By Michael Levin and John S. Wilson — 9/9/1949
An Online Exclusive
“Bop is no love-child of jazz,” says Charlie Parker. The creator of bop, in a series of interviews that took more than two weeks, told us he felt that “bop is something entirely separate and apart” from the older tradition; that it drew little from jazz, has no roots in it. The chubby little alto man, who has made himself an international music name in the last five years, added that bop, for the most part, had to be played by small bands.
“Gillespie’s playing has changed from being stuck in front of a big band. Anybody’s does. He’s a fine musician. The leopard coats and the wild hats are just another part of the managers’ routines to make him box office. The same thing happened a couple of years ago when they stuck his name on some tunes of mine to give him a better commercial reputation.”
Asked to define bop, after several evenings of arguing, Charlie still was not precise in his definition.
“It’s just music,” he said. “It’s trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes.”
Pushed further, he said that a distinctive feature of bop is its strong feeling for beat.
“The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it,” Charlie said. “It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that’s why bop is more flexible.”
He admits the music eventually may be atonal. Parker himself is a devout admirer of Paul Hindemith, the German neo-classicist. He raves about his Kammermusik and Sonata for Viola and Cello. He insists, however, that bop is not moving in the same direction as modern classical. He feels that it will be more flexible, more emotional, more colorful.
He reiterates constantly that bop is only just beginning to form as a school, that it can barely label its present trends, much less make prognostications about the future.
The closest Parker will come to an exact, technical description of what may happen is to say that he would like to emulate the precise, complex harmonic structures of Hindemith, but with an emotional coloring and dynamic shading that he feels modern classical lacks.
Parker’s indifference to the revered jazz tradition certainly will leave some of his own devotees in a state of surprise. But, actually, he himself has no roots in traditional jazz. During the few years he worked with traditional jazzmen, he wandered like a lost soul. In his formative years, he never heard any of the music which is traditionally supposed to inspire young jazzists—no Louis, no Bix, no Hawk, no Benny, no nothing. His first musical idol, the musician who so moved and inspired him that he went out and bought his first saxophone at the age of 11, was Rudy Vallee.
Tossed into the jazz world of the mid thirties with this kind of background, he had no familiar ground on which to stand. For three years he fumbled unhappily until he suddenly stumbled on the music which appealed to him, which had meaning to him. For Charlie insists, “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
Charlie’s horn first came alive in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th Street and 140th Street in December 1939. He was jamming there with a guitarist named Biddy Fleet. At the time, Charlie says, he was bored with the stereotyped changes being used then.
“I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else,” he recalls. “I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.”
Working over “Cherokee” with Fleet, Charlie suddenly found that by using higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, he could play this thing he had been “hearing.” Fleet picked it up behind him and bop was born.
Or, at least, it is reasonable to assume that this was the birth of bop. The closest Charlie will come to such a statement is, “I’m accused of having been one of the pioneers.”
Did Dizzy also play differently from the rest during the same period?
“I don’t think so,” Charlie replied. Then, after a moment, he added, “I don’t know. He could have been. Quote me as saying, ‘Yeah’.”
Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie in a performance
Dizzy himself has said that he wasn’t aware of playing bop changesbefore 1942.
As for the accompanying gimmicks which, to many people, represent
bop, Charlie views them with a cynical eye.
“Some guys said, ‘Here’s bop,’” he explains. “Wham! They said, ‘Here’s something we can make money on.’ Wham! ‘Here’s a comedian.’ Wham! ‘Here’s a guy who talks funny talk.’” Charlie shakes his head sadly.
Charlie himself has stayed away from a big band because the proper place for bop, he feels, is a small group. Big bands tend to get over scored, he says, and bop goes out the window. The only big band that managed to play bop in 1944, in Charlie’s estimation, was Billy Eckstine’s. Dizzy’s present band, he says, plays bop [but] could be better with more settling down and less personnel shifting.
“That big band is a bad thing for Diz,” he says. “A big band slows anybody down because you don’t get a chance to play enough. Diz has an awful lot of ideas when he wants to, but if he stays with the big band, he’ll forget everything he ever played. He isn’t repeating notes yet, but he is repeating patterns.”
It was on a visit to New York, in late 1942 after he had worked out his basic approach to complex harmony, that Charlie heard Stravinsky for the first time when Ziggy Kelly played Firebird for him.
The only possibility for a big band, he feels, is to get really big, practically on a symphonic scale with loads of strings.
“This has more chance than the standard jazz instrumentation,” he says. “You can pull away some of the harshness with the strings and get a variety of coloration.”
Today, Charlie has come full-cycle. As he did in 1939, when he kicked off bop in the Seventh Avenue chili house, he’s beginning to think there’s bound to be something more. He’s hearing things again, things that he can’t play yet. Just what these new things are, Charlie isn’t sure yet. But from the direction of his present musical interests—Hindemith, etc.—it seems likely he’s heading toward atonality. Charlie protests when he is mentioned in the same sentence with Hindemith, but, despite their vastly different starting points, he admits he might be working toward the same end.
This doesn’t mean Charlie is through with bop. He thinks bop still is far from perfection, looks on any further steps he may take as further developments of bop.
“They teach you there’s a boundary line to music,” he says. “But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.”
For the future, he’d like to go to the Academy of Music in Paris for a couple of years, then relax for a while and then write. The things he writes all will be concentrated toward one point: warmth. While he’s writing, he also wants to play experimentally with small groups. Ideally, he’d like to spend six months a year in France and six months here.
“You’ve got to do it that way,” he explains. “You’ve got to be here for the commercial things and in France for relaxing facilities.”
Relaxation is something Charlie constantly has missed. Lack of relaxation, he thinks, has spoiled most of the records he has made. To hear him tell it, he has never cut a good side. Some of things he did on the Continental label he considers more relaxed than the rest. But every record he has made could stand improvement, he says. We tried to pin him down, to get him to name a few sides that were at least better than the rest.
“Suppose a guy came up to us,” we said, “and said, ‘I’ve got four bucks and I want to buy three Charlie Parker records. What’ll I buy?’ What should we tell him?”
Charlie laughed.
“Tell him to keep his money,” he said.
Source: ~www.downbeat.com
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