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Charlie Parker, Composer

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As a founding father of bebop and brilliant jazz improviser, Charlie Parker has secured a reputation and legacy second to none since his birth nearly 100 years ago. Because of his excellence as an improviser, however, his compositions - while admired and still played - have taken a back seat. In this exciting and timely new volume, author Henry Martin rebalances our understanding of Parker by spotlighting his significance as a jazz composer.

Beginning with a review of Parker's life and musical training, Charlie Parker, Composer critically analyzes Parker's compositions, situating them within both his individual musicianship and early bebop style. Proposing that Parker composed up to 84 pieces, Martin examines their development and aesthetic qualities, their similarities and dissimilarities within a range of seven types of jazz composition. Also discussed are eight tunes credited to Parker but never performed by him, along with an evaluation of where - if at all - they fit in his oeuvre. Providing the first assessment of a major jazz composer's output in its entirety, Charlie Parker, Composer offers a thorough reexamination, through music-theoretical, historical, and philosophical lenses, of one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time.

372 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2020

12 people want to read

About the author

Henry Martin

77 books4 followers
Henry Martin is an award-winning Irish writer and art scholar. His plays have featured at Project Arts Centre, Roundhouse, Underbelly, Arcola, Theatre503, and Belltable; his fiction and poetry is published in Ireland, Mexico, USA and UK; and he has written about art and books for Soho House and Phaidon Press. He is narrator of the documentary 'Agnes Martin Before The Grid' (2016), his book 'Yappo' is published by Company Cod (2017), and his play 'The Cost of Your Forgetting' is published in 'Tiny Plays For Ireland', New Island Books, 2013.

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352 reviews6 followers
May 23, 2024
Thus far the book gives a good overview of Parker's place in the Western musical construction of "Composition" - a distinction I thank the author for, because, frankly, many jazz musicians don't exactly follow the standards of composition that we have inherited from European composers.

The ontology of composition is also explored here. Particularly, how a spontaneous composition like improvisation is truest when heard once and then is past. When you repeat and replay the recording of an improvisation, it musically changes the nature of the composition, thus making it a relational thing between listener and performer. He also discusses how Charlie Parker began "composing" in a sense his performance on the 1945 cut of "Ko-Ko" as early as 1942 or 1939 - something important because it truly shows how Bird's experimentalism was something he had worked on and striven towards. It also changes the nature of how to question Bird as an improviser and situates him in the dictates of a "Composer," as these were things he worked on, developed, and then finalized in a compositional nature. But how does that impact the idea of his spontaneity and ephemeral brilliance?

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One critique I have of this book is that it is an ACADEMIC'S BOOK about Charlie Parker. I feel that academics don't "GET" Bird and other jazz musicians because they break them down to pure INTELLECTUAL THEOREM that is INSTITUTIONALIZED. I wanted someone who would look at Bird as a serious composer, with serious things to say. Maybe it's because I love to create, and I get thrown off by people who proscript overt formality and intellectualism broken down to non-intuitive theorems that aren't so much an expression of life, people's lives, a person's life, the jazz musician's life, but rather the expression of a cultural ethos of an organization that has other agendas besides what the music is to figure out. Same issue pervades literature in academia.

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His assessment of Bird's 32 Bar Rhythm Changes compositions was not that good. Too much overt academic formality, and not enough true analysis of what Bird was doing.
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