John Brirks Gillespie Research Paper

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Personal Biography
John Birks Gillespie, otherwise known as “Dizzy” or “Cheeks”, was born in Cheraw, South Carolina on October 21, 1917. His music will later become a joyful experience that would reach people of all races and ethnicities and you will see how he became the famed “Dizzy Gillespie”. His mother was Lottie Gillespie and his father was James Gillespie. James Gillespie was a bricklayer, a pianist and a local bandleader. So because of the instruments that were easily available to John and he started to play the piano at the early age of four. John’s father died when John was 10, two years later John learned to play the trombone and the trumpet.
When he was 18, John moved with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He joined …show more content…

While touring in 1940, John met Charlie Parker in Kansa City and soon started joining Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and others for an after-hours jam session in New York. This group of young, experimenting players gradually developed the new, more complex style of jazz that was called bop. Calloway fired Gillespie in 1941 after they had an argument.
He recorded a full, formed bop solo within a swing band context on Little John Special in 1942. During the winter of 1943-1944, John led a small group with Oscar Pettiford. In 1944, Billy Eckstine, the singer with the Hines band, formed a big band of his own and asked John to play and to be the music director. During the same time, John completed some of the first small-group bop recordings. In 1953, someone accidentally fell on John's trumpet. The bell was bent backwards. After John played it, he discovered that he liked the sound. From that point, he had trumpets built for him with the bell pointing upwards at a 45-degree angle. The design was John’s trademark and more than three decades, he was the only major trumpeter in jazz who played such an

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