Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...history of jazz," Miles Davis maintains, "can be told in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker." Satchmo died at 71 on July 6, 1971, his name a household word; but 18 years have passed since Charlie ("Bird") Parker died, broke and burned out at 34. Except to jazz buffs, his name is barely remembered. No longer do such graffiti as "Bird lives!" appear on subway walls. Yet sooner or later Parker's genius confronts anyone who listens to jazz seriously...
...jazz's most prolific improviser. Bird would blow 15 or 20 choruses on his alto saxophone without a repeat, then pause, breathe from his toes and blow ten more, bending and coloring the notes with a broad double-edged sound. Technically, his music was fiendishly complex; emotionally it was a pure sound riding a column of air that came straight from the gut. It was the kind of music musicians dream about...
...temperate without being tepid. His style slips only when he reverts to a psuedo-novelistic form. Though Russell has unrestrained respect for Parker's talents, he nevertheless dismantles much of the myth that has grown around this genius of improvisation. Russell shows that Parker earned his place in jazz's pantheon by more than a shot of heroin. His talent was nurtured by hard work and an almost pathological concentration; Parker logged some 15,000 hours "woodshedding" (practicing). As he grew up, he heard firsthand all the important jazz artists who converged on his home town, Kansas City...
...fast as Art Tatum played the piano, and began with a brief stratospheric flight that teased the ear. But he soon lost the key and then the beat. At that, the drummer's cymbal hurtled through the air, landing with a crash at his feet: in the customary jazz citation to a bad musician...
Soon nobody was gonging off Bird. In his 20s, he had already become a legend. He had given his name to Birdland, and along with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell had founded a whole new jazz idiom called bebop. The beginning came one night while Parker was playing Cherokee in a Manhattan chili house: he reached up and got his line by filching the top notes off the chords. By mingling spontaneous pirouettes of fanciful improvisations with a tune's melody he vastly expanded the freedom of musicians...