Archive for ‘Bebop Cookbook’
The KoKo session was one of those just-about-supernatural recording dates seemingly shrouded with overflowing magical elements.....The impact of this recording session was far-reaching as the commercial release of Parker’s music soon accelerated the revolution of modern jazz. Teddy Reig, the producer of this recording date, comments on the influence of the release, stating that “in maybe six months it was like The Bible.”
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Jazz music, during its comparatively brief history of one hundred years, has continuously manifested its unparalleled energy by progressively reinventing itself and generating new variants that directly or indirectly reflect the development of music in general; the advancement of music technology, and the social interactions, conflicts, and inevitable transformations. Bebop, in particular, exhibits a substantial impact that antagonizes its community internally and consequently challenges the identity and value of the subordinate social groups and their collective assembly.....
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Jazz alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was not only the representative figure in the Bebop movement in terms of his musical exploration, but also in his continuous struggle with substance abuse. Evidently, the problem of substance abuse was pervasive during that period within the jazz community, as Burton W. Peretti elucidated that "while World War I, Prohibition, and the first flush of the adolescent subculture had prompted alcoholism among some early white jazz musicians, a deeper disappointment fueled the bebop turn to drugs......
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I love to quote. But You probably notice that already. You, clever you. For me, quoting tawdry or cutesy lines from novels, poems, movies, songs, commercials, disclaimers, and even product nutrition panels, is less an attempt to reaffirm my steps or missteps. It is more a way to clutch something, to remember something, to get a whiff of something from the hectic stream of everyday-life. piece by piece. poco a poco.....
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Bird soon immersed himself in works by composers active in the first half of the twentieth-century. In addition to Igor Stravinsky, composers of Western classical music that Parker venerated included Béla Bartók, Claude Debussy, Paul Hindemith, Sergey Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schönberg, and Dmitri Shostakovitch. Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s works came to be on Parker’s listening menu around 1945...
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When Charlie Parker met Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky’s music... It was Ziggy Kelly "hipped" Bird to Stravinsky’s The Firebird suite back in 1942, so they said in a Down Beat article "No Bop Roots in Jazz". 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"....
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