TamTam Books News Wednesday, March 09, 2005: A wonderful piece by Mike Zwerin, who translated Boris Vian's jazz writings in English (wow, really an amazing book).I got this article from the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/08/features/zwer9.htmlPARIS Listening to Charlie Parker, who died 50 years ago on March 12, the first thing you thought about was freedom. Still is..The late tennis legend Don Budge, who was also a legendary jazz fan, built his style on hitting the ball hard while it was still on the rise. "I guess Charlie Parker played like he was hitting a rising ball," Budge said. "The cats must have spent a lot of time trying to figure that one out.".A variety of very different people had in common being turned around by Bird - Jack Kerouac, Clint Eastwood, Louis Malle, Astor Piazzolla, Boris Vian, Freddie Heineken, Donald Fagen, Allen Greenspan, Donald Justice and Jacques Delors, the former prime minister of France. In his memoir "Chronicles, Volume 1," Bob Dylan wrote that during his early years in Greenwich Village, he met a lot of people who acted as though "Bird had transmitted some secret essence of life to them.".The nickname either came from Yardbird, an American Southern word for chicken (Bird liked chicken), or from the way he flew over the fast-moving, modulating chords of Ray Noble's "Cherokee." Take your pick. He could fly. Parker's music was a door-opening combination of courage, sophistication, physical strength and street smarts. He told the critic Nat Hentoff that he wanted to make a recording with six woodwinds, a harp and a vocal chorale, modeled on Paul Hindemith's "Kleine Kammermusik." He quoted phrases from Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite" and Bizet's "Carmen" in his solos.."I had the pleasure of meeting Edgar Varèse, the French composer," Parker once said on Boston radio. He was very nice to me. He's willing to teach me. He wants to compose something for me.".After Jean-Paul Sartre met Parker, he was asked what they had talked about. "Parker told me about his wish to study harmony at the Paris Conservatoire," he replied. "We talked about modern music.".It has been said that Parker could converse with rocket scientists, brain surgeons, chess players, gourmet chefs and so on, and that he liked to shoot the breeze with neighborhood white folks. But insisting on his wide-ranging spirit has become something of a condescension. Thanks to Parker, to a great degree, it is no longer newsworthy when a jazz musician listens to Hindemith. That Parker would feel the need to brag about a serious composer being seriously interested in him is kind of sad. He was so much more than the wasted, uneducated black man named Charlie playing bebop in gin joints most Americans took him for. He was making the serious music of his time. Think of the alienation. It is not surprising that heroin was central to his huddle..The new CD, "Inglewood Jam: Bird and Chet Live at the Trade Winds," captures a jam session in a Polynesian restaurant in California on June 16, 1952. "Jam session" is a euphemism for playing for free. An unpaid Tuesday night in the 1950s in an obscure club in the suburbs of Los Angeles with about 20 people in the room must have been a downer. You can practically hear the gloom, the opiates, the flash of color in a black and white world. Imagine the paranoia. It was not one of Bird's best nights, the 22-year old Chet Baker was floundering on trumpet and the piano was out of tune and tinny..Bird and bebop expanded what was acceptable to the ear. Over the years, an army of beboppers co-opted Bird's licks until they began to sound like Woody Woodpecker. He once thanked the young altoman Lee Konitz for "not playing like me." When Django Reinhardt heard Bird and Dizzy Gillespie for the first time after the war, he said: "They play so fast. I don't know if I can keep up with them." Bebop was perceived as a threat. Louis Armstrong sang about those "poor little boppers who lost their way.".By the time he died at 35, Parker had become a burned-out junkie and alcoholic. Mostly, though, as his fellow bebopper Thelonious Monk once put it, he was "tired of trying to please them.".Passing an evening with his friend Nica de Koenigswater, a Rothschild heiress and baronness, in her apartment in the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue, he began to feel poorly. She called her doctor, who, guessing he was 60, asked Parker if he drank alcohol. "Sometimes I take a sherry before dinner," Bird replied. He broke into uncontrollable laughter as he and the baroness watched some jugglers on Tommy Dorsey's variety TV show. He liked Tommy Dorsey. Then he began to cough, wretch and, spookily synchronized with a clap of thunder over Central Park, he passed away..Students still analyze Parker's improvisations on compositions with names like "Ornithology" and "Little Willie Leaps." Half a century after Parker's death, 11-year-old Cooper Copetas, who lives in Paris and has been playing the alto sax for three years, says: "He plays really fast. I like that. And he plays a good soft tune. Bird's music keeps going.". Tosh // 8:27 AM ______________________ Comments: Post a Comment
A wonderful piece by Mike Zwerin, who translated Boris Vian's jazz writings in English (wow, really an amazing book).I got this article from the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/08/features/zwer9.htmlPARIS Listening to Charlie Parker, who died 50 years ago on March 12, the first thing you thought about was freedom. Still is..The late tennis legend Don Budge, who was also a legendary jazz fan, built his style on hitting the ball hard while it was still on the rise. "I guess Charlie Parker played like he was hitting a rising ball," Budge said. "The cats must have spent a lot of time trying to figure that one out.".A variety of very different people had in common being turned around by Bird - Jack Kerouac, Clint Eastwood, Louis Malle, Astor Piazzolla, Boris Vian, Freddie Heineken, Donald Fagen, Allen Greenspan, Donald Justice and Jacques Delors, the former prime minister of France. In his memoir "Chronicles, Volume 1," Bob Dylan wrote that during his early years in Greenwich Village, he met a lot of people who acted as though "Bird had transmitted some secret essence of life to them.".The nickname either came from Yardbird, an American Southern word for chicken (Bird liked chicken), or from the way he flew over the fast-moving, modulating chords of Ray Noble's "Cherokee." Take your pick. He could fly. Parker's music was a door-opening combination of courage, sophistication, physical strength and street smarts. He told the critic Nat Hentoff that he wanted to make a recording with six woodwinds, a harp and a vocal chorale, modeled on Paul Hindemith's "Kleine Kammermusik." He quoted phrases from Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite" and Bizet's "Carmen" in his solos.."I had the pleasure of meeting Edgar Varèse, the French composer," Parker once said on Boston radio. He was very nice to me. He's willing to teach me. He wants to compose something for me.".After Jean-Paul Sartre met Parker, he was asked what they had talked about. "Parker told me about his wish to study harmony at the Paris Conservatoire," he replied. "We talked about modern music.".It has been said that Parker could converse with rocket scientists, brain surgeons, chess players, gourmet chefs and so on, and that he liked to shoot the breeze with neighborhood white folks. But insisting on his wide-ranging spirit has become something of a condescension. Thanks to Parker, to a great degree, it is no longer newsworthy when a jazz musician listens to Hindemith. That Parker would feel the need to brag about a serious composer being seriously interested in him is kind of sad. He was so much more than the wasted, uneducated black man named Charlie playing bebop in gin joints most Americans took him for. He was making the serious music of his time. Think of the alienation. It is not surprising that heroin was central to his huddle..The new CD, "Inglewood Jam: Bird and Chet Live at the Trade Winds," captures a jam session in a Polynesian restaurant in California on June 16, 1952. "Jam session" is a euphemism for playing for free. An unpaid Tuesday night in the 1950s in an obscure club in the suburbs of Los Angeles with about 20 people in the room must have been a downer. You can practically hear the gloom, the opiates, the flash of color in a black and white world. Imagine the paranoia. It was not one of Bird's best nights, the 22-year old Chet Baker was floundering on trumpet and the piano was out of tune and tinny..Bird and bebop expanded what was acceptable to the ear. Over the years, an army of beboppers co-opted Bird's licks until they began to sound like Woody Woodpecker. He once thanked the young altoman Lee Konitz for "not playing like me." When Django Reinhardt heard Bird and Dizzy Gillespie for the first time after the war, he said: "They play so fast. I don't know if I can keep up with them." Bebop was perceived as a threat. Louis Armstrong sang about those "poor little boppers who lost their way.".By the time he died at 35, Parker had become a burned-out junkie and alcoholic. Mostly, though, as his fellow bebopper Thelonious Monk once put it, he was "tired of trying to please them.".Passing an evening with his friend Nica de Koenigswater, a Rothschild heiress and baronness, in her apartment in the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue, he began to feel poorly. She called her doctor, who, guessing he was 60, asked Parker if he drank alcohol. "Sometimes I take a sherry before dinner," Bird replied. He broke into uncontrollable laughter as he and the baroness watched some jugglers on Tommy Dorsey's variety TV show. He liked Tommy Dorsey. Then he began to cough, wretch and, spookily synchronized with a clap of thunder over Central Park, he passed away..Students still analyze Parker's improvisations on compositions with names like "Ornithology" and "Little Willie Leaps." Half a century after Parker's death, 11-year-old Cooper Copetas, who lives in Paris and has been playing the alto sax for three years, says: "He plays really fast. I like that. And he plays a good soft tune. Bird's music keeps going.". Tosh // 8:27 AM
