Brian Priestley (1) (1940–)

Chasin’ the Bird. The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker van Brian Priestley is een soort biografie over de legendarische altsaxofoonspeler Charlie Parker, wiens bijnaam ‘Bird’ of ‘Yardbird’ was. Het is geen dik boek, 198 pagina’s in totaal, waarvan de pagina’s 139-199 bestaan uit een uitgebreide discografie, waarin al zijn uitgekomen muziek is opgenomen.

Dat laatste is mooi, maar dan blijft er voor de levensbeschrijving van zo’n jazzgrootheid niet veel ruimte over en dat viel mij dan ook tegen. Misschien moet ik de biografie van Stanley Crouch over Parker maar eens proberen, die telt zo’n 384 pagina’s.

Wat mij bewoog om toch dit boek te lezen is wordt door de auteur toegelicht voor in het boek en is iets waar ik zelf erg nieuwsgierig naar ben;

…Parker’s music contained the seeds of so much that followed it. This, however, becomes blindingly obvious after such a listener has spent sufficient study on the altoist’s recordings to realize that he was light-years ahead of all but a handful of his contemporaries. The purpose of this book is to make that fact clear, and also to relate his musical development to his private life.

Uiteraard heb ik veel van Parker’s muziek beluisterd, maar zo ‘obvious’ is het voor mij nog niet, ook niet na het lezen van dit boek; daar kom ik nog op terug. Het kan ook goed dat ik mij nog meer in zijn muziek moet verdiepen natuurlijk.

Zo kwam voor mij niet heel goed uit dit boek naar voren hoe Parker zo virtuoos is geworden. We lezen iets over zijn eerste pogingen gedurende zijn jeugd in Kansas City. Wat wel duidelijk wordt is dat hij de smaak te pakken krijgt van de saxofoon en naar eigen zeggen elf tot vijftien uur per dag oefent. Dat mag wellicht wat overdreven zijn, maar feit is dat om een zo’n smetteloze techniek te verkrijgen heel veel training nodig is. Bovendien zijn er verhalen dat Parker met een aan hem uitgeleende klarinet praktisch direct uit de voeten kon. Hij was ongehoord muzikaal en bovendien gezegend met een ‘fotografisch’ geheugen voor muziek. Hij ging zijn eigen stijl ontwikkelen;

The ability to play improvised phrases at double the original tempo of the piece…was to become one of the distinguishing characteristics of Charlie’s mature style. Equally…he was in later years famous for the integration of melodic quotations during an improvisation on another tune.

Hij speelt in bands en komt uiteindelijk in New York uit. Zijn privéleven loopt niet over rozen. Hij trouwt twee keer en krijgt twee kinderen, waarvan er één jong overlijdt aan cystic fibrosis. Hij raakt in zijn tienerjaren al verslaafd en zou zijn leven lang met heroïne- en alcoholverslavingen worstelen. Ook belandt hij meerdere keren in een psychiatrische inrichtng, onder meer na één van zijn twee zelfmoordpogingen.

Dat laatste, hoe dat turbulente leven relateert aan zijn muziek komt voor mij niet helemaal uit de verf. Ik lees wel hoe het zijn leven beïnvloed en wat het met hem en zijn omgeving doet. Zo was hij een keer zoek toen hij moest optreden met trompettist Dizzy Gillespie. De producers van het concert herinnerden zich in een later gegeven interview, dat Parker lag te slapen in zijn bad. Gevloerd door alcohol, omdat hij in die tijd excessief dronk om de behoefte aan heroïne te verdringen;

We went to his room [at the Dewey Square] and broke down the bathroom door. We got him out of the tub, dried him, dressed him, got him in a cab, stuck the horn in his hands, and pushed him from the wings on to the stage. The result, which was recorded, can be heard on a record today. It is unbelievable in its speed, ideas, and artistry.

Daar ligt dus een stuk van zijn magie. Hij kon bijna altijd leveren en beter dan de rest. Zijn verslavingen worden hem wel fataal, hij overlijdt in het appartement van de jazz-barones en mecenas Pannonica de Koeningswarter, die hier en hier ook al ter sprake kwam. Hij was 34 jaar, de arts die zijn dood vaststelde schatte hem op 53.

De auteur is met Parker’s dood nog niet klaar met dit boek want dan hebben we goed 100 pagina’s gehad en dat blijft wat mager voor zo’n bewogen leven. Dan volgt er een analyse van Parker’s muziek en daar ligt een deel van de verklaring waarom zijn muziek zo virtuoos was, maar die mij af en toe toch wat ver ging. Er worden notenvoorbeelden gegeven en ik heb getracht het verschil te ontdekken tussen de eerste, vijfde en negende maten van Parker’s nummers Bongo Beep en Bongo Bop, maar daar moet ik gewoon meer tijd in steken of een boek tegenkomen waarin de voorbeelden in wat meer hapklare brokken opgeleverd worden. Een hedendaagse biografie met bijbehorende Spotify-lijst zou ideaal zijn natuurlijk. Voorlopig pak ik toch dit boek er af en toe bij, om het voor mij wat meer ‘obvious’ te maken waarin de grootsheid van zijn muziek ligt. Dat het soms duizelingwekkend snel is en vaak mooi om te beluisteren, dat hoor ik wel.… (altro)

Priestly presents an interesting version of the history of jazz, looking at how the technology and business of recording influenced the music. Priestly acknowledges that musical forms developed and evolved before they were recorded, but also notes that recordings helped shape and disseminate key elements of style and technique.

Many of the black musicians playing jazz early in the 20th c. refused to record for fear that their licks would be copied and stolen, so the history of recorded jazz began (1917) with the irony of the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Jazz evolved from blues and ragtime, but the ODJB was a weak harbinger of what was to come, in Priestly’s view. More revelatory were the ‘stride’ pieces originally recorded for player-piano rolls around the same time. More dynamic than ragtime, stride piano playing featured the rhythmic counterpoint, ‘blue notes’ and the uneven phrasing that would come to distinguish jazz from other instrumental music. (Writing in 1988, Priestly has the advantage of hindsight over commentators who heard the earliest jazz records firsthand.)

The early-1920s recordings of Joe ‘King’ Oliver (with his archetypal Storyville-to-Chicago arc) were among the first to capture the subtlety and emotional ambiguity of jazz, says Priestly, though the recording techniques of the time were inadequate for the complexity of King Oliver’s music. Drummer Warren ‘Baby’ Dodds had to use a severely depleted kit to avoid overloading the recording equipment, and the string bass was not picked up at all (which necessitated the use of bass saxophone). Much of the appeal of the recordings came from the harmonized two-cornet breaks of Oliver and Louis Armstrong, who with his bright, penetrating tone had to stand ten feet away from the recording horn. White bands like the ODJB imitated black bands but diluted and denatured the music, writes Priestly, though a handful of white musicians did seriously pursue the depth and swing of black jazz. (The career of clarinetist Leon Roppolo of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the jazz world’s first ‘Great White Hope,’ in Priestly’s words, was cut short when he was confined to a mental home, the standard treatment at that time for marijuana ‘addicts.’)

The popularity of race records in the 1920s inspired record producers to innovate in pursuit of sales. The addition of saxophones and strings and precise arrangements led to the proliferation of mainstream big bands (a development lamented by jazz purists at the time) away from the loose, improvising New Orleans-style combos. Meanwhile, says Priestly, the technical virtuosity and range of expression achieved by Armstrong (in the bands of King Oliver then Fletcher Henderson) elevated the works of other big bands and challenged the abilities of their rhythm sections. In the late-20s, with the advent of the electrical recording process and the use of microphones, Armstrong and his producers finally began to figure out how to capture more sophisticated rhythms and percussive sounds, and innovators like Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington began to bring better writing and arranging and superior players to their recording sessions. Okeh Records, which issued Armstrong’s singles, sent out the first mobile recording units, providing a picture of jazz activity around the country and revealing the extent to which a new generation of musicians (Bix Beiderbecke among them) was learning to play by listening to records. Recording captured off-the-cuff improvisations and made them reproducible. In some cases, the solos featured on race records were transcribed and recorded by white sessionmen, then released under pseudonyms like “The Arkansas Travellers” or “The Five Birmingham Babies”—likely as an attempt to disguise the race of the musicians involved.

In the 1930s, recorded music had to compete with commercial radio and sound films. The Great Depression sent many American musicians to Europe in search of employment. American record companies were kept alive by the playing of recorded music in public; the jukebox was popular in black neighborhoods and provided session work for musicians from black ‘dance orchestras’ who were rarely heard on radio. Fats Waller formed a small group to take advantage of this system and helped created a style that evolved into R&B. Jukebox hits also launched the careers of Billie Holiday and Count Basie, whose sound incorporated the blues inflections of southern musicians who had migrated to Kansas City and the sublime rhythm section led by Jo Jones. Big band leaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, featured on regular radio series programs, began to hire and feature more rhythmically sophisticated musicians and presented them in trio and quartet settings.

A strike organized in the early 1940s by sheet music publishers in a grievance over royalties for live radio performances had the effect of encouraging radio stations to feature older unpublished recorded material, and record companies began recording musicians playing original material in order to avoid paying royalties. After the war, the popularity of danceable R&B surged and jazz record companies faced new competition for radio and jukebox play. The introduction (1948) of 33 1/3 long-playing microgroove albums encouraged record companies to reissue old 78s, now with superior sound, and led to a revival of traditionalist early jazz at the same time as more adventurous musicians were inventing altogether new sounds. Jazz in the 1950s, in dialogue with a range of popular musics, began incorporating Latin rhythms and elements of soul and funk.

1950s technology influenced the music in new directions. Recording tape and better microphones enabled sophisticated editing and splicing, multitracking and overdubbing to go along with the longer recording times available on 33 1/3 discs. The ‘spacious but detailed’ sound achieved in the home studio of a former optometrist named Rudy Van Gelder made Hackensack a mecca for recorded jazz. Technology also helped elevate star performers above their accompanists: producers would record large-scale written arrangements then bring in the soloist later. Other artists favored spontaneity and used the new technology to capture the energy of group interplay ‘live in the studio’ (think of the jazz workshops of Charles Mingus). The availability and portability of the new technology enabled Sun Ra to start his own record company and to accumulate hundreds of rehearsal and concert recordings that were issued (however irregularly) between the late 1950s and early 1990s.

As the emergence of rock reduced the commercial appeal of jazz through the 1960s and 1970s, small European and Japanese labels provided work for American musicians and European players inspired by earlier American records. Some record companies promoted slicker sounds and packaging, and jazz-rock fusion combined (the worst) bits of both.

Priestly, a Brit, is particularly strong on the role played by European promoters and record companies in sustaining American jazz musicians during hard times. As for the music, he uncovers some interesting information to help fill in a picture of the early decades of jazz, but his take on the aftermath of bebop and beyond is muddled and sloppy. For instance, without knowing better, one might come away from Jazz on Record thinking that the electric bands of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time are in the same category as Weather Report and Return to Forever. Nope. This is still a worthwhile book, for what it claims to be, and there are other sources for reading on the music qua music. Priestly inspires us to seek out the old recordings, and we are fortunate that many of them, including piano rolls and wax platters, have been digitally preserved and are available online.… (altro)