Google has used their latest Doodle to commemorate the birth of jazz icon Dizzy Gillespie. 93 years ago, a man by the name of John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was born. The youngest of nine children, Dizzy was born to James and Lottie Gillespie in South Carolina. His dad, James, was the leader of a band, which gave Dizzy access to all types of musical instruments. By age 12, Dizzy was able to play both the trombone and the trumpet.
Dizzy is considered a pioneer in bebop and jazz music. He’s credited with influencing such greats as Miles Davis and Fats Navarro. Besides being a musical legend, Dizzy is known by two characteristics: his cheeks and his horn. Google has captured both of these in their Doodle, making his cheeks bright yellow and circular and giving his horn an upward bend. From Wikipedia:
According to Gillespie’s autobiography, this was originally the result of accidental damage caused by someone sitting on it during a job on January 6, 1953, but the constriction caused by the bending altered the tone of the instrument, and Gillespie liked the effect. Gillespie’s biographer Alyn Shipton writes that Gillespie likely got the idea when he saw a similar instrument in 1937 in Manchester, England while on tour with the Teddy Hill Orchestra. An English trumpeter was using such an instrument because his vision was poor and the horn made reading music easier. According to this account (from British journalist Pat Brand) Gillespie was able to try out the horn and the experience led him, much later, to commission a similar horn for himself.
It’s interesting what events in our history Google chooses to commemorate with their Doodles. Personally, I prefer the fancy HTML5 animated Doodles that slow older computers to a crawl, but that’s probably because I rarely visit the Google home page.
Gillespie took the basic horn and literally bent it to his will to achieve something new and unique. This seems to be the same path that Google has taken with the web. They’ve used their influence and knowledge to revolutionize the web browser with Chrome, stir up the mobile market with Android, and even to invade your living room with Google TV. Their end goal may be to find more places to paste ads, but it still looks like a win for the web in general.