Adventures in Vintage Vinyl: Late Performances by Dizzy Gillespie
The bebop titan turns to “Mother Africa”
The thrill of thrift stores
I’ve always enjoyed browsing through shelves of dusty old records at thrift stores, “antique” malls, junk shops, etc. more than crate-digging at used record stores.
Sure, you have to rifle through the less-than-memorable efforts of Andy Williams, the Ray Conniff Singers, and innumerable pasty-white gospel groups like the Treble-Aires, whose covers are more interesting than their music:
And rock music in decent shape is hard to find outside of record stores, at least in my area. But you also come across fascinating music you never knew existed. Adventures in Vintage Vinyl is my occasional chronicle of some of these finds.
Adventure 1
A few months ago, a trip to Goodwill resulted in only two purchases (15 records seemed promising, but most were in bad shape): late recordings by bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie: “Swing Low Sweet Cadillac” and “The Real Thing.” I didn’t know anything about this period of Gillespie’s career…
