The Living History Series: Dizzy Gillespie

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Image c/o: Wikimedia Commons

It’s time for another Living History figure! We enjoyed our study of Otis Redding so much last month that we’re going with another American music icon for October: Dizzy Gillespie.

The only things I personally know about Dizzy Gillespie are that he was a great trumpet player, that he recorded “A Night in Tunisia” with Charlie Parker, and that he blew his cheeks out to enormous proportions when he played. But I’m sure there’s a lot more to this jazz great, so we’ll be spending some time this month getting to know him better.

And, just because it’s such an incredible song, here’s one of the recordings of “A Night in Tunisia”:

Here are a few of the books we’ll be using in our unit:

Dizzy by Jonah Winter

Dizzy Gillespie and the Birth of Bebop

Dizzy Gillespie (American Jazz)

If you want to follow along with us, you can grab these books from Amazon.com or your local library. Stop back by on October 29 to see what we learned about Dizzy Gillespie this month!