Dizzy Gillespie

Dizzy Gillespie, barely twenty years earlier a visionary musician and genuine revolutionary, the co-founder of bebop with Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk, as well as the veritable matchmaker behind the sensual fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms and modern jazz, was no exception to this massive movement that stripped jazz of its former standing. He was famous far beyond the inner sanctum of jazz lovers: his clowning antics, exaggerated by his legendary outsized jowls, gave the image of a jester blowing endlessly into an improbably shaped angled trumpet with its copper bell splendidly facing skyward. But to an audience in the thrall of new sounds, new grooves, new attitudes, Gillespie suddenly appeared to be a mere caricature of his past glory, conveying an image of jazz that was joyful, carefree, and certainly spectacular … but decidedly irrelevant