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 Even if he did not exactly reinvent the wheel musically,
Charlie Parker's innovations can still seem strange at first, even
today. It can take a while to develop a taste for them — as with
rare and fine wines. There must be many possible stories of
discovering his music. It can be demanding to listen to as well as to
play.
Its heights are in his recorded improvisations, some of which have
now been written down for much less gifted players to try to perform.
They have their own compelling logic and melodic and even satiric
appeal. Once you have come to appreciate them, they can be sources of
almost endless enjoyment and fascination. Getting to this point,
however, can take some time. You may first become aware of Charlie
Parker in your mid-teens, say. But it may not be until your mid-30s —
the age he was when he died — that you begin to altogether grasp and
marvel at his improvised music.  His genius can be
somewhat less demandingly approached through the melody lines to the
several dozen less complex tunes he more or less wrote down on paper
during the course of his tormented career — songs with such exotic
titles as "Au Privave," "Chi Chi," "Confirmation," "Dewey Square,"
"Dexterity," "Marmaduke," "Moose the Mooche," "Mohawk," "An Oscar for
Treadwell," and "Scrapple from the Apple."
These songs form the
bases or "heads" for some of Parker's most inspired improvisations.
They have the form and, for the most part, even the chords of the tunes
on the hit parade in his own time and place. They are in the end just
remarkably sophisticated or hip versions of the American popular songs
of the 1940s and early 1950s (which included quite a lot of material
from the 1920s and 1930s too). And the more you play them, and listen
to them, the more interesting they become.  According to
the critic James Patrick, among 30 recently re-issued classic Charlie
Parker recordings, "only three are originals" (i.e. "songs not having a
harmonic basis in the standards" or popular songs of his day). Five
"are harmonically based on ‘I've got Rhythm,' one on ‘Honeysuckle
Rose,' two on the combined chord patterns of ‘I've got Rhythm' and
‘Honeysuckle Rose,' and eight use "the progressions of other
standards." The remainder are "just 12-bar blues."
According to
a parallel set of exchanges in an Internet discussion group,
"Ornithology" (co-written with Benny Harris) is based on "How High the
Moon"; "Moose the Mouche," "Chasing the Bird," and "Dexterity" on "I
Got Rhythm"; "Bird Of Paradise" on "All The Things You Are";
"Marmaduke" on "Honeysuckle Rose"; and "Quasimodo" on "Embraceable You."  In
his lifetime Charlie Parker's recordings of his own tunes never sold
remotely as well as the popular songs on which so many of them were
based. His own most financially successful records involved more
straightforward if still sometimes astonishing renditions of standard
songs in the "Charlie Parker with Strings" series, masterminded by the
jazz impresario Norman Granz.
But it is a key to Bird's music in
even its most recondite forms that it was so intimately tied to the
popular music of his day. The full range of his recorded legacy finally
amounts to a kind of high commentary on American popular culture, in
the first half of the 20th century and beyond. Other sites and sources Written transcriptions of a wide selection of Charlie Parker improvisations and tunes are available in The Charlie Parker Omnibook, first published by Michael H. Goldsen at Atlantic Music Corp. in 1978. |
