Search Results

Youth

Gary Giddins

in Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker

This chapter describes Charlie Parker’s early years as a musician. Parker was born on August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, Kansas, during the time when jazz music was successfully gaining popularity in ... More

This chapter describes Charlie Parker’s early years as a musician. Parker was born on August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, Kansas, during the time when jazz music was successfully gaining popularity in Europe. He expressed his enthusiasm for music when his mother bought him a used and unplayable alto for forty-five dollars. When he was a freshman, Charlie was encouraged to join the school’s marching band by its locally celebrated bandmaster Alonzo Lewis who assigned him to play baritone horn. He did his best to improve his performance, soliciting help from anyone willing to teach him, and attended school periodically, chiefly to play in the band.Less

Concert Treasures

Williams Martin

in Jazz Changes

By the 1920s, jazz music was being recorded more or less regularly. And if those who heard the past legendary musicians claim that the records by Fletcher Henderson or King Oliver or Bix Beiderbecke ... More

By the 1920s, jazz music was being recorded more or less regularly. And if those who heard the past legendary musicians claim that the records by Fletcher Henderson or King Oliver or Bix Beiderbecke were a shadow of the reality, at least the records were there and in some quantity. A more recent legendary event, the appearance of Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie quintets in the early forties, is now regarded as much a part of jazz tradition as Oliver's Creole Band. Finally, a 1953 concert in Toronto did get recorded and now reappears on Fantasy, “Jazz At Massey Hall.”Less

Modern Jazz

Ted Gioia

in The History of Jazz

The rise of modern jazz—or “bebop” as it was called—dramatically changed the landscape of the music in the 1940s, transforming the genre into a truly progressive and experimental idiom. But this came ... More

The rise of modern jazz—or “bebop” as it was called—dramatically changed the landscape of the music in the 1940s, transforming the genre into a truly progressive and experimental idiom. But this came at a cost, marking a shift from jazz’s predominance as a popular music, and turning it into an art music addressing a much smaller audience. This chapter looks at the innovations of the leading bebop musicians, especially Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Other artists addressed include Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, Sarah Vaughan, and Dave Brubeck. The chapter concludes with an assessment of big band jazz during the post–World War II era, including the work of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton.Less

Dial Days: A Conversation with Ross Russell

Williams Martin

in Jazz Changes

Ross Russell was an American jazz producer and writer, as well as the founder of Dial Records. After World War II finished, he opened Tempo Music Shop, his own jazz record store, in Hollywood. He ... More

Ross Russell was an American jazz producer and writer, as well as the founder of Dial Records. After World War II finished, he opened Tempo Music Shop, his own jazz record store, in Hollywood. He founded Dial Records in 1946 for him to record with Charlie Parker, who was living in Los Angeles during that period. He also recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, Howard McGhee, Dodo Marmarosa, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, and Earl Coleman. As an artist, he loved Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, and he wrote an essay on James P. Johnson.Less

Music Background and Compositional Overview

Henry Martin

in Charlie Parker, Composer

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Parker’s life, emphasizing his musical background, his early musical training, and his experiences that bear directly on his future as a jazz saxophonist. This ... More

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Parker’s life, emphasizing his musical background, his early musical training, and his experiences that bear directly on his future as a jazz saxophonist. This overview tracks Parker’s growing professional stature as well as his role in the development of bebop style. Once Parker achieves significant professional success as a member of the Jay McShann Orchestra (1940–1942), the emphasis in the narrative shifts to his career as a composer. The relationships between Parker and his record companies, which secured his copyrights as publisher, are explored. The chapter ends by discussing his unrecorded compositions, including the possibility that they are not by Parker.Less

Collected Bird

Williams Martin

in Jazz Changes

The title of the collected Ko-Ko date on a new Savoy LP is simply “Charlie Parker” but the music represents, of course, the way it should be done. John Mehegan's terse notes were excellent. He began ... More

The title of the collected Ko-Ko date on a new Savoy LP is simply “Charlie Parker” but the music represents, of course, the way it should be done. John Mehegan's terse notes were excellent. He began with a brief essay which is possibly one of the most important written on Parker, Gillespie, and the whole movement. The discoveries here among the new tracks were the first take on “Thriving from a Riff”, including some excellent Gillespie.Less

Three Ways of Looking at a Yardbird: Charlie Parker and the Theorization of Jazz Improvisation in the Work of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka

in The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism

This chapter investigates how Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka used Charlie “Bird” Parker as a sign of Negro complexity and a symbolic guide through the contingent ... More

This chapter investigates how Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka used Charlie “Bird” Parker as a sign of Negro complexity and a symbolic guide through the contingent relationship among the illustrations and theories developed in their literary works and cultural criticism. Though each writer approached Bird as “the black artist as sacrificial Negro,” they charted separately defined routes toward achieving African American political, economic, and cultural freedom. Parker's musical innovations helped shape radical youth immediately after World War II. Improvisation and illumination provide access to salvation in Baldwin's work. Following John Dewey's themes of art as experience, Jones/Baraka draws poetry and jazz improvisation together so that he can simultaneously exercise the culture's diverse and contradictory parts while poeticizing the spiraling self in transition. Jones/Baraka provides the American public with a poetics for transforming American culture and politics with the inclusion of improvisational African American identities.Less

All Men and Flo: Struggling to Survive as an Attorney, 1948–1960

Sherie M. Randolph

in Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s law school training and early career as an attorney in New York City. As a black woman, Kennedy did not fit neatly within a legal system in which the most visible ... More

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s law school training and early career as an attorney in New York City. As a black woman, Kennedy did not fit neatly within a legal system in which the most visible architects of the courts’ civil and criminal process, doctrines, and unspoken codes were white men. With very little guidance on how to survive in a profession unaccustomed to black women in any role other than defendants, she had to make her own way. Now in her thirties, Kennedy created her own roadmap for becoming a lawyer, surviving as a working attorney, and gaining financial stability. Among her notable achievements was her contribution to intellectual property law, as she defended the rights of writers and jazz musicians (e.g., Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker) against the record labels that exploited their talents and profited from their creativity.Less

Appren Ticeship

Gary Giddins

in Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker

This chapter discusses the musicians that greatly influenced the career of Charlie Parker. Charlie took a job at the popular hangout place Jimmy’s Chicken Shack where he met Art Tatum, a pianist who ... More

This chapter discusses the musicians that greatly influenced the career of Charlie Parker. Charlie took a job at the popular hangout place Jimmy’s Chicken Shack where he met Art Tatum, a pianist who inspired him that that any note could be made to fit in a chord. He then performed a music gig at Times Square where he met Bill “Biddy” Fleet who taught him the harmonic theory. He practiced what he learned from Tatum and Fleet, playing passing tones and concentrating on the higher intervals of chords raised to ninths, elevenths, or thirteenths.Less

Bird Lives

Gary Giddins

in Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker

This chapter discusses the career of Charlie Parker after recovering from his heart disease. During his homecoming, Parker was stalked by amateur recording companies who offered to record his solo ... More

This chapter discusses the career of Charlie Parker after recovering from his heart disease. During his homecoming, Parker was stalked by amateur recording companies who offered to record his solo performance. More than 350 improvisations of Parker were recorded privately between 1947 and 1954. Parker composed the song “Yatag”—an acronym of his favorite phrase from the lyric, “You are the angel glow”—and recorded it for Dial Records. His later performances of the song include those from Sweden in late 1950 and from the celebrated concert at Massey Hall in Toronto, in 1953.Less

Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture

Phil Ford

in Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture

Chapter 4 considers the hip sensibility as it enjoyed its breakout success in the 1960s. While chapter 2 considers the early Cold War style of hip intellectualism—ironic, skeptical, literary, ... More

Chapter 4 considers the hip sensibility as it enjoyed its breakout success in the 1960s. While chapter 2 considers the early Cold War style of hip intellectualism—ironic, skeptical, literary, disaffiliative, and colored by the era's general dislike of the mass—chapter 4 describes how it changed within a mass counterculture. While the earlier generation sought a complicated reconciliation of meaning and sensory presence, the later one sought a purer presence in which meaning might dissolve altogether. This succession of moods within the hip sensibility registers on three exemplary pieces of music, each separated from the others by about a decade: Charlie Parker's “Ornithology,” Ken Nordine's “Sound Museum,” and Bob Dylan's “Ballad of a Thin Man.”Less

Portrait of the Artist as a Major Player: From Pale Rider to Bird

David Sterritt

in The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America

This chapter analyses Clint Eastwood's films in the 1980s. Pale Rider (1985) follows a gunfighter known only as the Preacher as he rides into a California mining camp besieged by an avaricious ... More

This chapter analyses Clint Eastwood's films in the 1980s. Pale Rider (1985) follows a gunfighter known only as the Preacher as he rides into a California mining camp besieged by an avaricious landowner, who has enlisted a corrupt sheriff in his campaign to seize the miners' claims. Heartbreak Ridge (1986) is the second war movie directed by Eastwood. Although its story is set in the present day, its title comes from the Battle of Heartbreak Ridge, a month-long clash in the Korean War that produced notably high casualties among American, French, Chinese, and North Korean troops. Bird (1988) is a biopic about Charlie Parker, the legendary alto-sax player known as Yardbird or just Bird to his contemporaneous fans.Less