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with Miles Davis (I'm pretty sure) accompanying him on trumpet
lyrics
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.
You are the angel glow that lights a star,
The dearest things I know are what you are.
Some day my happy arms will hold you,
And some day I’ll know that moment divine,
When all the things you are, are mine!
This entry comes from my east village google map
A description of it
Famous & Infamous Manhattan: East Village
A tour based on "A Colorful Walking Tour of New York's Most Notorious Crime* Sites" by Andrew Roth. Jim Naureckas' www.nysonglines.com/ is an invaluable source. Also Bruce Kayton's "Radical History Walking Tours of Manhattan." *Many here are noteworthy and far from criminals.
playing Hot House from 1952
Dizzy Gillespie biography from the pbs jazz site
John Birks (1917-1993) Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader
Dizzy Gillespie was one of the principal developers of bop in the early 1940s, and his styles of improvising and trumpet playing were imitated widely in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, he is one of the most influential players in the history of jazz.
Gillespie was the youngest of nine children. His father, a bricklayer and weekend bandleader, died when he was ten. Two years later, he began to teach himself to play trombone and trumpet and later took up cornet. His musical ability enabled him to attend Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina in 1932 because the school needed a trumpet player for its band. During his years there, he practiced the trumpet and piano intensively, still largely without formal guidance.
In 1935, he left school to join his family, who had moved to Philadelphia. Soon he joined a band led by Frankie Fairfax, which also included Charlie Shavers. Shavers knew many of the trumpet solos of Roy Eldridge, and Gillespie learned them by copying Shavers (he had previously known only a handful of phrases by Eldridge, the man who became his early role model). While he was in Fairfax's band, Gillespie's clownish behavior earned him the nickname he has carried ever since. Gillespie left Philadelphia in 1937 and moved to New York to try and become better known as a jazz player. After sitting in with many different bands and at many jam sessions, he earned a job with Teddy Hill's big band, largely because he sounded much like Eldridge, who had been Hill's trumpet soloist. The band toured France and Great Britain for two months shortly after Gillespie joined. On returning to New York, he again worked in several groups, including Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans and the Afro-Cuban band of Alberto Socarras, before returning to Hill's band.
Margot Stage reports that this Dizzy Gillespie classic marked the arrival of Afro-Cuban rhythms in American jazz. The song is a selection from National Public Radio's list of the 100 most important American musical recordings of the 20th In 1939, he joined Cab Calloway's big band, one of the highest-paid black bands in New York at the time. While in this group, he began to develop an interest in the fusion of jazz and Afro-Cuban music, largely because of his friendship with Mario Bauzi, who was also in Calloway's band. During the same period, he was beginning to diverge from Eldridge's playing style both formally, in his solos with the band such as Pickin' the Cabbage (1940), and in an informal context with the group's double bass player Milt Hinton. While on tour in 1940, Gillespie met Charlie Parker in Kansa City. Soon he began participating in after-hours jam session in New York with Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and others. This group of young, experimenting players gradual developed the new, more complex style of jazz that was to be called bop. Recordings, such as Kerouac (1941), made at Minton's Playhouse, exemplify this emergent style.
A dispute with Calloway led to Gillespie's dismissal in 1941. He then worked briefly with many leaders, including Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Le Hite, Lucky Millinder, Earl Hines (whose band also included Parker), and Duke Ellington. With Millinder, he recorded a full, formed bop solo within a swing band context on Little John Special (1942). After his solo, the band plays a riff which he developed into the composition Salt Peanuts. During the winter of 1943-4, Gillespie 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 engaged Gillespie to play and to be the music director. At about the same time, Gillespie made some of the first small-group bop recordings, some with Hawkins's band and others, including Salt Peanuts and Hot House, under his own name with Parker.
Early in 1945, Gillespie organized his own short-lived big band. Failing to achieve financial success with this group, he then formed a bop quintet with Parker in November. He later expanded the group to a sextet, but his desire to lead a big band inspired him to try once more, and this time he was able to keep its members together for four years. During this period, the band made some early attempts to fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with Afro-American jazz. Gillespie added Chano Pozo to the rhythm section, and the two men recorded Cubana Bel/Cubana Bop (written by George Russell) and Manteca (by Gillespie and Pozo). By 1947, the band's rhythm section consisted of John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke, and Ray Brown, who went on to form the Modern Jazz Quartet. At various times such prominent bop players as J. J. Johnson, Sonny Stitt, James Moody, Jimmy Heath, Paul Gonsalves, and John Coltrane were also members of Gillespie's band. Financial pressures forced Gillespie to give up the big band in 1950. A short engagement as featured soloist with Stan Kenton's big band followed, and then he organized a sextet. In 1951, he formed his own record company, Dee Gee; it, too, was financially unrewarding and short-lived.
Early in 1953, someone accidentally fell on Gillespie's trumpet, which was sitting upright on a trumpet stand, and bent the bell back. Gillespie played it, discovered that he liked the sound, and from that point on had trumpets built for him with the bell pointing upwards at a 45 degree angle. The design is his visual trademark — for more than three decades he was virtually the only major trumpeter in jazz playing such an instrument. In 1956, after several years leading small groups, Gillespie formed another big band specifically to tour Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, Greece, and Yugoslavia on a cultural mission for the US State Department, and a few months later another sponsored tour to South America took place. He kept the band together for two years, but without government funding he was unable to keep such a large ensemble operational, and he returned to leading small groups. Gillespie continued to perform and record extensively with his various small groups into the late 1980s. In addition, he appeared occasionally in all-star groups such as the Giants of Jazz (1971-2), a sextet with Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Thelonious Monk, Al McKibbon, and Art Blakey. Also, he was a regular performer on Caribbean cruise ships that featured jazz artists.
Although he was once viewed as a musical iconoclast, his music is no longer considered radical. He is viewed rather as an elder statesman of jazz, and his outgoing personality and impish sense of humor endeared him to the general public through appearances on television.
Coleman Randolph Hawkins (November 21, 1904–May 19, 1969), nicknamed "Hawk" and sometimes "Bean", was a prominent jazz tenor saxophonist.
He is commonly regarded as the first important and influential jazz musician to use the instrument: Joachim E. Berendt wrote, "there were some tenor players before him, but the instrument was not an acknowledged jazz horn"
While Hawkins is most strongly associated with the swing music and big band era, he began playing professionally in the early 1920s and was important in the development of bebop in the 1940s. He continued to be influenced by the avant-garde jazz of the 1950s and '60s.
Full Name: Charles Christopher Parker
Born: August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, Kansas
Died: March 12, 1955, in New York
Married: Rebecca Ruffin, 1936; Geraldine Scott, 1943; Doris Snyder, 1948; and Chan Richardson, 1950; He had five children.
Nickname origin: There are two stories.
1. He lived "free as a bird."
2. When touring with Jay McShann, they accidentally hit a chicken (a yardbird) with their car and Parker made them stop to pick it up so he could have his landlady cook it for him.
The only child of Charles and Addie Parker, Charlie Parker was one of the most important and influential saxophonists and jazz players of the 1940’s.
When Parker was still a child, his family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where jazz, blues and gospel music were flourishing. His first contact with music came from school, where he played baritone horn with the school’s band. When he was 15, he showed a great interest in music and a love for the alto saxophone. Soon, Parker was playing with local bands until 1935, when he left school to pursue a music career.
From 1935 to 1939, Parker worked in Kansas City with several local jazz and blues bands from which he developed his art. In 1939, Parker visited New York for the first time, and he stayed for nearly a year working as a professional musician and often participating in jam sessions. The New York atmosphere greatly influenced Parker's musical style.
In 1938, Parker joined the band of pianist Jay McShann, with whom he toured around Southwest Chicago and New York. A year later, Parker traveled to Chicago and was a regular performer at a club on 55th street. Parker soon moved to New York. He washed dishes at a local food place where he met guitarist Biddy Fleet, the man who taught him about instrumental harmony. Shortly afterwards, Parker returned to Kansas City to attend his father’s funeral. Once there, he joined Harlan Leonard’s Rockets and stayed for five months. In 1939, Yardbird rejoined McShann and was placed in charge of the reed section. Then, in 1940, Parker made his first recording with the McShann orchestra.
During the four years that Parker stayed with McShann's band, he got the opportunity to perform solo in several of their recordings, such as Hootie Blues, Sepian Bounce, and the 1941 hit Confessing the Blues. In 1942, while on tour with McShann, Parker performed in jam sessions at Monroe’s and Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. There he caught the attention of up-and-coming jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. Later that year, Parker broke with McShann and joined Earl Hines for eight months.
The year 1945 was extremely important for Parker. During that time he led his own group in New York and also worked with Gillespie in several ensembles. In December, Parker and Gillespie took their music to Hollywood on a six-week nightclub tour. Parker continued to perform in Los Angeles until June 1946, when he suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined at a state hospital. After his release in January 1947, Parker returned to New York and formed a quintet that performed some of his most famous tunes.
From 1947 to 1951, Parker worked in a number of nightclubs, radio studios, and other venues performing solo or with the accompaniment of other musicians. During this time, he visited Europe where he was cheered by devoted fans and did numerous recordings. March 5, 1955, was Parker’s last public engagement at Birdland, a nightclub in New York that was named in his honor. He died a week later in a friend’s apartment.
Charles "Yardbird" Parker was an amazing saxophonist who gained wide recognition for his brilliant solos and innovative improvisations. He was, without a doubt, one of the most influential and talented musicians in jazz history.
