Thoughts about Bird

[Dick Trickle]

Allright. I can't sleep (music is blaring in my head, I unfortunately heard some Bill Evans that made me go temporarily insane.) and that thread about Satchmo is getting me thinking.

Could someone here please tell me that Bird is overated? I dare you. I gotta be devils advocate once in a while... and my threads are never popular... so take a shot at that one and explain why I would be wrong in worshiping Charlie Parker as my personal savior. This is bound to be entertaining.

My training in music is attributed alot to practical experience, but help also came from author and player Carl Woideck, who wrote one of my very favorite works. It's on Parker of course. As his student in my youth, I overlooked the playing of Parker to favor Cannonball and other more modern players as my primary alto sources of inspiration. By transcrbing and listening to records, my playing never took on the bop sound I was looking for (or not)... instead... I would have a more bluesy approach that could reslove allright, but not like what I think I was meant to learn. Now that I have gained more appreciation for Parker by listening closer and studying his work with a more open and eager need to understand his playing... I have noticed a sudden surge in my overall approach to playing everything.

I guess what I am trying to hint at... is that the other thread about Louis Armstrong has it's good and bad moments in it like anything else. There are usefull musings all over in it... so I started thinking that I perhaps at one time thought Parker was overrated and would take the playing of Coltrane or someone else over Bird simply because the message had truly not been delivered to me as clearly as I hear it now.

There is nothing that can describe how good it feels to absorb that mans playing... My experiences in rediscovering his work is kicking my ass and making me loose sleep. I can only hope that future generations will still continue to revert back to Bird, because there is simply no greater teacher to melodic improvisation over the majority of standard song forms from my personal experience at this moment. I hope other people glean the same amount of worthwhile experiences from his work and come to love it as I have.

Anyway... there's my rant. Hopefully I can go to sleep now. I got to remember to try and not play music before going to bed... especialy not a Bill Evans cut that I had not heard before... I thought it would put me right out like he used to... but that Damn Bird taught me how to appreciate that boring old Piano stuff too, and the lights came like I drank a pot of coffee.

I hope this is not taken in a pejorative manner in regards to the other car accident thread in progress. I just thought I would use an example of my experience with a similar concept.

Rex

[Bill Barton]

You're not wrong.

Sorry that I can't provide any dry wood for the fire.

In fact, you're right on from my perspective (pencil in a 70's hairdo at this point if you like.)

[Pete C]

There are still early jazz fundamentalists who would argue that Bird is the devil! Don Mopsick, the bass player with the Jim Cullum Jazz Band, used to post here and would probably be the only one I can think of to argue that Bird was overrated.

[Jon Abbey]

I would never argue that Parker is overrated, but I would say that because of my specific path into jazz, in the late eighties initially, by the time I heard Bird, I'd already heard many more recent players who had directly built on what he did.

so because I'd heard all these copy-Birds already, I don't think I've ever fully appreciated Bird, because I was missing the element of how revolutionary what he did was. I've tried a lot, I even listened to that windbag Phil Schaap's Birdflight show a whole bunch, but there's a component that's never been there for me. maybe I'll revisit him down the road and it'll all click for me, dunno...

[Dick Trickle]

I did that too... I was sooo into Stitt, Jackie Mac and other guys who play similar to Bird that I thought "why bother"... everyone has built their skills off of this guy so why do I need to listen to these older recordings anyway.

The book kicked the door open wide for me. If you get a chance to get ahold of it... it is a worthwile companion to seeing a little more clearly what bird was about. At least it kinda sparked me to listen a little harder and analyze the examples myself to see if it helped me "see beyond the barlines". I'll tell you what... Bird may have made my ear 200% better than all the money I spent on music school classes and crap of that sort.

Listen to the "If I Should Loose You" from the strings album... I cannot describe how awesomely inspiring it is (for me)... and why an old conservatist wouldn't absolutely dig the shit out of it. It must have been like an atomic blast at it's time, to hear Bird live.

[Jimmy Cantiello]

Nice post, Jon. I'm guessing that your experience is similar to many others.

I'll always remember the time many years ago when I was sitting on my deck one summer day just grooving on the beautiful weather. I was listening to Charlie Parker. My wife always politely listen to my Jazz "lectures" which always included why certain pioneers were so great. She was puttering around the back yard. As she walked past me on her way into the house she said, "You must really like what you're listening to. You look like you're in heaven. Must be one of those great pioneers of Jazz".....................

[saltwatersnow]

god i hate phil schaap. yesterday was annual max roach virthday brioadcast. in car 20 minutes to hear 2 minutes of music on a record so old and scratched couldnt tell what instrument was soloing. i like bird very much, but even as a sax player always felt more for monk especially, than diz and bud

[stonemonkts]

Schaap really is a dickhead. I was fortunate to have discovered Bird prior to hearing his daily brainfartfest. I have countless homemade tapes with long gaps of silence, representing the hours he was doing duty during a beloved artist's birthday or memorial broadcast.

Schaap is the only negative in an otherwise extraordinary radio station.

My introduction to Bird was via the collection "Yardbird Suite". He was one of the first jazz artists I ever listened to, after Miles, Mingus, and Monk. I can enjoy and appreciate his innovations mainly due to my interest in pre-Parker jazz.

[Tom Storer]

Parker is definitely one of my personal deities, so I'm not the one who will say he's overrated. Parker was one of the players who influenced me greatly as a listener, more or less teaching me how to listen. I don't even think Don Mopsick would say he's overrated. I believe Don's point of view is that Parker and Gillespie were brilliant but their great influence led to the melodic pithiness and elegance of earlier jazz being jettisoned in favor of mechanical chord-running. In other words, Bird was great but too few of his imitators got the point. Maybe Don will come back in and correct me if I'm wrong about that.

A friend of mine who's a musician criticizes Bird for being too licks-oriented. In transcribing Bird solos he realized that Bird used a wide vocabulary of melodic figures that he repeated very often, with variations, in all his work. I can't deny that but somehow it always sounds fresh to me even when he does string together his favorite licks.

[gnhrtg]

Many of his imitators also often used those licks. The thing, of course, is that to the best of my knowledge, most, if not all, of the said licks were originally crafted by Bird (I mean crafted as in the "corkscrew" lick, one of my faves). I agree by the way that he could string together a number of licks always to sound fresh; and, fortunately, we have many alternate takes that provide ample evidence for this assertion.

There are a handfull of jazz recordings that always sound fresh and exciting no matter how many times you listen to them. Many of Charlie Parker's recordings are like that. The sessions that he recorded for Dial and Savoy in November and December 1947 especially blow me away every time that I hear them.

[frankiepop]

tho i agree with schaap that bird had one of the purest jump shots.