Charlie Parker: celebrating a century of the genius who changed jazz forever

Charlie Parker at the Three Deuces New York, 1947. William P Gottlieb/Flickr, CC BY-ND

Emile Wennekes, Utrecht University

His audience knew him as “Yardbird”, or more usually, just “Bird”. The variety of sobriquets given to jazz alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, who would have turned 100 on 29 August 2020, is indicative of his different personae – most important, of course, his musical personalities.

Parker was a legendary soloist, inspiring bandleader, daring composer, ingenious innovator and a source of inspiration for many generations still. A jazz idol, full stop. But his off-stage personality revealed a more tragic figure: a drug addict and alcoholic.

Bird lived hard and lost his performance licence, several jobs and attempted suicide twice. All in all, his physical and mental health were already waning at an early age. That he died young then, at just 34 years old, was not really a shock. He passed away a week after his last public performance, on 12 March 1955. This last concert took place in the famous New York nightclub Birdland – aptly named in his honour.

Charlie Parker is considered “one of the most striking performers in the entire history of jazz, and one of the most influential”, according to the Rough Guide to Jazz. The more authoritative encyclopedia in academic circles, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, qualifies him in comparable terms and characterises Bird as a “supremely creative improviser”.

Early Bird

Parker was born and raised in a musical family in Kansas City, Missouri, which was known for its vibrant music scene. He started to play the saxophone when he was 11 years old, taking lessons at a local music school and joining high school bands.

But he chiefly developed as a musician by carefully studying his older peers. Inspired by the big bands of Bennie Moten and Count Basie, Parker embarked on the blues and swing tradition of his time. Yet he felt something was missing.

His aural vision was to strut out to the quarter-note pulse of swing. But the adventurous Parker sought distractions from this predictable performance convention by making off-beat accents, syncopations and beats against the metric grain. At the same time, he also deemed the melodies of the standards musicians played in his era rather passé.

While leaving the original harmonies of songs basically intact, he took off to replace their melodies with creations of his own. These new lines and their subsequent improvisations generally included formulas like the “ya-ba-daba bebop” transcribed in onomatopoeic “scat singing”.

Bird and Bebop

Through Parker, complexity in jazz grew considerably. He aimed – and flew – higher, literally, by performing melodic lines that jumped to the next octave, overtly appropriating notes from a higher register. Like an alto riding piggyback on a soprano, and vice versa. This progressive musical concept required alterations in the supporting chords too. It enriched the accompanying harmonies with additional notes from these very same higher octaves.

To summarise Parker’s innovations in jazz is to describe the genre of bebop, of which he was one of the founding fathers and main protagonists. Bebop became the dominant style in jazz from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, when it was subsequently overshadowed by new directions including free jazz and jazz-rock.

Bebop was then rediscovered in the 1970s, to ultimately become accepted as the “classic” style of jazz. And Bird is the epitome. He not only influenced his own generation and inspired his fellow saxophonists up to the present day. Every self-respecting jazz musician – no matter what their instrument – must study Parker’s unique playing style that essentially boils down to about a hundred different formulaic lines, which he sewed into his improvisations like a patchwork quilt.

Bird and Beethoven

Parker’s modernisation of jazz affected every single parameter of music, including instrumentation. With Parker and his associates, the big band era made legendary by the orchestras of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and the like, drew to a close.

The smaller ensemble, or combo, with a modest rhythm section of drums, bass, piano (or guitar or vibraphone, for that matter) and a few wind instruments, became the new milestone of jazz. Parker’s own quintet – which included, among others, Miles Davis on trumpet and Max Roach on drums – was, once again, trendsetting.

Given Bird’s far-reaching influence on the evolution of jazz, it’s no surprise that many aficionados consider Parker on a par with classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven. Such qualifications consider jazz as equal to classical music, and are testament to it being taken seriously as a mature musical genre. Jazz can be regarded as America’s original contribution to music history – and, by consequence, an important topic of academic study.

Parker’s centennial is currently being celebrated worldwide with new (re)releases, radio and television documentaries, and tribute concerts. And rightly so. Once you’ve been seduced by the Bird, you will never stop listening to classics like Confirmation, Scrapple from the Apple, Billie’s Bounce, or the one with the most amusing, yet appropriate title: Ornithology.

Emile Wennekes, Chair Professor of Musicology: Music and Media, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The World Transformed 2020: Registration open now! #TWT20

The rise and fall of Black British writing

Malachi McIntosh, Queen Mary University of London

In many ways, the current state of the world seems unprecedented. The last few years – but especially 2020 – have brought shocks that no one could have foreseen.

Although much headline news has been cause for anxiety, there have been a few notable moments of hope. For me, like so many, the worldwide protests in response to the murder of George Floyd have been among them.

To call the uprisings “unprecedented” would be to potentially undersell how much tensions have been bubbling beneath the surface and all the work that was already being done by activists to draw attention to these issues. Among the uprising’s hopeful surprises has been the way they’ve torn open space for conversations about race and racism in the UK.

Why don’t we teach all British schoolchildren about colonialism. Why does it take so much more convincing to have the statues of slaveowners removed than those of others responsible for past atrocities? Why were so many young people of colour so quickly mobilised to say “the UK is not innocent”, in solidarity with their peers on the streets in the United States?

With the boom in interest in the histories of colonialism, empire and the British civil rights movement in response to Black Lives Matter protests, has come an aligned boom in interest in Black British writing.

Candice Carty-Williams and Bernardine Evaristo won significant firsts for Black authors at the British Book awards – book of the year and author of the year, respectively. Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, became the first Black Briton to top the paperback non-fiction chart, while Evaristo topped the fiction list.

Across social media and newspapers, reading lists proliferated, apparently responding to a hunger from readers of all backgrounds to gain knowledge of issues and the history of race and racism they’d never received in schools or universities.

For many in and on the fringes of the publishing industry, it’s felt hopeful that a moment of real recognition for Black British writing, in an echo of the attention being paid to Black British lives, has arrived.

But has it really? Although the accelerated pace of interest feels unique, the pattern – social unrest triggering readerly interest in the works of writers of colour – is, unfortunately, not.

Post-war Booms (and Busts)

Immediately after the second world war there was a similar boom. Britain was about to enter a long phase of decolonisation, and its demographic make-up, through waves of colonial then ex-colonial migration, was on course to permanently change. This opened up space and piqued curiosity for works from the most visible group at the centre of social transformation – at that time Caribbean emigrants.

As detailed in Kenneth Ramchand’s book The West Indian Novel and Its Background, from 1950 to 1964, over 80 novels by Caribbean authors, including classics like In the Castle of My Skin by by George Lamming and A House for Mr Biswas by VS Naipaul were published in London – far more than those published in the Caribbean itself.

To Sir With Love (1959) by the Guyanese writer ER Braithwaite is a semi-autobiographical novel set in East London. Wikimedia

What’s most significant about that spike is that it didn’t last. As Caribbean migration waned after the passage of a series of restrictive immigration acts from 1962 to 1971, so did the opportunities for writers from Caribbean backgrounds.

This was evident in the fortunes of most of the those published in Britain post-war. The likes of Edgar Mittelholzer and John Hearne - then known and widely published - and even Samuel Selvon - now widely known and respected - found their works falling out of print.

Attention then shifted to Black writers from the African continent – primarily those from west Africa, like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka – where the progress of decolonisation was taking dramatic turns. But this interest also waned.

There have been more recent booms, for example in the 1980s after the New Cross fire in 1981, which sparked protests in south London after 13 young black people were killed, and the Brixton uprising of the same year in response to excessive and, at times, violent policing in the area.

Then, around the turn of the millennium, rechristened “multicultural” writing rose, alongside visible demographic change, through the successes of Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Monica Ali and others. These were breakthroughs significant enough for Wasafiri, the magazine where I work and which has been championing Black British and British Asian writing since 1984, to declare in 2008 that Black Britons had “taken the cake” of British letters.

Yet in 2016, eight years later, only one debut novel from a Black British male author, Robyn Travis, was published in the UK.

The Future

In her memoirs, the British writer and editor Diana Athill calls the post-war boom in writing from then-colonies a result of short-lived “liberal guilt” combined with curiosity about the peoples and nations disconnecting from Britain. There are concerning signs along these lines in our present.

In their recent report on UK publishing – a result of over a hundred interviews with those in the field – Anamik Saha and Sandra van Lente reveal that British publishers feel that they ought to publish more writers of colour, and that those same writers belong to a particular niche with limited quality and limited appeal to their target readers.

Bernardine Evaristo has questioned the growing body of Black writing. Jennie Scott/Wikimedia, CC BY

Anticipating this conversation in her 2019 essay What a Time to Be a (Black) (British) (Womxn) Writer, first published in the book Brave New Words on the eve of her Booker Prize win, Bernardine Evaristo both celebrated and questioned the growing body of Black British writing.

Something, she notes in the essay, is definitely shifting, but she wonders how far it will really shift. If Black Britons are being published in greater numbers but on singularly narrow terms. Like their forebears in the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and early 2000s, are there only certain stories Black writers are allowed to tell? Only certain messages they’re expected to convey?

While it is far too early to make a judgement on how long the current boom will last, the way this moment repeats a pattern of social change followed by publishing frenzy is at least worthy of attention - and perhaps scepticism. So often the present seems unprecedented, but in order for it to be truly revolutionary, novel, status-quo shifting – liberating – the changes we see within it have to be sustained.

Malachi McIntosh, Emeritus professor in British Black and Asian Literature, Queen Mary University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But is it art?

But is it art? Standup comedy and the quest for cultural credibility

In the spotlight: Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel in the hit series The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. Amazon Prime via IMDB

Sebastian Bloomfield, York St John University

Arts Council England (ACE) has recently taken the unprecedented step of including comedy as a form of theatre under the terms of the Culture Recovery Fund, part of the emergency response package to help cultural institutions recover from the blow they have taken during the pandemic. But the council has expressly stated on its website that this was mandated by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and does not mean comedy clubs will be eligible for future ACE funding.

This singling out of comedy clubs once again brings into focus the disdain that the ACE has displayed for standup in the past and means now is the perfect time to reassess standup comedy as art.

Standup comedy is not created purely by the performer, but as a collaborative production between the performer, the audience, the venue and the promoter. In the same way a theatre is arranged to support dramatic performance or a gallery is lit to display paintings, so too must a standup comedy gig be presented in such a way that it contextualises the performance to come – the iconic image of the single microphone on a stand in a spotlight is evocative of standup comedy without anything needing to be said.

Unlike many other art forms, standup performance is more akin to a reactive conversation, albeit with laughter and other reactions forming the bulk of the audience response. And, in turn, this instant audience critique often shapes the unfolding production as the performer reacts. Finally, it is the job of the promoter and compère, through advertising the gig to designing the line-up of the show and the introducing of the artists, to create an atmosphere that the standup comedy can flourish in.

At first glance a performance may seem fleeting and inconsequential, something that will only be remembered by the audience that witnessed it. But, for the comedian, each performance shapes and recontextualises their set ready for the next gig. A standup comedian may work on a routine for years, honing and shaping each line, each joke and each pause with every performance. So each gig creates something unique that is tied inexorably to the people and place who witnessed it.

A gig is not just a venue, but all the contextual understanding that goes into making it a space to present comedy and support critique. An audience is not just a collection of strangers, but a collective who are guided through previous experience or through a skilled compère what to expect from a standup comedy gig and how to constructively critique the performers.

No laughing matter

When viewed as a collection of creative spaces for the production and critique of comedy, the vitality and energy of the circuit becomes visible – not just as a way for comedians to make a living but as part of the very fabric of standup comedy itself. The lifeline provided by the Culture Renewal Fund means that more clubs will survive, that less collective experience will be lost from the circuit as a whole.

But a lot will depend on what happens in the next few months. An emergency survey by the recently founded Live Comedy Association found that 58% of the industry rely on live comedy for more than 50% of their annual income and that 57% have already lost 50% of their personal income. Further, 59% of comedians said they would need to leave the industry in the next six months if live events continue to be unfeasible.

This loss would be massive for the circuit, not just on a personal level but in terms of lost experience. Learning standup comedy relies on mentoring – when you are starting out there is very little external to the comedy circuit to guide you, no equivalent of a drama school and only two universities offering undergraduate degrees in comedy writing and performance. The only people who can tell you why comedy is done the way it is are the people who do it, day in and day out.

Grand tradition

Standup comedy in its present incarnation has been part of the British cultural zeitgeist for more than 50 years. It has evolved from music-hall singers, front-cloth comics and variety acts of the early 20th century to the performers who travelled the often politically divergent circuits of working men’s clubs, folk clubs and London standup comedy clubs of the seventies.

This was then transformed with the alternative comedy boom of the 80s, the lad-culture drenched 90s and was colonised through panel shows which became the mainstay of TV schedules of the noughties, most recently spawning the sprawling DIY scene of the last decade. Here we’ve seen amateur, professional and experimental acts alike welcomed and encouraged by gigs created by fellow comedians not for profit, but to provide the most important resource of all – stage time, the five to ten minutes where the standup comedian creates and hones their art.

Standup comedy will survive. The current restrictions brought by the pandemic are breeding technical innovation through virtual performances that are accessible to anyone with internet access. Now is the ideal time to invest artistic credibility in something that is a fundamental fixture of British life and a very broad church. Invest now in “art for arts sake” to ensure the future of standup comedy, for all our sakes.

Sebastian Bloomfield, PhD Candidate, York St John University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.