“[His] musical gifts made it possible for [Charlie] Parker
to evolve from an inept alto saxophonist, a laughingstock in his middle teens,
to a virtuoso of all-encompassing talent who, by the age of twenty-five,
exhibited an unprecedented command of his instrument. His prodigious facility
was used not only for exhibition or revenge, moreover, but primarily for the
expression of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic inventions, at velocities that
extended the intimidating relationship of thought and action that forms the
mastery of improvisation in jazz. In the process, Parker defined his
generation: He provided the mortar for the bricks of fresh harmony that
Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie were making, he supplied linear substance
and an eighth note triplet approach to phrasing that was perfectly right for
the looser style of drumming that Kenny Clarke had invented.”— African-American
poet, novelist, musical and cultural commentator, and biographer Stanley
Crouch, “Bird Land: Charlie Parker, Clint Eastwood, and America,” in Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2006)
Charlie Parker, the nonpareil saxophonist and composer
who helped pioneer the postwar bebop movement in jazz, was born 100 years
ago today in Kansas City, KS.
I have written before on “Bird,” including on his subordinate
role in the first recording session of former group member Miles Davis and
his early death. But I wanted to post again in a way that captures
concisely what he meant to the evolution of jazz as an art form. Crouch’s
passage above fulfills that nicely, I think.
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