First I heard Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.  In the vernacular of the streets, I flipped.

----Charlie Parker

W hen Charlie Parker met Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky’s music...  It was Ziggy Kelly "hipped" Bird to Stravinsky’s The Firebird suite back in 1942,¹ so they said in a 1949 Down Beat article "No Bop Roots in Jazz".  Few years later, in a 1953 interview with Nat Hentoff for Down Beat magazine, Parker professed his love for Stravinsky’s music, uttering that “I first began listening seven or eight years ago.  First I heard Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.  In the vernacular of the streets, I flipped.”²  Chronically speaking, these two accounts brawl like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in “The Fight of the Century”. 1942 or around 1945?  Details of this fascinating punch-up can be found in my somewhat (well, actually, more like dreadfully) monotonous thesis Charlie Parker: the analytical study of twenty-two performance versions of Now's the Time.  But, hey, since I am no longer a time-line police, I am more interested in picturing jazz alto saxophonist Charlie Parker flipping around like Tom Cruise professing his love for Katie Holmes on Oprah show in my head.

Harry: I've been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you. Sally: What? Harry: I love you. Sally: How do you expect me to respond to this? Harry: How about, you love me too. Sally: How about, I'm leaving.

---When Harry Met Sally… (1989)

As luck would have it, Parker’s declaration of his love for Stravinsky’s music went much, much, much better than Harry Burns’ ghastly attempt.  The recollections of Parker’s acquaintances substantiated the happily-ever-after status between Parker and Stravinsky’s music.  Jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan recalled that Parker “used to sit on the bus or train with Stravinsky scores.  And then he’d get on the stage and play something from Stravinsky, but play it his way.”³  Howard McGhee, who was introduced to Stravinsky’s music by Parker, recounted that Parker “hipped me to, like Stravinsky and all those guys.  I didn’t know nothin’ about Stravinsky.  So Bird was the first one to tell me about it.  So like, The Rite of Spring, he brought it over to the house and let me hear it.”⁴  Neil Michaud, who accompanied Parker during his first visit to Canada, also recalled that “Parker hold forth on a recent New York City Ballet presentation of Stravinsky’s The Firebird at the New York City Center.”⁵  Idrees Suleiman also recounted that “Dizzy and Bird used to also come by one or two o’clock at night.  I had a lots of Stravinsky records and I wouldn’t like for Bird to come by, because he would never leave.”⁶  Furthermore, tenor saxophonist Wayne Short also recalled that Parker incorporating musical lines from Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka and Histoire du soldat to his own improvisations.⁷  Parker personally commented on Stravinsky’s compositions as “music at its best,”⁸ when he correctly identified Stravinsky’s The Song of the Nightingale with ease in a 1948 blindfold test conducted by Leonard Feather.

In a 1947 Metronome article, Parker told British-born pianist/journalist Leonard Feather:

Have you heard that album of music by Schönberg with just five instruments playing while an actress recites some poetry, in German?  It’s wonderful thing––I think it’s called Protée. . . . Have you heard The Children’s Corner by Debussy?  Oh, that’s so much music! . . . Debussy and Stravinsky are my favorites; but I like Shostakovitch . . . Beethoven too.⁹

Casually deciphering that statement, we don’t need to hire Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code to determine that Charlie Parker’s interest in Western classical music is by no means limited to Stravinsky’s music.  Parker’s fondness to the genre warrants another short article and more of JK's rumblings.  So, for now, please allow me to "hip" you to some Stravinsky, shall we?

* This is the first installment of a series of articles discussing the connections and usages of Western classical music in jazz alto saxophonist Charlie Parker’s Bebop improvisation. The first article focuses on the influence of Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky’s music on Charlie Parker. The second article discusses Parker’s acquaintances of music by the twentieth-century music composers. The third article concentrates on Bird’s technique by quoting fragments from works of Western classical music in his improvisations.

Article 1. When Charlie Parker Met Stravinsky & Bird’s “Slonimsky” Motive

Article 2. Charlie Parker and Western Classical Music & the Enclosure in Bebop Improvisation

Article 3. Charlie Parker’s Western Classical Music Quotations & Decorated Enclosure in Bebop Improvisation

After gobbling up Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic’s version of Petrouchka by Stravinsky, I took few seconds to reflect on that zesty beauty of Petrouchka chord and began to think about the “Slonimsky” motive, the yummy motive-of-the-day. The “Slonimsky”, labeled as M.40B(a) in Thomas Owens’s monumental dissertation on Charlie Parker’s improvisation technique, is a straightforward pattern derived from an octatonic scale,¹⁰ also known as the diminished scale (Example 1). As illustrated in the example, this basic pattern is constructed with two diminished seventh chords that are one half-step apart. Parker often systematically continues the basic pattern to create a longer improvisational line with minor modifications. Thomas Owens comments on the construction of this motive, citing that it is “built upon diminished 7^th chords.”¹¹  David Baker also lists this pattern in the “melodic patterns on the diminished scale” section in his monograph on Parker’s music.¹²  I nicknamed it -- I confess: I adore nicknames -- as the “Slonimsky” motive as it is identical to the descending form of pattern 447 in Nicolas Slonimsky’s fabulous 1947 publication Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns.¹³

Example 1.  The linear construction of the “Slonimsky” motive, aka motive M.40B(a).

Interestingly, Parker does not combine the “Slonimsky” motive with other motives in his performance of Now’s the Time (Example 2).  This isolation maintains the characteristic of motive as a rapid sequential pattern and accentuates the coloristic effect to generate linear contrasts with surrounding materials. In addition to applying embellishment to the motive, Parker also employs this motive in different formal locations.  These divergent employments epitomize a deviation from the clichés and standardized practices, reflecting not only Parker's exertions to create valid variants but also the comprehensiveness of his understanding of harmony.  For instances, the first and the third occurrences in the example exemplify the colorization technique by utilizing the symmetrical octatonic scale in the third and fourth measure of the blues form and generating a strong linear tendency to move toward the sub-dominant chord in the fifth measure.  The second occurrence, located in the sixth measure of the blues form, can be analyzed as the #IVo⁷ superimposition which commonly precedes the tonic chord in the seventh measure of the blues form.

Example 2.  The occurrences of the “Slonimsky” motive, aka motive M.40B(a), in Charlie Parker’s performances of Now’s the Time.

Here is a short three-chorus blues study in the style of Charlie Parker. Be a Sherlock Holmes and find the location of the “Slonimsky” Motive!

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Back in 1944, Igor Stravinsky conducted Boston Symphony Orchestra of his reharmonized version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. According to the New York Times, Stravinsky was later informed by the then Boston Police Commissioner Thomas F. Sullivan that the composer, under Massachusetts law, was liable to a $100 fine for tampering national property…I reflect on that little piece of history while buffeting on the brilliance of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. After that, I think I will have some of Bird’s Ko-Ko for desert. Yum!