Arena — Season 1, Episode 439: A Tribute to Dizzy Gillespie
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Elder statesman of jazz and a co-founder of the style that became bebop in the 40s, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie will be remembered by many as the trumpet player with ballooning cheeks and a misshapen horn. His career began in the 30s in Philadelphia, taking him on to New York where he met and jammed with two other young jazz greats, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. From these improvisations grew the radical new style that revolutionised jazz. He continued to experiment, and in the latter part of his career he took his music to the developing world, incorporating the sounds he found there into his own work. Arenapays tribute to the trumpeter, composer and bandleader who died earlier this month.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.