Dizzy’s “Sweet Lorraine”

After rounds of research and interviews, I am finally in the writing phase of a Dizzy Gillespie project whose nature I will disclose to you one of these days. For now, suffice it to say that it involves Gillespie club performances most of which have never been released. In the course of listening to them, I took many side trips to his work on issued records . One of them that I hadn’t listened to in a couple of decades reminded me that Dizzy made one of the classic versions of a song that has never lost its charm or its harmonic structure’s possibilities. This is what a great artist did in one chorus of melodic improvisation on “Sweet Lorraine.”

I wonder if he was thinking of his wife, Lorraine, as he played that.

Dizzy Gillespie in Paris in 1952, with Bill Tamper, trombone; Hubert Fol, alto saxophone; Don Byas, tenor saxophone; Raymond Fol, piano; Pierre Michelot, bass; and Pierre Lemarchand, drums.