I have a very special guest writer for you this week, Mr. Bill Strickland, founder of the wonderful non profit organization in Pittsburgh known as Manchester Bidwell which,
1) provides state of the art jobs training programs intended to give poor and otherwise disadvantaged adults the skills and direction they need to land meaningful, good-paying jobs that provide the foundation for a much brighter future, and
2) offers rigorous after school courses in the arts that light a creative fire in at-risk kids and inspire them to stay in school (a program known as Manchester Craftmens Guild).
He is also the winner of the MacArthur Foundation genius grant among many other truly commendable accomplishments and awards.
Sooo, youre probably wondering how I got such a legit guy to guest write for me. Well, I didnt really. Im simply snagging an excerpt from his book, titled Make the Impossible Possible, which I highly recommend you read. Enjoy!
In the 1930s, a young saxophone player from Kansas City showed up on the stages of the best jazz clubs in New York, playing with such virtuosity that even the best jazz artists of the day could only shake their heads in awe. His name was Charlie Parker, and he became an overnight phenomenon. Now, I have to be honest; Im no fan of Charlie Parker the man. in many ways he was a mean, sometimes treacherous person, and his self-destructive tendencies and reckless abuse of drugs and alcohol eventually killed him at the age of thirty-four. But despite the mess he made of his personal life, he understood that music was a way of seeing some deeper meaning in the world.
I kept thinking, theres bound to be something else, he said. I could hear it, but I couldnt play it.
Parkers frustration was that the vision, the potential, the meaning he sensed in the music was beyond his abilities as a musician, as astonishing as those abilities were. He struggled, every time he picked up his saxophone, to deepen his vision, strengthen his technique, and lengthen the reach of his talent. The act of playing his horn became a desperate search for the elusive music he could hear only in his heart. After months of struggling and failing, Parkers search was finally rewarded.
As the story goes, Parker was playing at a New York chili house one night, soloing on a notoriously difficult tune called Cherokee, when the music opened up to him in a whole new way. It would take a jazz scholar to explain precisely was Parker discovered that night, but in simplest terms, Charlie found a new way to draw melody lines from the chords other band members were playing. The effect of this discovery was huge, because it freed Parker from the traditional structures of rhythm and harmony that had shaped jazz music, and limited jazz soloists, since the earliest days of the art.
Now Parker was free to unleash his fierce talent, steering his dazzling solos in any direction he wanted. He carved out melody lines that looped, dove, circled, and soared so intricately and with such blinding speed that some of his fans would play his 45 rpm records at 33 rpm just to hear what the guy was doing. But no matter how far and how wildly he strayed from the melody, Parker could still resolve his solos in the rhythms and harmonies of the song. Before that night at the chili house, Parker was a work in progress. After his revelation, he became a true genius, an artist whose music fundamentally changed the nature of jazz. Jazz historians could write volumes on the impact of Parkers epiphany, but for Parker himself, the effect of the revelation was a relatively simple matter.
I could play the things Id been hearing, he said. I came alive.
Im convinced that the moment of insight Charlie Parker had at the chili house is the moment all true jazz artists, all people who search for meaning in their lives, strive for. They dig down past compromise, past imitation, past all the conventional wisdom about whats important or true. For them, every performance, each day, is a chance to discover new depth, new range, new tone, new phrasing. These individuals reach, they stretch, and they grow. For them, the very act of living is an opportunity to find new and richer meaning in the music, in what they do. They dont strive this was to become virtuosos. On the contrary, they become virtuosos in order to express the music they hear in their hearts.
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The following song is titled, A Night In Tunisia, from the album Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945, featuring Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker. Fred Kaplan of the New York Times describes the album as the most stunning jazz discovery in a decade the Rosetta Stone of bebop The reason being, the tracks on this album were not discovered until sometime around 2005. They feature bassist Curley Russell, percussionist Max Roach and pianist Al Haig. The concert is considered by many to be one of their greatest small group performances.
Duration : 0:8:2
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Technorati Tags: 1945, 22, charlie, Dizzy, Gillespie, Hall, in, june, music, Night, parker, runco, runco's, Town, Tunisia, weekly
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