Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie

Following up on his 1996 biography, Stan Getz, Maggin offers this engrossing, if somewhat sanitized, portrait of jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie. The author, a journalist and concert promoter, follows his subject from the North Carolina cotton fields where the young scrapper taught himself trumpet to the astronomic heights of mid-20th century jazz and on to Dizzy's final, brave struggle with pancreatic cancer. Along the way, readers are treated to anecdotes of New York City apartment jam sessions steaming with ham and grits, knife fights with Cab Calloway and Gillespie's trademark puffed out cheeks. Of course, Gillespie's story is also the story of jazz, and Maggin does a fine job of noting the social changes that helped shape its historical arc: Depression-era innovation, booming war-economy big bands, racial politics, the rise of the suburban leisure class and the death-knell of TV and the Beatles. Through it all, Dizzy adapted to become one of the world's most beloved entertainers. The highlight of Dizzy's career was his gig as ""goodwill ambassador"" in the employ of the U.S. State Department. Charged with the task of improving America's poor civil rights image during the Cold War, Gillespie traveled far and wide with his all-star band, including to South America and the Middle East, to which he brought the distinctly American idea of jazz for the first time. The significant innovations he made in Be-Bop and Latin-Jazz are clearly expounded with musical analysis that can be understood by everyone. Various other jazz heavies appear in the exhaustive interview and article excerpts, lending accuracy and balance. Though Maggin's glimpses of Dizzy's moral shortcomings are scant and exculpatory, his work is nonetheless an inspiring account of what genius and conviction can do.