Re-visiting Bird

[Ian Thumwood]

I've been listening to some Charlie Parker this weekend (Massey Hall / session with dizzy, Monk, Rich, etc) as I hadn't listened to his records for a very long while. When I was about 16 /17 I stumbled on his records after hearing him with Swing groups like Jay McShann and Tiny Grimes and his music automatically hit home. It never seemed "outside" or inaccessible to my ears and I have never understood just why he was such a shocking revelation at the time because his phrasing seemed to sing in a way that I found hard to appreciate why so many older people I knew detested his music. When I was getting in to jazz I was advised and encouraged by people who preferred Big Band jazz and Parker's music still seemed pretty radical and exciting back in the mid 1980's. I don't think he was far enough in the past to not have a relevance. Bebop may have had an esoteric value about it but there is nothing quite as agreeable as hearing a multitude of groups from the late 1940's and the music never fails to excite. I would have to say that Dizzy Gillespie is still one of my all-time trumpet heroes and his use of dynamics and timbre has continued in practically all the jazz trumpeters who have followed on from his such as Kenny Dorham, Dave Douglas, Ambrose Akinmusire, Don Cherry and josh Berman. The fact that Gillespie managed to bridge "Swing", Be-bop" and "R n; B" seems to have made him more "contemporary" than Parker whose music was locked in to a particular period in the 1940's / early 1950's.

Wind forward thirty years and it is fascinating to re-visit Charlie Parker , especially as I was so passionate about his playing in the past. I wanted to sound like that when I played piano and it was Be-bop I sought to teach me how to play improvised lines. I'm not quite so convinced by some aspects of Parker and think that his place in jazz has really shifted in the last thirty years. There are two problems for me. The first is that he never seemed to put together a truly great regular band. It was a shame that the Massey Hall line up was not a working group as it was totally devastating. The use of unison alto and trumpet combined with the themes employed gets a bit repetitive after about five or six tracks. I love the way Parker structures his Blues themes and there are compositions like "Cheryl" and Segment" which still sound contemporary. The lack of any real variety in his recorded output is also problematic - you can quickly appreciate why he became disillusioned with the limitations of jazz at the time and you can't help thinking that he would have been more inspired by the way jazz exploded in the range of possibilities in the 1960's. I don't think that any of his bands got anywhere nears as good as Miles , Coltrane's or a host of Blue Note records.

The other issue is that Parker no longer seems relevant. He is a source of inspiration for the likes of Rudresh Mahanthappa , for example, but he probably has as much in common with most of contemporary jazz as say King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton or Benny Goodman. i.e. Maybe the inspiration for a particular "project." Parker almost seems eclipsed by other players from earlier generations who still seem to have a bearing on contemporary jazz. (i.e. Tenor players like David S Ware , David Murray or Branford Marsalis taking their cures from Ben Webster or a host of composers like Jason Roebke who are clearly indebted to Duke Ellington.) By contrast, Parker seems a bit quaint and, to be honest, not as radically different from his contemporaries like Johnny Hodges or Benny Carter - especially if you listen to the music they produced in the 1950's. He is slightly more adventurous from a rhythmic point of view but not radically different. There is a bigger gap between Eric Dolphy and Parker than there is between Parker and Carter, in my opinion.

I would have to say that Charlie Parker sound terrific on the records that I have been playing and his soloing is pretty consistent , even when he was getting a bit lazy in the composition stakes, rather like on the Venuti / Lang record I have had on recently where the "originals" are just re-workings of "Tiger Rag." I'm still a fan but Bird sounds more like Vintage Jazz / Classic Jazz than anything remotely "Modern." It is almost impossible to appreciate the shock value of his music and would have thought that most people who never listen to jazz could "get " his music really quickly.

[Serial_Apologist]

The reason for no regular Parker-led group was down to drugs, but I think I'm repeating myself here. The one thing I would have to say is that in the early 1960s, before discovering bebop jazz meant mainly trad and to a lesser degree the Swing that was no more, is that as listeners those Parker solos were the utter revelation they had been for Ronnie Scott et al 15 years earlier, representing what could be done in musically as opposed to just technically advanced ways, which I for one had heard in Benny Goodman. It was only later that the implications of soloing on chromatic extensions of conventional chord sequences came home to me, for one, namely that the chords didn't need to be conventional and could even be dispensed with altogether, allowing the full realisation of that unfettered freedom to spin lines without benchmarking one's progress by perpetually recapping the sequence without interrupting the flow. I think Bird might have baulked at that step because he was looking at possibilities for extending harmonic basics in a manner parallelling what straight composers had been doing 50 years previously. He would have been in the equivalent position of Mahler in relation to Schoenberg - encouraging like John Lewis did Ornette, but sticking by what he knew, or might given time he didn't have find in Hindemith, Bartok or Varese.

[Ian Thumwood]

Parker actually approached Varese about studying with his although I am not sure that it was totally serious. All sorts of weird influences were around at that time with the likes of Bud Freeman wanted to study with Lennie Tristano, for example.

It is a shame that Parker was an addict as it really was to the detriment to his recorded legacy, not only by curtailing it. I find that he usually dominates his quintets even more than Armstrong dominated the Hot 5's and 7's. Perhaps only Gillespie matches him but Dizzy had already had a career that was 10 years old when he produced the classic recordings on Savoy. Parker's solos are magisterial but the bands he led for labels like Dial produced music that lacked a lot of variety. I think the likes of Granz should be applauded for trying to put Parker in different contexts but these aren't necessarily his best performances. The record with strings has some incredible solos on but it would have been fascinating had Parker experimented with someone like George Russell or even studied with Tristano. To take your example, I would imagine someone coming to jazz today would find much more in common betwenn Goodman and Parker (especially if you consider the music recorded with Charlie Christian / George Auld where they were knocking on the door of Bebop) than with anything contemporary. Parker may have been significant in the 1940s but what happened in the 1960's onwards was far more of a game changer.

[Quarky]

. Parker may have been significant in the 1940s but what happened in the 1960's onwards was far more of a game changer.

I wouldn't/ couldn't disagree with any of the above, so far as I can understand it, but:

1. Is Parker's position any different from that of Louis Armstrong, who most folks would regard as the greatest Jazz artist ever? OK Armstrong had his own group, but simplistically, he kicked off the Swing Era, whereas Parker kicked off the Bop era.
2. Did Parker take Jazz from the Dance Hall to the Concert Hall, i.e. bums on seats -not wiggling on the dance floor?
3. Would Bop have been as significant without Parker? What would have happened to all those alto saxes of the '50s?
4. Would Ornette have existed without Bird? Didn't Ornette take Bird as his starting point for freer explorations?
5. Bird had a truly phenomenal technique, and even on this fastest improvisations, I feel he had a firm grip and knew exactly what he was doing - not just playing strings of notes. Is that not an example to be followed?
6. Bird's place in the history books is assured, but I must agree that albums like "Beloved Bird" are not stretching any envelopes (at least, so far as I can appreciate them).

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Parker did approach Varese in all seriousness, even to the point of humbly offering to cook for him - "I do great fried chicken".

As for his " relevance", and Ian's being contrariant again (and again), when Alyn played KoKo as part of his Jazz Library on Bird (and when Peter King a few years before named his key records), it just ripped through the airways. Astonishing. For fucks sake, this work does not date, its the very cornerstone of the ART. Its like saying Picasso is "yesterday".

If you don't get "that" .....

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

Oddball

I agree that Bird's place in the jazz history books is pivotal. It is interesting to read your comments. If you distil the most significant / influential jazz musicians up to the mid 1960s to ten individuals(Armstrong / Hawkins / Young / Basie / Ellington / Parker / Coltrane / Miles / Ornette / Hancock) I think Parker's recordings are probably the least "commercial" or uncompromising. The discography is filled with gems yet I don't feel the groups he led were "great" in the way that some of the bands in which the other musicians listed could be deemed to be. Part of the "problem" is the small group music is almost entirely structured on alto / trumpet playing the them in unison with the soloists being alto, trumpet and piano with a bass solo and perhaps the drummer trading "fours." Listening to track after track by Parker can therefore be a bit of a "hard" listen due to the lack of variety. Some of my favourite Parker recordings are where he players in other bands, especially if he is up against an earlier generation of soloists where his approach immediately seems more radical. I love his work with McShann, for example.


I concur with Bluesnik in some respects such as the almost inhuman brilliance of Parker's improvised solo on Ko-Ko. Someone once described jazz as the "imperfect art" as it was improvised and therefore never finite. I think "Ko ko" is one of those records where the solo is pretty much perfect just like Armstrong's "West End Blues" or Young's "Shoe shine boy." It would be impossible to improve on these discs. However, where I don't agree is Bluesnik's argument that Be-bop doesn't date. For me, it is probably the one kind of jazz that absolutely nails the music to one era, even more than Fusion. After mid 1950's Be-bop seems a bit passe but in the late 40's it was the ultimate "start of the art" musical statement even if it sometimes parodied itself. Nothing is more "dated" than Be-bop. I say this as a fan. The thing with Parker's approach that it largely eschewed commerciality even if Parker himself could never appreciate why something as beautiful as the music he created never enjoyed popular appeal and remained esoteric. In doing this, the music he produced does sound of it's time. I feel that Parker's approach was so based upon spontaneity that the lack of writing makes his music less interesting in some respects than the other nine musicians. Parker's solos always sound interesting and frequently compelling but there are instances where the heads are just last contra-facts. For the most part, Parker's solos are the best things about the records although listening to Massey Hall again today he is run all the distance by both Gillespie and Powell. It is tragic that this band never convened in a studio . Armstrong's best work is probably more rewarding to listen than Parker's due to the collective improvisation which is more interesting and the fact that the records are less formulaic. It is intriguing that collective improvisation would have been considered pretty naff by Parker's contemporaries yet it is far more intrinsic to jazz these days than it was 70 years ago.

I'm not convinced that Parker should be credited with taking jazz in to the concert hall as this had its antecedents in the 1930's with the concerts organised by John Hammond as well as the various "chamber jazz" groups that existed in the same decade. The evolution of "Be- bop" / Modern Jazz is, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect of jazz as the music really started on this path around 1932 . Something would have happened to push the music on in the 1940's without Parker as there was so much else happening at the same time with other forward thinking musicians like Charlie Christian, Tadd Dameron, Monk, Don Byas, etc, etc.