Bootleg Friday: Dizzy Gillespie, 1953

I find it very intimidating to write about jazz. I know far less about it then I know about rock and soul, and the history of the music is simply so vast. It's a music that I have come to love only in the past few years, and it occurs for me much like my love of wine: I know what I like, I am ready for more, but writing as an expert would be fraudulent.

That being said, here's a wonderful five song collection of Dizzy Gillespie and his quintet in Hamburg, Germany from 1953. You can hear in the songs what he brought to the table: a fusion of Latin sounds and rhythms with jazz and the darker, richer tones of bop, the revolution in jazz which he helped to usher in.

Listening to this music fifty plus years after the fact, you don't hear the radicalness of it. You hear the beauty in it.

Download: "Manteca" 3/8/53, Hamburg, Germany
Download: "Alone Together" 3/8/53, Hamburg, Germany
Download: "They Can't Take That Away From Me" 3/8/53, Hamburg, Germany
Download: "I Can't Get Started" 3/8/53, Hamburg, Germany
Download: "Tin Tin Deo" 3/8/53, Hamburg, Germany