Once, in Paris, the audience was so stunned by the music that at the end of the first number, it forgot to applaud. (Results of these sessions are to be found in The Bebop Revolution, Bluebird CD 2177-2-RB.) Then Dizzy took the band to Europe on a tour that was a commercial fiasco due to mismanagement, not to mention theft, by some of the business people involved, but a public, critical, and aesthetic triumph. In August and December 1947, Dizzy and a big band recorded a group of 'sides' for RCA, rushing to get them done before the onset in January of the second AFM recording ban. For the personal use of existing materials, we need look only to Earl Hines, Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, John Guarnieri, Dave Brubeck, Teddy Wilson, Mel Powell, Bud Powell, Fats Waller, Phineas Newborn, Oscar Peterson, Tommy Flanagan, John Lewis, Roger Kellaway, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Rowles, Milt Buckner, Nat Cole, Bill Evans, and many others, all of them inventing within the same broad vocabulary of Western music, all of them strongly personal, even instantly recognizable, and all of them producing their own tone qualities on an instrument on which, it has been argued from a scientific standpoint, individual tone is not even possible. It can be argued that those who use known vocabulary to say new things are more creative than those who affect the invention of a language. The nineteenth century led to the illusion that to be original, one must invent a new language rather than use the existing lexicon with personal powers of invention.

Thus too with jazz, when Parker and Gillespie entered with such eclat on the scene. However, this expansion, particularly in the Romantic music of the nineteenth century, appeared to be invention. As composers explored what we call western music over these last centuries, they expanded the vocabulary but they did not invent, or re-invent it.

Dizzy gillespie autobiography