Groovin' High
| "Groovin' High" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Dizzy Gillespie from the album Shaw 'Nuff | |
| Released | 1946 |
| Recorded | February 9, 1945 |
| Genre | Jazz, bebop |
| Length | 2:38 |
| Composer(s) | Dizzy Gillespie |
"Groovin' High" is an influential 1945 song by jazz composer and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. The song was a bebop mainstay that became a jazz standard, one of Gillespie's best known hits, and, according to Bebop: The Music and Its Players author Thomas Owens, "the first famous bebop recording". The song is a complex musical arrangement based on the chord structure of the 1920 standard originally recorded by Paul Whiteman, "Whispering", with lyrics by John Schonberger and Richard Coburn (né Frank Reginald DeLong; 1886–1952) and music by Vincent Rose. The biography Dizzy characterizes the song as "a pleasant medium-tempo tune" that "demonstrates...[Gillespie's] skill in fashioning interesting textures using only six instruments".
The song has been used to title many compilation albums and also the 2001 biography Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie.
First published on the 1945 album Shaw 'Nuff, the song is one of seven on that album that, according to jazz critic Scott Yanow, "shocked" Gillespie's contemporaries, contributing to that album's "permanently [changing]...jazz and (indirectly) the entire music world". In Jazz: A Regional Exploration, Yanow explained that at the time such songs "were unprecedented...displaying a radically different language" from contemporary swing. But though fans and fellow musicians found the material "very strange and difficult", The Sax & Brass Book notes, they were quickly adopted as classics. According to Yanow, "Parker and Gillespie's solos seemed to have little relation to the melody, but they were connected. It was a giant step forward for jazz".
Thomas Owens highlights the innovative use of source material, pointing out that while it was not uncommon for jazz musicians to utilize existing chord structures in their compositions in 1945, Gillespie's "melodic contrafact was the most complex jazz melody superimposed on a pre-existing chordal scheme", "atypically elaborate".
First performed on February 9, 1945, Gillespie reworked the arrangement for a February 28 performance to allow an improvisation by guitarist Remo Palmier, and it is this reworking that became so well known.
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Wikipedia