Dizzy on the French Riviera
Today’s high temperatures provide me with an excuse to post my favourite hot-weather music, the 1962 album Dizzy on the French Riviera. Can this really have been recorded 60 years ago?
Anyway, the album features the great Dizzy Gillespie Quintet of that time which was heavily influenced by Latin American sounds and had Argentinian Lalo Schifrin on piano, a man best known as a prolific composer of film and TV scores. The band also featured Leo Wright, a very under-rated saxophonist and flautist, and is augmented on some of the tracks by various percussionists. I have lost track of the number of times I’ve listened to the happy seaside sounds of children playing leading into to the opening track No More Blues…
In the Dark 
June 30, 2025 at 8:29 pm
[…] Lalo Schifrin was a huge fan of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie whom he met when Gillespie toured Schifrin’s home country of Argentina in 1956. This long piece, Gillespiana was written for Gillespie’s big band in 1958. You can here in it many of the musical ideas that Schifrin was later to include in his film scores. In 1960, Lalo Schifrin moved to York and joined Gillespie’s band as a pianist after the departure of Junior Mance. He only stayed with the band for a couple of years but together they made some great records, especially Dizzy on the French Riviera (which I have blogged about here). […]