Search - Dizzy Gillespie :: Champ

Not To Be OverLooked..1951-1952..Considered a Milestone

Original Mixed Up-Kid | New York United States | 12/23/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Small group sesions with great musicians, great songs of the day all add to a wonderful collection..The Champ was a 2 sided single presented here here as a 5 minute blowout...Art Blakey,Milt Jackson,John Coltrane all grace some of these sides doing standard classics such as Caravan,Star Dust,Sunny Side,numbers by Gershwin and Berlin as well as Dizzy's Birks Works.Two bonus tracks here make this all a real good piece of music."

Fun, fun, fun

Matthew Watters | Vietnam | 05/11/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The historians of jazz tend to slough over the period between the demise of swing and the advent of hard bop and the LP era in the mid-1950s, largely focusing on the innovations of Charlie Parker and the advent of "cool" jazz and consigning most of the rest of the music produced during this period to the dustbin of obscurity. But a bit of digging reveals an astonishing diversity in the music, from the polytonal experiments of Lee Konitz and Teddy Charles, to the big bands of Stan Kenton and Dizzy Gillespie - the latter, in its short existence, setting the standard for all large jazz bands that have since followed. This particular album by Dizzy followed close on the heals of the demise of that band but itself suggested a direction for small-group jazz different from that of the Jazz Messengers school of hard bop that would soon prevail, a direction based more on arrangements and variety than on giving soloists a platform to blow. The music on The Champ is an historical dead end of a sort, but a wondrously delightful one, with Dizzy and his cohorts revelling in a variety of feelings and textures and instrumental line-ups, with legendary musicians like Kenny Burrell, Stuff Smith and J.J. Johnson along for the ride but band sizes never exceeding a sextet. As always, Diz's trumpet work seems casually tossed off yet gleaming in its brilliance; he really was one-of-a-kind, jazz's cavalier poet. The other reviewer sums up the music succinctly and well, but what makes this album a keeper and a classic is its overriding sense of joy."