Charlie Parker

En esta primera parte, se realiza un acercamiento a la vida de Charlie Parker desde aspectos desconocidos de su vida. No quise escribir una biografía más, sino una biografía embebida principalmente de eventos como duscutir la teoría de la relatividad con Einstein, gravar con Benny Woodman, la verdadera historia del saxo de plástico, etc.

Known to his peers as the “keeper of the bebop flame,” jazz pianist Barry Harris has cultivated and imparted a unique approach to teaching the music of Charlie Parker, Earl “Bud” Powell, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. Harris, an internationally renowned jazz pianist, composer and educator, whose former students include the likes of John Coltrane, Donald Byrd, and Paul Chambers, began playing jazz as a young adult in Detroit in the 1930s, before making a pilgrimage to Harlem, New York (Bicket 2001, 3). He has since gone on to develop a teaching method based on his unrelenting inquiry into the nature of traditional jazz and bebop (Stein 2006).
As a jazz educator, Harris has created a unique harmonic palette that features the oscillation of specific chord structures constructed from what he terms “diminished” scales.1 His theory of moving these chord structures along various scale degrees is almost a reflection of jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins’s declaration: “I don’t play chords, I play movements” (Rees 1998, 60). Perhaps inspired by this notion, Harris has developed a framework for moving his chord structures along scales in much the same way that one might think of developing single-note improvisations from scale practice. The diminished scales consist of a combination of two chord types that lend themselves to the facile movement of simple structures up and down the scale.2 The goal is to keep the chord structures moving, as opposed to static, thereby creating tension and resolution. This is what he refers to as “movement.”

At the end of the 1940s, Charlie Parker (1920-1955) recorded a jazz album (Charlie Parker with strings, 1949) in which they would participate not only in the usual instrumental set of bebop, but also in orchestral instruments. Parker received criticism in recording this album as a commercial product intended for the white public, contraty to the proposel of bebop that expressed the ethnic identity of the black population. However, Charlie Parker with strings allowed both the financial gain and the advertising opportunities of bebop's musical characteristics to a wider audience than originally reached at the beginning of bebop. The piece Just friends by John Klenner and Sam M. Lewis, was chosen as the first of the album, possibly being one of the most emblematic of these possibilities of commercial and advertising bebop. The works will makea analyze of Parker's solo in this piece, seeking to identify compositional improvisatory features and their relationships with bebop's idiomatic characteristics.



Keywords: Bebop; Charlie Parker (1920-1955); Just friends (song, 1931); Just friends (arrangement, 1949); Melodic analysis.

https://www.youcanprint.it/musica/musica-generi-e-stili-internazionale/jack-kerouac-e-la-rivoluzione-letteraria-della-beat-generation-9788892600553-ebook.html

A oltre sessant’anni dalla pubblicazione di On the Road (1957), l’opera che esprime e sintetizza in sé l’anima della beat generation in tutte le sue più disparate sfaccettature, dall’incondizionata joie de vivre alla forte inquietudine, dall’insofferenza per tutto ciò che è ordinario all’insaziabile ricerca dell’amore e dell’esperienza, all’esaltazione della follia e dei più sfrenati piaceri, riscopriamo il suo autore, Jack Kerouac, l’inventore della “Prosa Moderna”, e il movimento letterario beat.

The career of jazz pianist Earl “Bud” Powell evidenced a near cinematic arc. By the time he was in his late teens, he had all of the technical tools necessary to move to the front ranks of musicians in his category. He was one of the first pianists to truly understand the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic implications of the new music that was later termed “bebop.” If he fell short of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in terms of technical ability, he was at least the equal of some of the other players whose mastery of the idiom was complete, such as Fats Navarro, Sonny Stitt, Charles Mingus and Kenny Clarke (Farrell 2011). It can be argued that he was the most compelling player of the aforementioned group, a man compelled to channel his emotions through his improvisations, demonstrating an endlessly creative mind. He managed to fuse early influences of stride, swing and bebop into his musical vocabulary, without sounding contrived or archaic (Groves 2001, 3). In short, Powell may very well be viewed as a consummate artist, who explored and challenged his creative mind to the fullest extent possible. Where other pianists were content to follow the school of Art Tatum, Powell was heading in a different direction, more concerned with the new sound of Charlie Parker and transferring Parker’ s ideas and harmonies to the piano, while preserving the orchestral aspect of the instrument as Tatum did (Pullman 2012, 39-40).Powell’ s harmonic disposition was both esoteric and erratic, as well as arcane and widely misunderstood.

This short work will look at some possibilities for using Arnold Schoenberg’s symmetrical set from his Serenade Op. 24 Mvmt. 5 as pitch material in Jazz/Fusion improvisation.

I will examine some harmonic and melodic uses of the set’s two hexachords using an accepted Jazz Chord/Scale Relationship pedagogical methodology. My approach will look at these pitch groups as unordered sets or collections only, although their use as ordered sets is of course certainly possible. As many Jazz and Fusion Improvisers are familiar with Nicholas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns , I will reference this text in relation to the sets and subsets present in this survey for ease in cross referencing.

Conlon Nancarrow’s music has been the subject of analysis by some of the most astute composers and academics in modern music. His music and its accompanying scholarly literature are a potentially rich source of material for improvisation. As Nancarrow was influenced by expert jazz improvisers with virtuoso technique such as Art Tatum when constructing this music, this is a logical outcome.

Nancarrow’s work had made a substantial impact on the output of electric guitar virtuosos such as Frank Zappa and Shawn Lane, as the sheer speed of the linear material along with the dense polyrhythmic fabric present in the music had pushed these influential players to increase their technical capabilities of the instrument to a new much higher level. This in turn has had substantial impact on current electric guitar practice.

The video performance of an electric guitar piece based on Nancarrow’s Third Study for Player Piano (Boogie Woogie Suite) is performed on electric guitar improvisation based on melodic, intervallic, and rhythmic material within the piece against two tracks of pre-recorded electric guitars also performed by me following the harmonic structure of the piece and utilizing the polyrhythmic devices contained within the original music. The performance is roughly the same length as the original piece (3’ 22”), and demonstrates Nancarrow’s rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic concepts (including what he himself called “licks”) within an improvisational format.

Perpetuum Mobile

This piece was written using a nine-tone (Nonatonic) scale  (C#, D#, E#, G, A#, C, D, E, F#) constructed by 20th Century Jazz Theorist and Pedagogue Dennis Sandole (teacher of John Coltrane, James Moody, Jim Hall, Pat Martino amongst many others). My use of pitch material of a jazz origin such as Sandole’s was purposeful in order to conceptually align this work with Nancarrow’s clear jazz influences in his “Boogie Woogie Suite”.  This particular scale allows for liberal use of a trichord that includes a minor third and major third which features prominently in Nancarrow’s “Suite”.

I constructed this piece using octave (registral) displacement techniques combined with a rhythmic texture of sixteenth note rhythms similar to the constant “left hand” ostinato motion of Nancarrow’s Study#3. The octave displacement of lines creates a two part texture of predominately staccato attacks and the use of changing time signatures and registers in a variety of rhythmic note groupings was meant to give the illusion of two separate rhythmically independent parts unified by one basic scalar tonality. The few cascading arpeggio sections that feature liberal use of sustain pedal were inspired by Nancarrow studies 5, 27, 37, and 45c.

The general absence of harmonic writing places the emphasis on the rhythmic and contrapuntal elements of the music and the faux “player piano” sound is an obvious nod to Nancarrow and seems to work with this essentially staccato and rhythmic nature of the piece.

I wrote this composition not to imitate Nancarrow’s work directly, but to allow his overall musical approach to influence my own musical language.

2-CD set: Hat Hut Records CD 612-1, 612-2
Anthony Braxton, sopranino, alto saxophone, contrabass clarinet;
Ari Brown, tenor & soprano saxophone;
Paul Smoker, trumpet & flugelhorn;
Misha Mengelberg, piano;
Joe Fonda, bass; Han Bennink, drums (CD1);
Pheeroan ak-Laff, drums (CD2)

1 CD: Leo Records, GY 23
Anthony Braxton, alto saxophone

The present study establishes meaning and linkage among a cluster of specific structural features —the snap, twang, and blue note— and between this cluster and the temporal deviations they can be found accompanying. These features are explored through their perceived sonic, textual, and motional properties, as they have emerged across cultures and historical periods, with distinct ethos. Consideration is taken for the ethnic, social, and spiritual meanings invoked by each feature, their interrelationships as a cluster, and with temporal deviation. Interrelationships include: snap and temporal deviations both emerging from polytempic interactions, yet contrasting in their respective grounded and floating qualities; snap and twang each articulating (i.e.: ‘worrying’) flexible blue note pitch regions; and twang and blue note’s respective articulations of vocal harmonics. I propose an isomorphic continuum may explain the ratios of temporal deviations identified in a number of African-American musics, suggesting deep interrelationships among snap, twang, blue note, and temporal deviations. If the blue note and certain temporal deviations are isomorphic, we can also learn about temporal deviation by studying the ethos of the blue note: I compare the ‘blue third’ with the diatonic minor third. The relationships between these features and temporal deviations suggest they function as co-expressions of, or redundant cues for, the performer’s awareness and commitment. I interpret the consistency of heightened arousal invoked by these features, as embodied understanding across cultural contexts. When embodied, the cue is perceived directly: for example, commitment and intensity is experienced, not merely represented, in the snap. Such cross-cultural consistency of meaning does not preclude the possibility that the features function as code-switching cues to mark transformative moments in music, since consistency of meaning doesn’t indicate consistency of ideology. Connecting the features to their subdivided variations opens the door to understanding the relevance and applicability of this study’s findings across an even wider breadth of musical practices. The spontaneous participant —artist, witness, researcher— kinesthetically channelling the creative spirit, stands to gain appreciation for the compatibility and complexity of different gestures, their consonances and dissonances, across disciplines and traditions.

armas secretas, pode ser compreendido como um divisor de águas na produção do autor argentino, como ele mesmo observou em uma de suas aulas de literatura ministrada em Berkeley (1980). O conto narra alguns episódios da vida de Johnny Carter, numa narrativa repleta de balbucios e monólogos, inspirada no saxofonista de jazz Charlie Parker. O conto não apenas tematiza a vida de um dos maiores representantes do jazz bebop como também apresenta questões essenciais sobre vida e arte, além de trazer uma nova forma ao conto cortazariano, que parece dialogar com a mesma busca por novas estruturas que se vê nas composições dos músicos do bebop. Neste trabalho, proponho demonstrar algo dessas relações entre a criação jazzística e literária enquanto forma e tema no referido conto de Julio Cortázar. PALAVR AS-CHAVE: jazz; El perseguidor; Julio Cortázar; bebop. 25 Balbucios e monólogos são termos usados pelo próprio Cortázar quando se refere ao personagem Johnny Carter numa de suas aulas, em Berkeley, 1980: " Na grande solidão em que vivia em Paris, de repente foi como estar começando a descobrir o meu próximo na figura de Johnny Carter, esse músico negro, perseguido pela desgraça, cujos balbucios, monólogos e tentativas eu inventava ao longo do conto. (CORTÁZAR, 2013, p. 18). Além disso, o autor também se refere a seus primeiros escritos, produzidos na infância, como 'balbucios'.