and pop music.

Dizzy Gillespie with his famously bent trumpet and puffed out cheeks.

Works Cited:
Biography.com Editors. Dizzy Gillespie Biography. Thebiography.com. A&E
Television Networks. 8 July 2014. Web. 3 December 2016

Gammond, Peter bebop. The Oxford Online Companion of Music. Ed. Alison Latham.
Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, Web 3 December 2016

Heim, Chris. Dizzy Gillespie, Eddie Harris, Martin Taylor and More. 89.1 Wichita
Public Radio. 2016 KMUW. 3 December 2016.

History.com staff. Dizzy Gillespie is Born history.com A&E Networks 2009. 3

December 2016.