A Tribute to Dizzy Gillespie

Arena

29th January 1993 Season 1 Episode 439

Elder statesman of jazz and a co-founder of the style that became bebop in the 40s, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie will be remembered by many as the trumpet player with ballooning cheeks and a misshapen horn. His career began in the 30s in Philadelphia, taking him on to New York where he met and jammed with two other young jazz greats, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. From these improvisations grew the radical new style that revolutionised jazz. He continued to experiment, and in the latter part of his career he took his music to the developing world, incorporating the sounds he found there into his own work. Arenapays tribute to the trumpeter, composer and bandleader who died earlier this month.

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Season 1 · Episode 440

Larry Kramer

One of the world's leading figures in the battle against Aids is not a doctor, scientist or politician, but a writer - Larry Kramer - who says: "Aids has given me my life's work." A novelist, playwright and screenwriter, Kramer first came to prominence in the 1960s with his screenplay of the film Women in Love. His 1970s novel Faggots caused widespread controversy as he attacked his contemporaries in the gay community for their regime of casual sex and easy promiscuity, earning him the title "the angriest gay man in the world". In the 1980s, when the Aids epidemic began to decimate the community, he was one of the first people to take a political, active stance in bringing it to the attention of the world. In recent years - and with the discovery of his own HIV-positive status - Kramer has withdrawn from activism to concentrate on writing, and his new play, the autobiographical The Destiny of Me, has opened off-Broadway to rave reviews.

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