Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie

British author and BBC radio host Alyn Shipton's biography on the world-renowned puffy-cheeked trumpeter/composer/bandleader John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie is the most comprehensive to date. It's an excellent follow-up to Gillespie's 1980 memoir, To Be or Not to Bop, and it contains new interviews with many of his associates, including pianist Dave Brubeck, author John Chilton, and bassist Milt Hinton. In addition to detailing Gillespie's South Carolina origins and his mid-1940s co-creations of bebop and Latin jazz (with drummer Kenny Clarke, saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Thelonious Monk, and composer Mario Bauza), the author penetrates his fun-loving, goatee-sporting, beret-wearing, and generally zany façade. "This was bizarre behavior indeed," writes Shipton, "but part of a pattern that led more than one commentator to the conclusion that Dizzy was 'crazy like a fox,' a shrewd operator who meticulously filed away in his mind any shred of fact or information that might come in handy some day." Shipton reveals him to be a man who sometimes angered and alienated his fellow musicians, as evidenced by trumpeter's infamous spitball affair with Cab Calloway; his fathering of a daughter by a white woman out of wedlock in 1958, and his spiritual quest for world brotherhood as a member of the Islam-based Baha'i faith. Shipton's portrait of Gillespie in his final years in the late '80s and '90s as the leader of his multiracial United Nation Orchestra is that of an elder statesman, cultural ambassador, and musical innovator. "With his death," Shipton writes, "the world lost a man who had revolutionized jazz, gave it a set of principles on which it could develop musically, and shown by example how to create within those principles at the highest level." --Eugene Holley, Jr.