Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods - Dizzy Gillespie & Machito

Rating: 5.5/10
Sound Quality: 320 kb/s
Format: Mp3
Record Label: Original Jazz Classics
Year Released: 1975
Album Covers: Included
Pass: radiodada
Links: rapidshare

About Dizzy Gillespie

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, singer, and composer. He was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, the youngest of nine children. Dizzy's father was a local bandleader, so instruments were made available to Dizzy. He started to play the piano at the age of 4. Together with Charlie Parker, he was a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz.

In addition to featuring in these epochal moments in bebop, he was instrumental in founding Afro-Cuban jazz, the modern jazz version of what early-jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton referred to as the "Spanish Tinge". Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and gifted improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic complexity previously unknown in jazz. In addition to his instrumental skills, Dizzy's beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop, which was originally regarded as threatening and frightening music by many listeners raised on older styles of jazz. He had an enormous impact on virtually every subsequent trumpeter, both by the example of his playing and as a mentor to younger musicians.

About Machito

Machito (December 3, 1909 – April 15, 1984), born Francisco Raúl Gutiérrez Grillo in Havana, Cuba, was an influential Latin jazz musician. Machito played a huge role in the history of Latin jazz. His bands of the 1940s, especially the band named the Afro-Cubans, were among the first to fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz improvisation. Machito was the front man, singer, conductor, and maraca player of the Afro-Cubans and its successors. Machito's brother-in-law Mario Bauza, the musical director, influenced Machito to hire jazz-oriented arrangers. The son of a cigar manufacturer, Machito became a professional musician in Cuba in his teens before he emigrated to America in 1937 as a vocalist with La Estrella Habanera. He worked with several Latin artists and orchestras in the late '30s, recording with the then-dominant Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat. After an earlier, aborted attempt to launch a band with Bauza, Machito founded the Afro-Cubans in 1940, taking on Bauza the following year as music director where he remained for 35 years. Machito's son Mario Grillo later took over the position.

In 1983, he won a Grammy Award in the Best Latin Recording category for "Machito & His Salsa Big Band '82".

More recently, the song "Mambo Mucho Mambo" has featured on the sound track for the game Grand Theft Auto Vice City.In 2005, the 1957 album Kenya was added to the list of albums in '1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die'.Machito died during a concert in London, England in 1984, suffering a fatal stroke while playing Ronnie Scott's club. A documentary film by Carlo Ortiz, Machito: A Latin Jazz Legacy, was released in 1987.