Groovin' High: History and Key Facts

"Groovin' High" is a 1945 jazz song by trumpeter and composer Dizzy Gillespie. The song was a bebop mainstay that became a jazz standard, one of Gillespie's best known hits, and according to Bebop: The Music and Its Players author Thomas Owens, it was "the first famous bebop recording".

It is a complex musical arrangement based on the chord structure of a 1920 standard originally recorded by Paul Whiteman, "Whispering", composed by Vincent Rose with lyrics by John Schonberger and Richard Coburn. The biography Dizzy characterizes the song as "a pleasant medium-tempo tune" that "demonstrates ... [Gillespie's] skill in fashioning interesting textures using only six instruments".

It has been used to title many compilation albums and also the 2001 biography Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Groovin' High by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.