Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks, and his light-hearted personality provided some of bebop’s most prominent symbols.
In the 1940s Gillespie, with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz.
He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Jon Faddis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Chuck Mangione, and balladeer Johnny Hartman.
Scott Yanow wrote, “Dizzy Gillespie’s contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time, Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up being similar to those of Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis’s emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy’s style was successfully recreated [….] Arguably Gillespie is remembered, by both critics and fans alike, as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time”.
Author: whskyjack
The Case for Elizabeth Warren
I just ran across this excellent article about Elizabeth Warren. The writer does a good job of making the case of why she is the most important person running for president. It is long form writing so it will take a while to read , but well worth it whether you are a supporter, detractor or ambivalent. While it starts with Joe Biden in reality it is a case for why the American left should embrace her brand of Teddy Roosevelt style liberalism than Bernie Sanders’ path which has it’s roots in Henry Wallace socialism.
The contrast between Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden is stark: Biden is comfort food; Warren is food for thought with, to some tastes, a dollop of spinach.
Warren stands virtually alone in the field by offering comprehensive, and specific, proposals for reanimating American democracy by reforming capitalism to reconcile its long-term interests with the needs of Americans writ large. She is, in substantive terms, by far the most important Democrat seeking the presidency.
Whether one tends right or left, Warren’s importance to the political dialogue transcends the eventual fate of her campaign. That’s because she is asking an essential question: Can we repair our deepening economic and social fissures by making large corporations more responsive participants in a revitalized democracy which expands economic opportunity, reinvigorates competition, and redefines corporate citizenship. Her candidacy is an attempt to rescue contemporary capitalism from its potentially fatal excesses.
Richard North Patterson
Sunday Jazz
Jazz and patriotic music don’t often go hand in hand but thanks to the folks at NPR I was able to find an interesting selection to start the week of the 4th. It is a medley of “America the Beautiful”, “Lift every voice and sing“, “Skies of America” by
Charlie Haden and The Liberation Orchestra
If this was a dog kennel some one would be in jail.
A chaotic scene of sickness and filth is unfolding in an overcrowded border station in Clint, Tex., where hundreds of young people who have recently crossed the border are being held, according to lawyers who visited the facility this week. Some of the children have been there for nearly a month.
New York Times
Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.
Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.
How does a person get up every morning and go to work in this facility? It is beyond my ability to even understand. How do they justify this to themselves? How do they explain their participation in this atrocity. Just to their wife, their children?
Enough sympathy.
What I want to know. Who are these criminals, we need names, we need perp walks, right down to those who went to work everyday with total indifference. This is not a time for political posturing from presidential wannabes. This a time when all Americans should stand up and say put these bastards in jail.
It is time for the press to start naming names from the top to the ones who went in everyday and silently tolerated this abuse. Stand in front of their doors with cameras running, microphones in their faces. Shine the light on them. From the big boss right down the lowliest cockroach. Treat them like the perverts they are.
In less than 10 days it will the 4th of July the anniversary of the founding of this country. A time where a group of men pledged their lives and sacred honor to create some thing better than what they knew back in Europe.
This is the God! Damn! United States of America!
How dare you assholes do this in our names!
Jack
Sunday Jazz
Horace Silver ( September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014 )
Horace Silver was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, particularly in the hard bop style that he helped pioneer in the 1950s. As a player, Silver transitioned from bebop to hard bop by stressing melody rather than complex harmony, and combined clean and often humorous right-hand lines with darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual left-hand rumble. His compositions similarly emphasized catchy melodies, but often also contained dissonant harmonies. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including “Doodlin'”, “Peace”, and “Sister Sadie”, became jazz standards that are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades.
Some very relaxing enjoyable music for your Sunday pleasure
Jack