The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    How to celebrate the groundbreaking saxophonist — who died at 34 in 1955 — via books, albums, tributes and more.

    Charlie Parker’s brief swing through this world kicked off a century ago on Saturday with his birth in Kansas City, Kan. Eleven years later, he would take up the saxophone. A couple of years after that, inspired by the hot bands tearing up K.C. in the ’30s, the man who was later known as Bird dedicated himself to his instrument, the alto, woodshedding for 11 to 15 hours a day, he would later say.

    A decade later, the complexity, beauty and “tommy-gun velocity” (as Stanley Crouch once put it) of his improvisations would hasten jazz’s departure from the dance hall. With his bebop cohort of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and others, Bird declared “Now’s the Time,” thrilling audiences and scarifying critics, who mostly took a while to catch up to the advanced harmonics and polyrhythms. His brash modernism jolted New York and then the world.

    And then, just 34 years into a life of epochal consequence, Parker died, his body ravaged by appetites as outsized as his genius.

    In the decades since, his influence has never waned, even as the modern music he created evolved restlessly in his absence. Recent tribute recordings come from the patron saint of the avant-garde, via Anthony Braxton’s 11-disc archival treasure “Sextet (Parker) 1993,” and the heart of the mainstream, with the Italian guitar phenom Pasquale Grasso’s “Solo Bird” EP from Sony Masterworks.

    Birdland, the club that bears Parker’s name — and once banned the sometimes unreliable master from its stage — remains an institution, updated for the age of streaming, and the annual Charlie Parker Festival, a free summer tradition since 1992, promises to return whenever live music lives again.

    Jazz thrives most fully in live performance — now’s the time, after all. But there’s plenty of Parker (and Parker-inspired) art to thrill us at home, too. (All times listed for live events are Eastern.)
    Full article here (paywall if you hit the reading limit): Charlie Parker at 100: What to Read, Watch and Dig - The New York Times

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #2

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    No mention of the Clint Eastwood movie?

    Curious about opinions here on the best technical book on Parker's music?

  4. #3

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    Can’t mention Parker enough. The man deserves to be respected and celebrated for what he accomplished. He’s a dead poet. He was a genius. End of story.
    Last edited by 2bornot2bop; 08-26-2020 at 02:26 PM.

  5. #4

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    "Celebrity" with Hank Jones on drums.


  6. #5

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    The great interview with Paul Desmond.
    Parker stresses being "clean and precise" and "beautiful."
    Paul asks him about the Klose book he worked in as a kid. "It was all done with books. It wasn't done with mirrors."


  7. #6

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    I didn't see this before starting a thread in Chit Chat.
    That includes the interview with Paul Desmond and also the filmed performance of "Celebrity" with Hank Jones on drums.

    I'll alert Dirk and ask him to move it here.

  8. #7

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    Jazz History Lesson: Bird and Diz


  9. #8

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    forever



    cheers

  10. #9

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  11. #10

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    This is the only Parker tune I can play; My Little Suede Shoes


  12. #11

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    bird after relaxin at camarillo

    stupendous- great dial session with howard mcghee, wardell gray and barney kessel!



    cheers

    ps- ^ slim gaillard track is classic..big slim g fan!

  13. #12

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    The musician and blogger Kevin Sun has published a small handful of posts analyzing Bird over the last year or so, which I found via Ethan Iverson's recommendations.

    A recent post has a look at master vs alternate take solos, analyzing them by playing the recordings simultaneously. In the case of Yardbird Suite, he discovers what sounds like a call-and-response pattern--Bird playing at different points in a given measure in a fascinating way:

    Musings on Bird, II: Synchronic Bird

    Iverson's site, as usual, also has some great stuff, including a brand-new interview with Scofield on the subject of Bird:
    https://ethaniverson.com/john-scofie...harlie-parker/

  14. #13

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    " Bird in Milwaukee "

    ** Here's The Corrected Story **

    Back in the '60's my friend had a 'stripper gig' with a local alto / tenor player who told him the story.......Their stripper gig was also on the South Side in a ballroom above a bowling alley....the area reminded the horn player of his Bird story......
    It had to be in the late '40's that Bird was scheduled to appear in a similar venue - ballroom / South Side Milwaukee tavern.....This horn player goes to see him, but Bird never shows, so the horn player walks to the nearest bus stop and just proceeds to wait for his bus home. While he's waiting, he hears and clearly recognizes Bird playing nearby and has to follow the music and eventually finds him. Similar tavern / ballroom / bowling alley. Anyway, sure enough there's Bird playing the absolute sh** outta polkas with a local polka band.
    The horn player says he stayed there all night then had to leave to make sure he got his bus home.

    : )
    Last edited by Dennis D; 08-29-2020 at 08:22 PM.

  15. #14

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    Bird w/Dizzy, Slim's partner Slam Stewart bass, Clyde Hart piano, JC Heard drums on Red Norvo's Fabulous Jam Session, also on Dial. I bought both Dial box sets on vinyl when they came out years ago, practically wore them out, so much good music. Even though Bird had a relatively short career we're lucky he was so prolific.



  16. #15

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  17. #16

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    Thought this was a great observation by Sco.

    Our generation, the Rock and Roll generation, my generation, we were really weird. All the kids agreed to hate the music of their parents. There was no real reason to hate it, and in fact we secretly kind of liked some of it anyway. After all, it was still music.

    But in 1966, everybody canceled everything before 1965. It was just no good. So the whole Old School pop thing that had been happening up to that point, which was the Tin Pan Alley, and the great songs and and Frank Sinatra and all that, we canceled on it.

    And that was prejudicing me and everybody else against jazz, against the feeling of swing. I heard Louis Armstrong or Count Basie and said, oh, that’s okay. You know that I love that. But Glenn Miller, I don’t know.

  18. #17

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    'Hear Bird speak in this too-brief 1954 interview with the saxophonist Paul Desmond, recorded at a Boston radio station. Desmond, famous from Dave Brubeck’s quartet, can fairly be said to geek out in the presence of the master, while Parker, for his part, takes pains to dispel the pernicious myth of Black jazzmen as wild, natural talents: “Study is absolutely necessary in all forms,” he says, after describing countless hours of practice. “It’s just like any talent that’s born within somebody. It’s just like a good pair of shoes when you put a shine on it, you know?”'

    Something to print out and pin to the wall.

  19. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by BWV
    No mention of the Clint Eastwood movie?

    Curious about opinions here on the best technical book on Parker's music?
    Easily the best book on Parker's music is the Carl Woideck one " Charlie Parker his music and life "

  20. #19

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    Quote Originally Posted by Pycroft
    Easily the best book on Parker's music is the Carl Woideck one " Charlie Parker his music and life "
    Lawrence O. Koch's Yardbird Suite is excellent and Henry Martin's new book, Charlie Parker, Composer looks promising as well:

    https://books.google.com.au/books?id...page&q&f=false

  21. #20

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    BIRD The Legend of Charlie Parker by Robert George Reisner

    Legit interviews with people who actually knew him.

    Tried to copy & paste link to Amazon but ??

    No affiliation etc etc.

  22. #21

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    Dennis D, let's see if this works:
    https://www.amazon.com/Bird-Legend-C.../dp/0306800691

  23. #22

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    have had the reisner book for decades...very solid book



    best bird research ever is phil schaaps long running show "birdflight" on wkcr (columbia university radio station..available online)...still on the air every morn..tho in repeat/replay mode these days...he covers and recovers birds every move

    shout out to PHIL SCHAAP!

    cheers

  24. #23

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