Billboard : 01/01/1955
(this also includes a review of Norgran MGN-1003)

Bop, as such, is supposed to be dead.

But RCA Victor has come up with a collection of Gillespie big band interpretations from the 1947-1949 period when bop was very much alive, that will remind the forgetful just how exciting this music was. To these “classics” are added five items of merit not previously released. It is an easy jump from the Cubano Be and Cubano Bop of the Victor album to the Gillespie-Chico O’Farrill collaborations in the Norgran package. The fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms and harmonies with the American jazz idiom still offers Gillespie one of the most fertile fields for experimentation. Diz plays as dazzling a horn as ever. Old and new admirers will want both of these samples of Gillespie’s varied art.

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Cashbox : 12/25/1954

“In the history of jazz, the era of bop stands alone as a monument to one man’s capricious ingenuity” – Dizzy Gillespie’s. His magnificent style and sound with all its heat and excitement, created an era which swept the country. Although this master’s present day material is called modern or progressive jazz, it still carries the same excitement as when it was called bop. But on this LP, Victor takes us back to the post-war years of 1947, ’48 and ’49 to hear a dozen of Dizzy’s great arrangements and bop classics waxed in those years. Diz is supported by top name musicians on all of the numbers. Five of these have never been released. The other seven are Gillespie standards. Disk is housed in a fold-open package with a modern, fascinating painting of Diz’s prominent characteristics. A collector’s item.

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San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA)
Ralph J. Gleason : 12/21/1954

During the years before the appearance of the long playing disc, jazz musicians spent a lot of time bemoaning the strictures of the three minute, 78 r.p.m. record. When the L.P., with its 10 and 12 Inches of surface allowing up to 25 or 30 minutes of uninterrupted music arrived it was greeted with cries of delight.

Unfortunately the strength of a number does not depend on its length and a better illustration of this than the new Dizzy Gillespie 12″ LP Afro on Norgran is hard to find. One of Gillespie’s most effective numbers, when he led his now legendary band of the late 40s, was a simple riff built over Latin rhythms and called Manteca. It combined the elemental Afro-Cuban rhythms with considerable scope for jazz blowing and had the virtue, since various parts of it were little more than exercises for congo drums and chanting, of being expandable at will. Gillespie might do it for 15 minutes at a concert, building up to a tremendous pitch of excitement. But that concert recording, as in the Gene Norman Presents LP of a few months ago, lacked the same effect when played in your own home.

Now, Norgran has’ released a version that runs 20 minutes, more or less, as part of the Afro LP. The band is a large one, the arrangements are by Chico O’Farrill and the recording is technically excellent. However, Manteca, which was first recorded in a three minute version on RCA, does not lend itself to such extension. The original three minute effort remains the best and this one, though it has excellent passages, seems over-arranged and pretentious. In fact. this entire LP, ambitious as it is (O’Farrill and an excellent group of musicians back Dizzy), is somewhat disappointing. Gillespie has now reached the point arrived at some time ago by Armstrong where his further improvisations in certain settings seem merely to be quotations of earlier efforts by himself.

Gillespie is unquestionably the best trumpeter of all of the modern school and O’Farrill is an arranger of acknowledged talent. But somehow the two do not seem to mix well.

RCA Victor, on the other hand, has just issued a 12-Inch LP album of numbers by the Gillespie band of the late 40s called Dizzier and Dizzier which contains the excellent Ow and Two Bass Hit as well as other great sides by that band. However, this LP suffers from the other hazard of the long playing disc: you have to fill up the time. So several sides not issued by RCA when they were originally made (and for excellent reasons it now develops: they were pretty bad) were included.

Despite this, it is a delightful collection and captures the spirit of that band very well. Furthermore it is ample evidence of the debt modern jazz owes to Dizzy Gillespie.

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Saturday Review
Whitney Balliett : 01/15/1955

Twelve selections, five of which have never been released before, taken from Gillespie’s misguided Cubano-big-band days in the late Forties. The leader’s brilliant, cavortive trumpet rises occasionally, like the Phoenix, above the Wildroot Charlie sax sections and ricketing bongo drums, and then the whole mass comes to life.

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Down Beat : 01/26/1955
Nat Hentoff : 4.0 stars

A valuable set of 1947-49 Dizzy big band sides including five never before released (one is a lovely Gerald Wilson-Count Basie ballad, unaccountably called Dizzier and Dizzier). Also on hand is the polyrocking Cubana Be and Cubana Bop (with the late Chano Pozo) and Ray Brown’s work on Two Bass Hit. The band was rough (in section and often solo work) but it was ruggedly forging forward and Dizzy blew brilliantly. The notes are totally wrong, however, in ascribing all of “bop” to “one man’s capricious ingenuity.” There was a guy called Bird among many others who deserve to share in the credit. Recording quality, even by mid-’40s standards, could be much better, but this is an important set to have. There is also a record, issued in France, a 1948 Paris concert by the Gillespie band that some enterprising American company would do well to reissue.

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Liner Notes by Jack Lewis and Bill Zeitung

In the history of jazz the era of bop stands alone as a monument to one man’s capricious ingenuity. It would, indeed, be impossible to make this statement about any of the previous ages or styles of our native music, since there has been an often bewildering variety of leading and influential figures, all of whom have reacted equally on the others. But, in 1946, seeking to place a new and long-needed emphasis on a contemporary musical expression, one man appeared who was a great many years ahead of his contemporaries. He inspired a host of rabid followers, a plethora of rather terrible jokes and, in the final analysis, some of the most stylistically complicated and emotionally exciting jazz of any date – a great amount of which is reproduced on this album.

That man, of course, was Dizzy Gillespie who, replate with costume which was soon to become a standard (beret, goatee and horn-rimmed specs), miraculously established a new Mecca on New York’s 52nd Street. He was in every way a veritable prophet, but, in reality, must be termed something of a cross between Mahomet and the Pied Piper. The notes issuing from his horn – hot, bumptious, rollicking – magnetically attracted the faithful to whom the gospel was quickly spread. He was the center, and driving force, of a movement which soon had America divided into warring musical camps.

There seems little doubt now that Dizzy was considerably ahead of his time. His new music left a good segment of the public cold, but it made rapid headway among the musically knowledgeable. Not only did an entire new generation of musicians spring up around him, but the potency of his personality was such that an amazing number of traditional jazz artists (Coleman Hawkins was one) began to feel the heat endangered by Dizzy’s off-beat wanderings and to express it in a form of their own – always influenced, of course, by the voice of authority.

While bop was a violent expression of post-war musical liberation, it has not, as many people believe; completely died. Dizzy, of course, is certainly playing today as effervescently as ever, but the movement which he founded has been merged with the general “progressive” idiom of the day – its excesses have been tempered and some of its thinking modified – but it is being carried on, not alone by the re-doubtable Gillespie, but by all the Mulligans, Brubecks, Rogers and Petersons, each of whom, together with many more, has contributed to expounding a modern jazz idiom of quiet surface and profound musical insight.

Dizzy’s first RCA Victor records, made in February, 1946, were cut with a six-piece outfit which, in retrospect, seems to embody the absolute essence of the bop movement (besides Dizzy, there were Milt Jackson, Ray Brown, Al Haig, Bill de Arango and Don Byas). But it was in 1947, ’48 and *49, with large bands of sixteen and seventeen men, that Dizzy made his greatest, loudest and most explosive effect on the musical scene. There was no paucity of great performers in these bands either – James Moody, John Lewis, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson and Al McKibbon contributed their share to the aural fireworks – and, if these sides do not mark the absolute zenith of the Gillespie career, they are more than representative of that exalted plane on which Dizzy landed in the late forties and which he has continued to inhabit through the present day.

Of the twelve selections in this album, five have never before been released in any form (St. Louis Blues, Dizzier and Dizzier, I’m Be Boppin’ Too, Hey Pete! Let’s Eat Mo’ Meat and and Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid), and the remaining seven are of what can only be called classic Gillespie stature. Two of these, Cubana Be and Cubana Bop, feature Chano Pozo on the conga drums, a set of instruments which Dizzy made an integral part of the bop movement and which, in one form or another, has steadily spread into all of what we know as “progressive” jazz. And in Dull Capers, the studio atmosphere is recreated by utilizing a fluff from an unreleased master – from there we revert to the issued performance – its uninhibited temper offers a prime example of bopsterania.

It is interesting to note that Dizzy’s career has run in a kind of alternating cycle – small groups, large band, small groups, large band – the only change being that, along with a further working out of his musical idiom, he has recently appeared with a trumpet whose bell swings upwards towards the heavens, giving one the impression that here is a man whose musical ideas are endless. It is almost as if one could actually see the thoughts emerging from Dizzy’s mind, entering the mouthpiece, emerging from the screwy-looking bell and re-entering the mind where they ate further refined and elaborated. And, as the selections on this disc testify. even before the era of this newfangled, belabored instrument, these processes were invoked. For Dizzy has always been an artist whose musical structure and endless inspiration have formed, so to speak, a perfect circle – they constitute, in themselves, one of the very happiest moments in jazz music.