A feather for the Yardbird.
Crafting often begins with a person in mind. In this case, the person is a jazz musician who always played as if a feather lit his cap. So the green vase holds an eternal feather for Charlie Parker, who changed the language of jazz so we could continue to speak it. What keeps Charlie relevant is his influence on the development of bebop, particularly with respect to rhythm.
A little meat for your gristle. The earliest, preformal type of jazz, also known as the "cakewalk" style, relied on the half-note pulse. The rise of the ragtime style brought was tied to the syncopated half-note. In the New Orleans style, syncopation gradually divided the pulse until it emerged as the even four in Louis Armstrong's music. But the rhythmic basis of Parker's bebop is an eighth-note.
"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."
- Charlie Parker
Charlie leaned on Lester Young's flexible use of the 4/4 pulse and a more freely moving rhythmic impulse in creating his melodic lines. But he also imported the urban, southwestern blues idiom popularized by Count Basie's orchestra as the emotional and even technical basis for his work.
Listen to "Parker's Blues" (below) which Charlie recorded with a young Miles Davis and you can't miss the blues behind the movement.
Parker's Mood (mp3)
The sax never runs of things to say- and ways to say it as emphatically as a livid woman in high heels rapidly crossing a room. To learn more about the Bird and his influence on jazz greats including Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, take a pee at his website.
