Dizzy Gillespie composed, arranged, and soloed with the Teddy Hill and Cab Calloway bands in the late 1930s, and with the Benny Carter and Earl Hines bands, among others, in the early 1940s. He took an active part in the jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where such musicians as pianist Thelonius Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, and saxophonist Charlie Parker were experimenting with a new style of jazz composed of numerous altered chord progressions and rapidsyncopated rhythms. Gillespie became co-leader of a group on 52nd Street with bassist Oscar Pettiford, which marked the birth of the bebop era. When Gillespie and Parker joined Billy Eckstine's band in 1944, it became the first big band to showcase the new style.

Gillespie took the saxophone-style lines of advanced swing-era trumpeter Roy Eldridge and executed them faster, with greater ease, and with further harmonic daring. He played his jagged melodies with abandon, reaching into the highest registers of the trumpet range and improvising into precarious situations from which he seemed always to extricate himself. He thought much like a drummer and was partly responsible for the assimilation of Afro-Cuban elements into modern jazz. Gillespie influenced many modern jazz trumpeters, including such leading figures as Miles Davis, Thad Jones, and Kenny Dorham. His improvised lines with their abrupt changes in direction were incorporated into the improvisations of pianists, saxophonists, guitarists, bassists, and vibraphonists. Though associated mostly with small combos, Gillespie also led and wrote for his own swing-era-sized big bands throughout the late 1940s, and sporadically during the '50s, launching such outstanding saxophone soloists as John Coltrane, Benny Golson, Dexter Gordon, and James Moody.

The Gillespie classic jazz compositions "Night in Tunisia," "Manteca," "Con Alma," and "Birks Works" became jazz standards. His bent trumpet (originally the result of its being sat on) and his on stage clowning became personal trademarks. His memoirs, To Be or Not To Bop, were published in 1979.

-Raymond Horricks, Dizzy Gillespie and the Be-Bop Revolution (1984); and Barry McRae, Dizzy Gillespie: His Life & Times (1988). x