Jazz for aficionados

"I spent my first week in New York looking for Bird and Dizzy. Juilliard was only a smokescreen, a stopover, a pretense I used to put me close to being around Bird and Diz."

Those were Miles very own words; Diz didn't go to St. Louis looking for Miles, he came to New York looking for Bird and Diz; that was from the start, which tells a lot.

Dizzy G, was the ultimate "jazz musician" who could innovate like nobody you ever heard; that's how he was able to consistently play "jazz" that sounded fresh and brand new from the 40's until his death. He never sounded "stereotypical", meaning clinging to certain riffs that he repeated, but each time he reworked his old tunes until they sounded new.

While Diz never left the "jazz compound" he pushed and re-invented his music in such a way that it was always new and fresh.


Throughout most of my "jazz life" I was equally a Diz and Miles fan; that is until Miles trolley jumped the tracks, and I no longer liked his music. Trying to quantify Miles new music would give me a a "brain-ache", therefore I won't, but leave it at the fact I could live without it.


Enjoy the music.

Frogman, I really appreciate your 'inside' comments, there is no reason why I should not believe you. It would be interesting if somebody could come up with some material where perhaps Dizzy was faced with question or comment about it, meaning why he emphasized one 'style' of playing over another

"Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins." - Dizzy Gillespie 

"How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don't you ask him? And besides, maybe we'd all like to be like Miles, and just haven't got the guts." - Dizzy Gillespie

Similar to being a combat infantryman, the guy who got a Silver Star yesterday is hiding behind a tree today . We all have good and bad days, there are no heroes .

Hi Alex - I just caught up with this thread again, and wanted to chime in on Dizzy, being a professional brass player myself.  Everything Frogman has said is true, and he explains it about as well as it can be explained to a layman.  Dizzy was self-taught, and quite frankly had a terrible embouchure (the way we shape our mouths and the muscles around it to play) - in fact, he is very often used as the textbook example of how not to form an embouchure - any beginning brass player is told not to look like that while playing, with the cheeks all puffed out like he did - this is extremely inefficient - the air is bunching up in his cheeks and is not getting into the instrument, hence the thin sound Frogman accurately described (and there are plenty of other problems directly associated with it as well, but more technical than anyone is going to want to read about here). Again, this is not to say that he couldn't play the trumpet.  But it is to say that he was not a particularly good trumpet player, especially as we are comparing him to other professional players - he was a fantastic musician, but these are not the same things.  There is only so far one can develop as a player of an instrument if one's basic fundamentals are that flawed, no matter how good a musician one is in other respects.   Though many musicians don't like them, perhaps an athletic analogy is appropriate here.  There is only so far a baseball pitcher can go if his basic throwing motions are flawed.  Perhaps an even better comparison might be to swimming - the better your technique with each stroke, the better  you will swim.  Anyone can learn to swim, and pretty much anyone can be taught to make a sound on a brass instrument - you could teach a monkey to make a  loud noise on a brass instrument.  But you couldn't teach him to play soft with great control...hope all this makes some sense.