Dizzy Gillespie

Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993), the trumpeter with the puffed cheeks and the bent bell, was with Charlie Parker one of the inventors of bebop and the great bridge to Afro-Cuban jazz. A worldwide ambassador of music, he is among the figures who made the great years of the Montreux Jazz Festival in the 1970s and 1980s.

Dizzy Gillespie in Montreux

A regular of the 1970s-80s

Dizzy Gillespie came back to Montreux throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In July 1975 his “Big 7” gave a concert there released by the Pablo label as “Dizzy Gillespie at Montreux 1975”. He played again on 14 July 1977 in a sextet.

On 19 July 1980 he shared the stage with harmonica player Toots Thielemans and drummer Bernard Purdie: that concert would appear as “Digital at Montreux, 1980”. He returned again in 1982. At every visit, the bent trumpet and virtuoso phrasing of the bebop master electrified the Casino de Montreux.

The ambassador of bebop

With Charlie Parker, Gillespie had invented in the 1940s a faster, more sophisticated jazz, bebop, before marrying it to the Afro-Cuban rhythms of percussionist Chano Pozo — “A Night in Tunisia” remains its emblem. Right up to his United Nations Orchestra, he never stopped making jazz a universal language.

At Montreux he belonged to that generation of giants whom Claude Nobs received as friends. His name appears in the guest book of the Eden Palace au Lac, alongside Charles Mingus and Charles Aznavour.