Dizzy Gillespie Dizzy Gillespie John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, and singer. Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks, and his light-hearted personality provided some of bebop's most prominent symbols. In the 1940s Gillespie, with Charlie Parker, became
Jazz (TV series) central figures, "providing the narrative thread around which the stories of other major figures turn", among them Sidney Bechet, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. A number of companion CDs were released simultaneously. Each two-hour episode of the ten episodes of "Jazz" covered a different era. "Jazz" was nominated for several awards, including multiple Emmy Awards. Among the critics with a positive response, Charles Paul Freund wrote that "Jazz" "is filled with rewards, many of them proffered unintentionally... Burns's documentary gifts are not visionary, analytical, nor even properly historical. Rather, he is a