Alyn Shipton's Groovin' High: The life of Dizzy Gillespie takes a traditional approach to jazz biography: His is a narrative rich with names, titles, places, and dates. Shipton sticks close to the music and the facts. Shipton has succeeded in making this the most complete biography yet written on Dizzy. Even though this book sometimes has the scrapbook feel of raw data, it is written with the passion of one who is making a discovery, and with the resolve to restore the reputation of a sometimes neglected, but nonetheless quintessential Blue Note artitst of the 1960s. Jazziz
Jazz biography at its most accessible and revealing...An extremely well-researched and critical assessment of Gillespie's artistry and humanity.
In the annals of jazz, few players have contributed more to the music than Dizzy Gillespie.... Shipton offers an interesting ride through the facts of Gillespie's career. We get a fine portrait of his struggles at keeping bebop big band alive through the turbulent late-'40's, and Gillespie's evolution from rebel after-hours player to America's musical goodwill ambassador.Copley News Service
Shipton illuminates a facet of Gillespie that was at least as important as his playing, arranging, and band leading: the trumpeter was music's great theoretician and teacher....Shipton examines the components of the man's complicated personality, and his public and private behavior....This biography has valuable information....It is a step on the way to a major biography of a major figure.Jazz Times
British jazz critic Alyn Shipton has penned the exhaustively-researched Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie , the first full biography of the trumpeter since his death in 1993. Without diminishing his subject, Shipton strives to separate fact from fiction, unlike earlier accounts he claims lacked the necessary critical perspective. Shipton left no stone unturned in compiling this very complete portrait. He has mined every imaginable source for his book, interviewing musicians, pouring over artivles in the music press, and even checking musicians union records.
His clownish stage antics may have belied the fact, but Dizzy Gillespie may be remembered, above all, as the musician who intellectualized jazz. In this first-rate jazz biography, Shipton casts the puffy-cheeked trumpeter as the chief architect of the bebop revolution. The author nudges saxophonist Charlie Parker from his presumed King-of-Bop throne, persuasively arguing that when the two innovators met in 1940, Gillespie was the more advanced and influential musician. Both were exploring a new approach to jazz that employed progressive harmonic concepts, but Gillespie had widely introduced his ideas while playing in big bands such as Cab Calloway's Orchestra. His unique style of soloing had been developed and captured on record before he ever met Parker, and Shipton dissects those early recordings in elucidating detail.
Not that he belittles Parker's talents. Parker possessed a natural feel for the blues that Gillespie never quite grasped, Shipton writes, and he introduced a fluid sense of phrasing to the bebop lexicon. But as Parker became increasingly unreliable, Gillespie went on to lead an ensemble that applied the theoretical concepts of bebop to a big-band format. Although he hardly pushed the conceptual envelope of jazz after the early 1950s, Gillespie outlived his musical soulmate Parker by four decades, serving as worldwide ambassador of the musical style he helped create.
Painstakingly researched, Groovin' High challenges many commonly accepted myths as it documents Gillespie's musical journey. It will enhance anyone's understanding of Gillespie's music and its role in jazz history.
Challenging the conventional view that saxophonist Charlie Parker set the pace for the bebop generation, this engrossing biography of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) makes the case that Diz was in many ways a "more original, wide-ranging and innovative" bebop pioneer. In a vibrant blend of meticulous scholarship, swinging anecdote and astute music criticism, London Times jazz critic Shipton charts Gillespie's creative evolution, from his heady plunge into New York's swing-era scene of the late 1930s, through his revolutionary experimentation of the 1940s and '50s, to his slide in the '60s and his reinvention of himself as the elder statesman of jazz. Born John Birks Gillespie in South Carolina, where he faced grinding poverty and racial prejudice, Dizzy's happy-go-lucky exterior concealed a quickfire temper and a mean streak that Shipton attributes to his sadistic bricklayer father. Beneath the hipster persona, the beret and goatee, Shipton shows, was a man of formidable intelligence. A contradictory figure, Gillespie prided himself on his outwardly exemplary life with his wife, Lorraine Willis, who acted as his personal manager; the public revelation in 1990 that he had fathered an illegitimate daughter--singer Jeanie Bryson--with white songwriter Connie Bryson ripped the lid off his secret life. Shipton credits Gillespie's embrace of the Baha'i faith by 1970 as key to the spiritual growth that allowed him to assume the roles of teacher and prophet for a generation of younger musicians. A must for jazz aficionados, this exhaustively researched biography features a supporting cast that reads like a who's who of jazz history: Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Max Roach and many, many more. Photos. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie's wish to be remembered as a humanitarian is well served by jazz critic Shipton's fully realized biography. Since Gillespie's death in 1993, an in-depth biography of this jazz innovator has been eagerly awaited. While Barry McRae's short Dizzy Gillespie: His Life and Times (1989) was an admirable stopgap, Shipton has fulfilled the need for a biography rich in detail and analysis. Providing surprising and convincing insight into the development of bebop, Shipton's depth of understanding of the birth of this vibrant movement, together with on-target analysis of Gillespie's recorded output, makes this an exceptional tribute. The important role of Gillespie's collaborators (particularly musicians and arrangers) is noted as well, reminding us that the music, though inspired by Gillespie, was brought to fruition by many exceptional people--all part of Gillespie's vital musical heritage. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--William Kenz, Moorhead State Univ. Lib., MN Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
...[T]he first biography of Gillespie to be published since his death and the most thorough summary of his life and music, with the exception of To Be or Not to Bop , Gillespie's valuable but poorly organized and often fanciful 1979 autobiography....Shipton's strong suit is his obvious affection for Gillespie, whose playing he credits with ''conveying more of the sheer joy and excitement of jazz than that of any other musician.'' The New York Times Book Review
London Times jazz writer Shipton tenders a new look at the life of legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. There have been, as Shipton himself points out in his preface, several other biographies of the musician (born John Birks Gillespie), as well as an autobiography that Shipton says, "has often been hailed as a landmark in oral history." So why yet another examination of the life and music of the Cheraw, South Carolina, native? After posing that same question, Shipton, who also presents jazz programs for the BBC and has written biographies of Fats Waller and Bud Powell, responds, "The answer is to some extent all these books took their cues from him as to the shape and pattern of his life—I began to realize that, without in any way detracting from Dizzy's immense achievement, there was more to be discovered about the influences on him." Shipton does indeed concentrate extensively on Gillespie's early influences, sometimes at the expense of Gillespie's personal life. For example, even though he promises to explore Gillespie's long-standing extramarital affair with songwriter Connie Bryson, which resulted in an illegitimate daughter, Jeanie Bryson, Shipton doesn't get into that until nearly 300 pages into the book. Given that Jeanie was Gillespie's only offspring, despite a successful marriage of over 50 years to his wife-manager, Lorraine, more attention should be focused on their father-daughter relationship (Gillespie did provide financial support, although he never admitted publicly that she was his daughter). That Shipton would gloss over the rich terrain of Gillespie's personal life to concentrate on his music is almost commendable in this era of sensationalized biographies.However, he should not have promised to explore these issues if he was not prepared to follow up on them. Torn between the morally upright educated music book and the more sensationalistic material of his subject's life, Shipton ends up with an unbalanced portrait that fails to satisfy.
