Charlie Parker--c/d?

^yeah. I wasn't trying to be snarky, Marcello - well, plainly I was, because I'm in a crabbit mood. Your putting those words in the author's mouth just felt offensive & disingenuous to me. The review is about different critical approaches; it explains the reasons IP personally finds them unsatisfying, and argues for a new approach - this is a million miles away from saying that George Russell should have known his place or whatever nonsense you read into it. As xyzzz__ says, Penman has a pretty complete aesthetic sense and he applies it consistently to all music. I don't always agree with him (I'm largely in it for the writing, I wouldn't presume to argue w/you guys about the necessity of theory in jazz criticism or whatever) but you were being ridiculously unfair at the end of your 1st paragraph.

he becomes better known for a ruinous pile-it-high lifestyle, for being the only addict pre-Fassbinder to get fatter, not thinner, as his habit deepens; for plunging into late decrepitude only to die in the lap of luxury, in a high-society eyrie belonging to the Rothschild child and ‘Jazz Baroness’, Pannonica de Koenigswarter.

Really? I always thought the popular perception of Charlie Parker included the fact thathe pushed jazz into headier, less pop-oriented territory and fucked with the audience's expectations from standards. I mean people who disliked bebop at the time usually thought it was "not melodic enough" or "too esoteric" or that sort of thing, I thought.

One way into Parker: compare and contrast him w/ Ornette Coleman.

^^^i dont get this
ornette is way more out there than bird

― joe 40oz (deej), Tuesday, October 7, 2008 6:12 PM (6 years ago)

. . .

Yeah, whenever he's not expounding on What Jazz Is(n't), he's a great read/listen. In Montgomery Burns' Jazz he came up with this great description of Parker's sound, that it was "devoid of pity."

― hopping and bopping to the krokodil rot (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, October 7, 2013 3:13 PM (1 year ago)

yeah it's not the out-there-ness, it's the free, cutting lyric lines, just playing these little songs that slice through everything

there's some place where nietzsche is doing his usual thing and posturing a lot, and distancing himself from his past views on art (lots of affiliation w/ romanticism via wagner in them), and he says something about how all he wants for music now is like rossini or something, not all this heaviness. 'devoid of pity' reminds me of that.

listening to live earlier stuff in the car this morning & then to some Verve stuff after getting home -- the way his melodic phrases always carry on a few bars beyond the central hook (specifically thinking of "Ornithology" here), they're like paragraphs, really chewy paragraphs with dependent clauses, or like listening to somebody talk and make clever asides while making a vital point

Goddamn...
"Yardbird Suite" is like someone juggling firecrackers, but also just tremendously cool... like, laid way back, but sharp... it's an amazing balance...
And such a beautiful melody as well...