Dizzy Gillespie
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"John Birks" ""Dizzy"" "Gillespie" was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer and occasional singer.

AllMusic's Scott Yanow wrote, "Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time (some would say the best), Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying 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."

Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improvisation/improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmony/harmonic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop.

In the 1940s Gillespie, together 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

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I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

. . .I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

[Another friend is Jimmy Heath, who wrote a composition called] Without You, No Me, ... He said, 'Without Dizzy there wouldn't have been a Jimmy Heath.' I feel the same way, because without Dizzy there wouldn't have been a James Moody.

Ideas, ideas, backward and forward. His influence is layers and layers of spirit.