Lee, who's also a Grammy-winning record producer, was handpicked by Gillespie's widow to keep Gillespie’s legacy alive in small- and big-band forms. “It was a great variety in the experience of it, so you weren't just playing one kind of jazz,” Lee says. The other profound part of his work with Gillespie was the variety of sounds the band would play every night, including African-Cuban, Brazilian and Argentinian music, some bebop and swing, and maybe some Thelonious Monk songs or arrangements by Lalo Schifrin, who worked in Gillespie’s big band before becoming a world-renowned film composer. He could travel for ten hours, and when we hit the stage, Dizzy was having a party, man. While Gillespie was a sharp instructor who loved to teach his concepts and jazz theories, one of his greatest qualities was his joie de vivre, Lee says: “He had fun all the time. That trial by fire led to Lee being Gillespie’s bassist until Gillespie passed away in 1993 at the age of 75. When Lee, who'd been playing in McCoy Tyner’s band for several years, got to Memphis, Gillespie quickly ran through the songs they were going to play, but they didn’t rehearse. In 1984, bassist John Lee got a call from his mentor, Bob Cranshaw, a longtime member of Sonny Rollins’s group, asking if he wanted to fly down to Memphis to play with legendary jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.
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