Managing in inflation Book

3.5 STARS

The story of Dizzy Gillespie, father of bebop, and I wanted to love it! Dizzy's story is inspiring in that he came from an abusive situation in a small Southern town (his father beat him, and he also faced the oppression blacks in the South endured during his childhood in the early 1920s). At first, he struck out and got into fights with other kids. But, then a wise teacher gave him a trumpet and he began to play out his feelings. He fell in love with music, and felt drawn to jazz, eventually making his own style of both music and performance as he moved away from "swing" music into bebop and made lots of silly faces and dance steps while he played. Also, he was married to the same woman all his life and never did drugs, unlike many jazz stars of the day. But, I wasn't ultimately sold on the presentation here. The illustrations did not suit my taste (though the cover one is adorable) as I did not like the red pouring out of the trumpet; I think it was supposed to represent the "fire" of Dizzy's performance, but to me it looked too much like blood and rage and kept bringing to mind his early days of abuse and fighting when I think the point was that he had moved beyond that because of his music. Also, I did not like the choice of words at the end of the book when it said that Dizzy "knocked down" the old house of jazz and built a new one. I get the meaning, of course, but it just seemed, again, to keep bringing up violence when Dizzy was so much into creating beautiful music and being free and original and fun.