V.V. 3--Notes and queries

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Don Corathers wrote:

> 59.34 Horn and alto together? like a knife fight or a tug of war. Check out Miles Davis and Charlie Parker on "Chasing the Bird," which can be found, among other places, on the great Rhino two-disk set Yardbird Suite.
>
> 60.6 Death of Charlie Parker. Charles Christopher "Yardbird" Parker, Jr., 1920-55. A brilliant improviser on alto sax, Parker created bop (with the help of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and others), which became the jazz of choice in New York within a few years after Bird moved there from Kansas City in 1942. "No one other than Louis Armstrong has cast such a long shadow over succeeding generations of jazz musicians," writes Brian Priestly in The Rough Guide to Jazz, describing Parker's "perhaps childlike" ability "to conceive fantastic ideas which other, more rational beings would have dismissed as technically impossible."
>
> Addicted to heroin and a prodigious drinker, Parker died March 12, 1955 in the home of jazz benefactor Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater. He was 35. Priestly: "Although never excusing or recommending his own habits to others, Parker nonetheless set an example in this sphere as much as in his music?" Parker's dissipation was probably accelerated by his frustration with attempts to package his musical genius in ways that might make it more appealing to mainstream tastes. "It wasn't the booze and junk that killed him," one music writer quoted a Parker acquaintance. "It was the strings."

Thanks a lot, Don. Great stuff. I know next to nothing about jazz, but following somebody's recommendation I bought "Yardbird Suite" about a year ago. Even to my uneducated ears it sounds absolutely great. Julio Cortázar wrote a brilliant long short story about Charlie Parker called "El perseguidor".

Thomas