June 1, 2020

ONLY 100?:

Yardbird: 100 Years of Charlie Parker  (Dominic Green, 6/01/20, tHE cRITIC)

Much of Parker's life remains obscure, but everything suggests the legend is more or less true. He really was a heroin addict from the age of 15. He really did come late to the saxophone, and he really wasn't much shakes at first. The young Parker really did struggle when he sat in with Lester Young and other members of the Basie group in Kansas City, and Jo Jones really did throw a cymbal at his feet to stop him playing. He really did take up the alto as second-best to tenor: apart from Lester, Parker's other idol was Leon "Chu" Berry, after whom he named his son. After not just the statutory woodshedding but also an inner communing with the harmonies that no soloist had yet managed, he really did appear as if from nowhere in New York City and make jazz a modern art form. And he really did turn up at Stravinsky's house in Los Angeles in the middle of night and have the door slammed in his face.

To mark Parker's centenary, Craft Records have reissued the recordings Parker made with his first label, Savoy. [...]

Parker's solo on 'Red Cross' sounds like a message from the future. His opening phrase strikes flattened fifth, the quintessence of discord, on the downbeat; not an unusual move at all, in fact quite traditional. So is the impeccable Kansas City blues of its resolution. But where a blues or Swing player would simply repeat this move from discord to concord, Parker slides sideways across the chords, substituting chromatically as he goes. "It is an essentially Romantic paradox," Charles Rosen wrote, "that the primacy of sound in Romantic music should be accompanied, and even announced, by a sonority that is not only unrealisable but unimaginable."

You can hear the quartet's relief when Parker stops. 



Posted by at June 1, 2020 6:23 PM

  

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