Charlie Parker--c/d?

mentioned it upthread but bears repeating -- Charlie Parker: A Studio Chronicle (1940-1948) is innnnnnnsane. the guy was incapable of making anything but brilliant sounds.

looks like crouch's bio of parker (first volume at least) will be out soon. he's been talking about it for decades.
http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/09/23/what-made-charlie-parker-great-reviewing-stanley-crouch-s-biography-on-bird/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage_0.img.503.jpg/1379929518894.cached.jpg
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/23/what-made-charlie-parker-great-reviewing-stanley-crouch-s-biography-on-bird.html

Thanks for posting that! I was actually just wondering today what the status of that project was.

It looks good; actually can't wait to read it, even though I'm a little ambivalent about Crouch. He can be brilliant one moment, and then completely embarrass himself the next by, for instance, blindly trashing Miles' electric period or renouncing his avant-garde past (he came to NYC as David Murray's drummer, and actually acquits himself well on the Wildflowers comp). (though I doubt either of those two topics will come up in the Bird bios.)

whoa, I had no idea about Crouch's career as an out drummer, kind of surprising. found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXTC-sQR9r0

yeah crouch is obviously kind of a blowhard, but i dunno, i like that his parker bio will be feisty at least, as opposed to a dry academic thing.

Christgau digs it.

hah, this is the season for first-part music biographies that don't even get to the good part (see lewisohn's beatles tome). still, sounds pretty cool, just ordered it.

Am about 20 pages into it, and totally digging it. It makes sense that it only goes up to 1942 considering the chronology starts at the 16th century.

haha, sounds great.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/popcast-early-bird-and-kansas-city-lightning/?ref=music&_r=0
haven't gotten the book in the mail for some reason, but this interview is good. i dunno, crouch's writing can be didactic and off-putting at times, but whenever i hear/read an interview with him, i think he seems like a nice guy.

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."

I naively assumed this bio wouldn't contain a flailing, predictably Crouchian, mis-timed swing at hip-hop. I was wrong.

Seriously, it's like he's trying to hit a ball thrown in the opposite direction.

"Montgomery Burns Jazz" still gets me every time -- who originated that?

I did. Welcome!

good display name too

Hey, what? I was calling it that back in early 2000, when that shit first aired.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n02/ian-penman/birditis

great etc etc

excellent

True believers want to reclaim Parker from a now (as they see it) deeply degraded image, emphasising instead the dare and complexity of his music; this is already a gamble when many fair-weather fans tend to shut down at the first mention of flattened fifths and roving thirteenths. Even if you’ve loved this music for half a lifetime, you can find the algebraic lingo of jazz theory about as clarifying as a book of logarithms baked in mud.

This leapt out at me and it's indicative that other people on Twitter have cited this bit while linking. Can't go with this; you can't keep on talking or writing about jazz by thinking it's some aleatoric game of chance whose theories are arrived at by sheer luck and chutzpah. You HAVE to get in the technical knowledge; jazz isn't rock. "Algebraic lingo" sounds borderline racist too, i.e. how dare these uppity blacks have complicated ways of thinking up and playing music, who do they think they are, WHITE EUROPEANS?

Piece borders on "tl;dr" territory and no I wasn't inspired to go and listen to Bird after reading it. Perhaps reading the books themselves will persuade me.

With all due respect I'm inclined to think you "dr" the piece if that's what you think penman's getting at

Jazz was pop.

He is saying the theory he has read as written by others on Parker's music doesn't elucidate the inner workings of it. But it isn't confined to black music; Penman reviewed the Merce Cunningham box a couple of years ago, wasn't shy of calling the sleeve notes academic or dry (but in a more readable, not as reactionary a manner, I don't have the article at the mo.) The important thing is, despite any lack of theory, I think the ear for music is working great whenever I read him - in that article, he got that David Tudor was the best of the lot in that set.

But yes, its hard to deny he has never had a lot of time for theory - its never played a role in the middle of one of his arguments of why Zappa is terrible or Tim Buckley is great - nor would you find him writing about his favourite solos were he reviewing a Parker box set instead of biogs. But that's ok, I don't agree that theory is the way to engage with this music, only a way.

^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...