2. uncountable noun [oft in NOUN] Distress is the state of being in extreme danger and needing urgent help. He expressed concern that the ship might be in distress. The constable received a distress call, and saw two youths attacking his colleague. Synonyms: danger, risk, difficulty, peril More Synonyms of distress.
But Dizzy Gillespie -- born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, S.C., on Oct. 21, 1917 -- saw himself primarily as a player. I always thought I was a musician, he told Musician magazine's Chip Stern a year ago. Thought I was a musician before I really was a musician..
Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time (some would say the best), Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis' emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy's style was successfully recreated.