This is a recent discovery I just had to post. It was was made at a private recording session in 1943 in Kansas City, the home town of Charlie Parker. It was never released commercially and features Parker on alto saxophone with just a guitar and drum accompaniment. This recording must have been made during the musicians’ strike of 1942-44 that contributed to the fact the bebop movement (which Parker pioneered) was out of the public eye during its incubation period. Parker had moved to New York City in 1939 and was playing regularly in Harlem jazz clubs during the recording blackout, so I don’t know what he was doing back in Kansas City in 1943 to be making this track.
It’s a fascinating version of the tune calledCherokhee that Parker used as the basis of the bebop classic Ko-ko I discussed in a post last year, and which shows him already playing in a recognizably Parkeresque style, but only hinting at the harmonic adventurousness he was to develop just a year or two later; Ko-ko was first performed, I think, in 1945. Very few examples survive of his playing from this transitional period, so this is a fascinating bit of musical history as well as being a fine performance in its own right.
Sun Ra, one of the most extraordinary composers and bandleaders of the 20th Century, was born Herman Poole Blount in Bimingham, Alabama, on 22nd May 1914. From the 1950s, until his death in 1993, he led various combinations of musician in bands with various permutations of names involving the word Arkestra, such as the Blue Universe Arkestra and the Solar Myth Arkestra. He himself played keyboards, sometimes solo and sometimes with huge bands of over 30 musicians; his music touched on virtually the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing music, from bebop to free jazz. He was also one of the first musicians, in any genre to make extensive use of electronic keyboards.
He never achieved mainstream commercial success, but was a prolific recording artist with a cult following, partly fuelled by his outrageous claims to have been born not on Earth but on Saturn and the fact that much of his music was to do with space travel. Quoted in Jazziz magazine
They really thought I was some kind of kook with all my talk about outer space and the planets. I’m still talking about it, but governments are spending billions of dollars to go to Venus, Mars, and other planets, so it’s no longer kooky to talk about space
Quite. In fact, Sun Ra developed a complex performing identity based on his music, “cosmic” philosophy, and poetry. He abandoned his birth name, took on the persona of Sun Ra (Ra being the ancient Egyptian god of the sun), and often dressed in the style of an ancient Egyptian pharoah, as in the video clip. In other words, he was very odd.
At this point you’re probably thinking this is all a bit “New Age” and heading in the direction of Charlie Parker‘s Private Hell, one of my favourite Gary Larson cartoons:
However, although I admit Sun Ra’s music is eclectic, outrageous and sometimes downright mystifying, it also has a marvellous coherence to it maintained as his style evolved over four decades and is consistently imbued with a powerful sense of the Jazz tradition. In fact, I think Charlie Parker would have approved. I know I do! Anyway, whatever I think, the music of Sun Ra has withstood its skeptics and detractors for generations and long may it continue to do so. The world needs more of his kind.
Here’s a typically psychedelic number, Calling Planet Earth.
At the risk of becoming a complete bore on the subject of bebop I thought I’d follow up an earlier post on the joys of jazz with this brilliant performance of yet another Charlie Parker tune, not by the man himself, but by one of his disciples.
I was lucky enough to hear Sonny Stitt live a number of times and he was always brilliant; he died in 1982. He was criticised by some jazz buffs between numbers during one gig I was at with the words “You’re just playing like Charlie Parker!”, to which he replied by handing his alto saxophone to the twit in the audience and saying “Here then. YOU play like Charlie Parker.”
Anyway, in the late 1950s (after Charlie Parker had died) Sonny Stitt sat in as on alto saxophone with the Oscar Peterson trio of which Ray Brown (bass) and Ed Thigpen (drums) were the other two members. They made a classic album for the Verve label which features a number of Charlie Parker numbers. Oscar Peterson isn’t my absolute favourite jazz pianist but it has to be said that he and his sidemen build up a colossal head of steam on these records, especially the one I’ve picked which is called Au Privave.
I tried for ages to unravel this intricate little tune. It’s basically a twelve-bar blues, but it is built on much more complicated chords than the usual blues cycle. In its simplest form, the blues involves only three chords, the same three that most rock-and-roll tunes are built on. The foundation is a “tonic” chord (T) based on the root note of whatever key it’s played in, often a basic triad consisting of the first, third and five notes of a major scale starting on that note or including the dominant 7th. The next chord is the subdominant chord (S), shifting things up by a perfect fourth relative to the tonic, and then finally we have the dominant (D) which brings us up by a fifth from the original root note.
The basic twelve-bar blues has one chord per bar. The first four bars are accompanied by the tonic, then the subdominant S takes over for two bars followed by a return to the tonic for another two. The last four bars introduce the dominant (but only for one bar), followed by S for one and then back down to the root for the final two.
In a standard blues in F the sequence would thus be
| F| F| F |F | B♭| B♭| F| F |C| B♭| F| F|,
or possibly with F7 etc. The slow and relatively simple progression of chords gives these blues a rather statuesque form: the soloist has to be really good to keep the thing going without getting bogged down. When played by a master even the simplest blues can be immensely powerful, but they can also be very dull when played not so well. It may be simple, but it certainly isn’t easy.
Au Privave is in F but has considerably more complicated changes than the bog-standard F blues. Parker inserted several intermediate chords to keep the harmonies moving and dispensed with some of the conventional progressions. There are also more chords, usually two per bar rather than just one. The sequence here looks more like
although I’m not sure I got them right as it tends to be played very fast! It’s a lot more to remember, but it’s also a much more dynamic setting to improvise in which is what people like Charlie Parker wanted to create. Instead of moving quasi-statically through perfect intervals each chorus, you run helter-skelter through a constantly shifting harmonic environment. Notice also that there’s no comfortable return to the tonic at measure 12, even. The appearance of a C7 chord here is called a turnaround. Complicated? Yes, I suppose it is. But whenever I hear it played by Sonny Stitt it’s always just four minutes of sheer exhilaration.
Oh, and there’s another thing. Listen to the chorus that starts about 2:58. Did he really play all twelve bars without breathing?
I often find myself trying to explain to people why I love listening to Jazz. Most people either don’t know much about it or don’t like it at all, especially if it’s “modern”. The trouble is, explaining why it’s so hard to play jazz doesn’t usually make people want to go and listen to it. “There’s no proper tune” and “It’s just noise” are just a couple of the comments I heard in a pub a few weeks ago when somebody put a Miles Davis track on the internet jukebox.
It’s partly a matter of language, of course. The most exquisite Japanese poetry probably sounds like noise to a Westerner who can’t understand the language. When it comes to jazz, even if you do know a bit about the music you’re by no means guaranteed an easy listening experience. But, played at the highest level, with a driving rhythm section and a star soloist improvising through a constantly shifting pattern of harmonies, there’s no music to match it for sheer white-knuckle intensity.
Far from being “just noise”, jazz is a tightly disciplined musical form. The freedom given to the soloist to create their own melody comes in fact at a very high price because the melodic line of a jazz solo must constantly recalibrate itself in relationship to the harmonic changes going on beneath it. The chord progression within which the original melody was embedded provides the soloist with the challenge of playing something that fits as well as being new and interesting to listen to. Usually the actual tune is played only briefly at the start and thereafter becomes pretty much irrelevant until recapitulated at the end of the performance. What really matters to a jazz soloist is not the original melody but the chords.
Each chord establishes a tonal centre and a related scale that furnishes a reference frame in the space of possible musical notes. When the rest of the band makes the chord changes the soloist must transform to a different coordinate system. The progression of chords as the tune unfolds thus has the effect of pushing and pulling the soloist in different tonal directions. A great jazz solo requires strict adherence to this framework and it imposes tremendous discipline on all the musicians involved.
In a slow 12-bar blues the gravitational effect of the relatively simple chord pattern is especially strong, which is no doubt why it has such a powerfully expressive effect when the soloist plays a “blue note” such as a flattened fifth on top of major scale chords.
In more complicated tunes keeping your place within the constantly shifting harmonic framework is a real challenge, especially if the chord progression is complicated and especially at fast tempi in which the chord changes go flying past at a rate of knots. Such numbers turn into a rollercoaster ride for both musicians and audience.
It’s not just the speed of fingers that makes great soloists so electrifying, but their astonishing mental agility. I remember seeing the great saxophonist Sonny Stitt at Ronnie Scott’s club in London playing the jazz standard How the Moon. Nothing unusual about that because it’s part of the jazz repertoire. The thing was, though, that he played 12 choruses, each one in a different key. How he managed to keep track of everything is completely beyond me. I wasn’t the only one in the audience shaking his head in disbelief.
Giant Steps by John Coltrane is an example I posted a while ago of a supreme piece of high-speed improvisation, and I thought I’d follow it up with this wonderful performance in which the legendary Charlie Parker plays an extended solo, very fast.
The tune is in fact a variation of a 1930s hit called Cherokee. Most popular tunes have a 32 bar basic format of the type AABA, with B representing the bridge or middle eight. Cherokee has a similar structure, but is 64 bars long. Its chord progression is both complicated and unusual, with lots of changes to remember especially in the (16-bar) bridge which is fiendishly difficult to play. This makes it fertile ground for improvising on and it quickly became a standard test vehicle for jazz soloists and a yardstick by which saxophonists in particular tended to measure each other’s skill.
During the bebop era it became fairly common practice for musicians to borrow chord sequences from other tunes. Many Charlie Parker pieces, such as Anthropology, are based on the chords from I Got Rhythm for example. There’s a famous story about a recording session involving Charlie Parker during which the band decided to do a version of Cherokee (i.e. using the chord sequence but with a different melody). During the take, however, they absent-mindedly played the actual melody rather than playing something else over the chords. There was a cry of anguish from producer in the control room who had hoped that if they stayed off the actual tune of Cherokee he wouldn’t have to pay composers royalties and the performance ground to a halt. Shortly after, they did another take, called it Ko-ko and it quickly became a bop classic. This is a later version of Ko-ko, played live, during which Bird runs through the changes like a man possessed. What it must be like to be able to play like this!
I was listening to Jazz Record Requests on BBC Radio 3 this afternoon, which reminded me that today is the 89th anniversary of the birth of the great Charlie Parker, who was known to his friends as “Bird”. Looking for something to celebrate with, I was delighted to find on Youtube this version of the classic bebop tune Anthropology, which appeared on another blog post of mine about Bud Powell (who also plays on this track). This clip (inevitably without video I’m afraid) is in fact taken from the first ever Charlie Parker LP I bought when I was about 15 and which I still have. Sadly, it has never been released on CD so I’m very glad I held onto the LP for so long.
No information is provided on Youtube, but referring to the sleeve note reveals that the track was recorded from a radio broadcast live from Birdland in New York City on March 31st 1951 using a primitive disc recording machine by an amateur recording buff called Boris Rose. The sound quality isn’t great, but he deserves much greater recognition for capturing this and so many other classic performances and preserving them for posterity.
The personnels consist of Charlie Parker (alto saxophone), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Bud Powell (piano), Tommy Potter (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums).
Here’s what the sleevenote (written by Gary Giddens) says about this track:
“Anthropology is an “I Got Rhythm” variation which originally appeared, in a slightly different form, as “Thriving on a Riff” on Parker’s first session as leader. The tempo is insanely fast; the performance is stunning. Bird has plenty of ideas in his first chorus, but he builds the second and third around a succession of quotations: “Tenderly”, “High Society”, “Temptation.” Gillespie’s second chorus is especially fine – only Fats Navarro had comparable control among the trumpeters who worked with Bird. His blazing high notes tend to set his lyrical phrases in bold relief. Bud, the ultimate bop pianist (and much more), jumps in for two note-gobbling choruses: no quotes, though, it’s all Powell. The four bar exchanges that follow demonstrate Hayne’s precision.
Spot on, but words aren’t really enough to describe this scintillating music, so listen!
I’ve gone far too long without posting something by the great alto saxophonist Charlie Parker (“Bird”), undoubtedly one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. Together with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, Bird effectively created a revolution in Jazz after the end of World War II in the form of a new style called bebop.
Like many Jazz legends, Charlie Parker died young as a result of chronic alcoholism and, especially in his case, drug addiction. He became hooked on heroin when he was a teenager and when he couldn’t get heroin he used anything else he could. The result was a body ravaged by abuse and a career frequently interrupted by illness. When he died, at the age of 35, the doctor who signed his death certificate estimated his age as “about 60”.
I remember, as a teenager, finding a Charlie Parker LP in a second-hand record shop and buying it for 50p. When I got home I put it straight on the record player and couldn’t believe my ears when I heard the staggering virtuosity of his playing. I just didn’t realise the alto sax could be played the way he played it. I’ve been a devout Charlie Parker fan ever since, although most of recorded output is quite difficult to get your hands on. In fact, the first record I bought as an LP has never been released on CD, which I think is a scandal.
Many people I know can’t really stand any Jazz that’s stylistically dated after about 1940. I have never really understood this attitude. To my mind the two tracks I’ve picked here, recorded in 1948, sound as fresh and exciting to me now as they did when I first heard them 30 years ago. They also seem to me firmly rooted in a wonderful tradition of music-making that reaches back to Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and forward to the likes of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman. Anyway, I’m not going to preach. I love this music and it’s up to you whether you agree or not.
Parker’s ideas didn’t just remain within jazz, and bebop had a huge cultural influence on post-war America. It never became as popular as pre-war Jazz, but had a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic and breathed new creative life into a form that was in danger of becoming stale and commercialized.
The first piece is called Ah Leu Cha and – as far as I’m aware – it is the only tune Bird ever wrote that involves any kind of counterpoint (provided by a very young Miles Davis on trumpet). The second track is a majestic solo blues called Parker’s Mood which demonstrates his deep understanding of and appreciation of the traditional 12-bar blues format.
I heard a record by this band ages and ages ago (probably in the 70s) and was delighted to be reminded of them by finding this little clip on Youtube. It’s a bit of an oddity, but I think it’s both fun and fascinating.
The Anachronic Jazz Band is, I think, now defunct but they were from Paris originally. The style they played in could probably be described as like the New York style of the late 1920s, with definite touches of Bix Beiderbecke. On the other hand, the tunes they played all came from the era of modern jazz, such as this one which is the Charlie Parker classic Anthropology. I’ve already posted a version of it by Bud Powell, in fact..
You might think that an uncompromising bebop number like this would pose unsurmountable challenges for a traditional jazz outfit, but I think they pull it off rather well. I think though that they were probably helped by the fact that this tune, like many modern jazz compositions, is actually based on a chord progression belonging to a much more familiar tune. In this case the harmonies actually derive from George Gershwin’s standard I Got Rhythm….
Anyway, perhaps the efforts of this fine little band go some way to showing that there’s more continuity between traditional and modern jazz than one might suppose…
The views presented here are personal and not necessarily those of my employer (or anyone else for that matter).
Feel free to comment on any of the posts on this blog but comments may be moderated; anonymous comments and any considered by me to be vexatious and/or abusive and/or defamatory will not be accepted. I do not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with the opinions or statements of any information or other content in the comments on this site and do not in any way guarantee their accuracy or reliability.
In the Dark 