Dizzy Gillespie, the legendary jazz trumpeter with the puffy cheeks, scored his piece “Lisbon” in the album Winter In Lisbon as part of the original soundtrack of the film of the same name — or, rather El Invierno En Lisboa, by Spanish director José Antonio Zorrilla — in 1991.
The film, adapted from the thriller novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina, tells the story of an American jazz pianist who falls for a femme fatale while in Portugal. Dizzy Gillespie stars in the film as one of the band members.
This soundtrack would turn out to be his last recording before he passed away in 1993.
The track “Lisbon” is not easy to come by, but here’s a scene from the film featuring Gillespie, dubbed in Spanish….
To make it up to you, here’s a snippet of Dizzy Gillespie’s kick-ass first appearance in Portugal to an ecstatic crowd, at the Cascais Jazz Festival, back in 1971, billed as the Giants of Jazz, with no less than Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt, and Art Blakey, wrapping it up on drums:
