Dizzy Gillespie

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, on the twenty-first of October 1917, the youngest of nine children. His father — an amateur bandleader — kept the instruments of his band at home; Dizzy taught himself trumpet by ten.

He moved to Philadelphia in 1935, to New York in 1937, and joined Cab Calloway's orchestra in 1939. Through the late 1930s and the early 1940s he played with the principal big bands of the era (Calloway, Earl Hines, Billy Eckstine, Lucky Millinder) while developing — at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem alongside Thelonious Monk (also placed in this archive), Kenny Clarke, and Charlie Parker — the harmonic and rhythmic language that became bebop.

In 1947 he hired the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo into his big band and recorded "Manteca," "Cubana Be, Cubana Bop," and "Tin Tin Deo" — the founding works of Afro-Cuban jazz. The integration of Cuban rumba rhythms with the bebop language Gillespie had helped invent was the most consequential cross-Atlantic musical fusion of the twentieth century. The continuing tradition of Latin jazz — Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría — descends from those 1947 sessions.

He served as the first State Department-sponsored jazz ambassador in 1956, conducting a goodwill tour of Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, and across South Asia. The bent trumpet bell — accidentally damaged at a 1953 party and subsequently reproduced as Gillespie's distinctive instrument — became the most photographed object in twentieth-century jazz.

He led big bands and small groups until his death and won fourteen Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts (1989), and the Kennedy Center Honors (1990).

He died of pancreatic cancer in Englewood, New Jersey, on the sixth of January 1993, age seventy-five.

He is honored here as the trumpeter who founded both bebop and Afro-Cuban jazz.