Bebop

One of the challenges faced in post-secondary jazz education across the GTA is finding qualified instructors who are familiar with dialogical methods for teaching African American jazz histories. More specifically, finding and hiring African American instructors whose musical genealogy can be delineated from “black” oral/aural histories and can draw from these historicities. Unless the narratives of this music are unpacked, analyzed and taught from its internal elements, which embodies the symbiosis and synthesis of African American dance, theatrics, poetics and American black English that encapsulates the “African American-ness” in jazz, then there remains a risk that this folk music will become more and more diluted. Consequently, it is my belief that current music educators across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) should consider alternative methods of pedagogy if students are to understand the historicity— the historical authenticity of this African American folk music. The idea for this study originated from my observation of a lack of “African American-ness”—African American narratives not being used as a pedagogical tool in post-secondary jazz curricula across the GTA. Therefore, this multi-case study will lead to the creation of an alternative curriculum that incorporates new teaching methods based on African American narratives. Dr. Barry Harris is one such educator who incorporates new teaching methods based on African American narratives. Therefore, I seek to unpack and analyze the musical and social upbringing that contributed to African American jazz pianist and educator Dr. Barry Harris’  primary contribution to jazz education, which is his concept of movement, while also expanding upon it.  When these antecedents of Harris’  concept of movement have been analyzed, they will use them as a compliance for the cultivation and filling in of gaps in post-secondary jazz curricula across the GTA.

En esta primera parte, se realiza un acercamiento a la vida de Charlie Parker desde aspectos desconocidos de su vida. No quise escribir una biografía más, sino una biografía embebida principalmente de eventos como duscutir la teoría de la relatividad con Einstein, gravar con Benny Woodman, la verdadera historia del saxo de plástico, etc.

Known to his peers as the “keeper of the bebop flame,” jazz pianist Barry Harris has cultivated and imparted a unique approach to teaching the music of Charlie Parker, Earl “Bud” Powell, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. Harris, an internationally renowned jazz pianist, composer and educator, whose former students include the likes of John Coltrane, Donald Byrd, and Paul Chambers, began playing jazz as a young adult in Detroit in the 1930s, before making a pilgrimage to Harlem, New York (Bicket 2001, 3). He has since gone on to develop a teaching method based on his unrelenting inquiry into the nature of traditional jazz and bebop (Stein 2006).
As a jazz educator, Harris has created a unique harmonic palette that features the oscillation of specific chord structures constructed from what he terms “diminished” scales.1 His theory of moving these chord structures along various scale degrees is almost a reflection of jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins’s declaration: “I don’t play chords, I play movements” (Rees 1998, 60). Perhaps inspired by this notion, Harris has developed a framework for moving his chord structures along scales in much the same way that one might think of developing single-note improvisations from scale practice. The diminished scales consist of a combination of two chord types that lend themselves to the facile movement of simple structures up and down the scale.2 The goal is to keep the chord structures moving, as opposed to static, thereby creating tension and resolution. This is what he refers to as “movement.”

In the year 1951, pioneer jazz pianist and composer Lennie Tristano made groundbreaking musical experimentations and discoveries in the realm of jazz and improvised music by utilizing a Presto tape recorder in order to create overdubbing and multi-track recordings. With the use of the Presto recorder, Tristano created experimental works that resulted in a revolutionary approach to contrapuntal improvisations, superimposition of regular and odd rhythmic structures, over-layering of independent poly-melodic and polymodal structures, and experimentation with the limits of perception.

For the purposes of this paper I have selected 1 composition from Rosenwinkel's album "The Enemies of Energy" to analyze under the lens of a post-bop observer, in that I will be examining those selections for techniques of postbop composition, including but not limited to:

-expanded forms
-enhanced options for harmonic progression
-phrase groupings that depart from conventional 4-and 8-bar frameworks
-axis progressions
-harmonies that progress in locally functional ways, but within compositions in which a single tonic is uncertain
-the absence or suppression of functional harmonic progressions and/or use of alternative cadential progressions
-common structure progressions, sometimes using stepwise motion in the bass
-bass pedal points beneath shifting harmonies
-characteristic harmonies, such as sus chords and slash chords, along with harmonies characteristic of earlier styles
-harmonic rhythm with chord changes every half-measure, measure, or every two measures
-transformative aspects of harmonic progressions and harmonic/melodic interplay

I will also add that within the post-bop era we see unique freedoms enacted in respect to form and improvisation. We often find ambiguity and circularity in regard to form, usually created by any of the aforementioned elements and/or their combinations. We also find the improvisational component to diverge from the written material, whether it be alternate changes, alternate meter/hyper-meter, alternate form, absence of form, or other manipulations in regard to the improvisational sections’ divergence from the written material. This Rosenwinkel composition exhibits all of these characteristics.

At the end of the 1940s, Charlie Parker (1920-1955) recorded a jazz album (Charlie Parker with strings, 1949) in which they would participate not only in the usual instrumental set of bebop, but also in orchestral instruments. Parker received criticism in recording this album as a commercial product intended for the white public, contraty to the proposel of bebop that expressed the ethnic identity of the black population. However, Charlie Parker with strings allowed both the financial gain and the advertising opportunities of bebop's musical characteristics to a wider audience than originally reached at the beginning of bebop. The piece Just friends by John Klenner and Sam M. Lewis, was chosen as the first of the album, possibly being one of the most emblematic of these possibilities of commercial and advertising bebop. The works will makea analyze of Parker's solo in this piece, seeking to identify compositional improvisatory features and their relationships with bebop's idiomatic characteristics.



Keywords: Bebop; Charlie Parker (1920-1955); Just friends (song, 1931); Just friends (arrangement, 1949); Melodic analysis.

The career of jazz pianist Earl “Bud” Powell evidenced a near cinematic arc. By the time he was in his late teens, he had all of the technical tools necessary to move to the front ranks of musicians in his category. He was one of the first pianists to truly understand the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic implications of the new music that was later termed “bebop.” If he fell short of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in terms of technical ability, he was at least the equal of some of the other players whose mastery of the idiom was complete, such as Fats Navarro, Sonny Stitt, Charles Mingus and Kenny Clarke (Farrell 2011). It can be argued that he was the most compelling player of the aforementioned group, a man compelled to channel his emotions through his improvisations, demonstrating an endlessly creative mind. He managed to fuse early influences of stride, swing and bebop into his musical vocabulary, without sounding contrived or archaic (Groves 2001, 3). In short, Powell may very well be viewed as a consummate artist, who explored and challenged his creative mind to the fullest extent possible. Where other pianists were content to follow the school of Art Tatum, Powell was heading in a different direction, more concerned with the new sound of Charlie Parker and transferring Parker’ s ideas and harmonies to the piano, while preserving the orchestral aspect of the instrument as Tatum did (Pullman 2012, 39-40).Powell’ s harmonic disposition was both esoteric and erratic, as well as arcane and widely misunderstood.

As the 1940s turned into the 1950s the popular image of the jazz musician shifted. The patriotic soldier jazzmen and wholesome mass entertainers of the war years were replaced by a conception of the jazz musician as a deviant who refused to conform to conventional tastes. Focusing on Down Beat and Metronome, this essay examines how this image was created in the popular jazz press of the late 1940s. The way these publica- tions responded to the music and words of the young black musicians at the forefront of bebop helped shape an image of the bebop musician as an individual who stood outside musical and social norms, and who stood in contrast to the more respectable elements of 1940s swing. Carried to others through the press, bebop’s style and image served as a model antidote to the conformity of the early years of the Cold War, and as bebop was entrenched as the basis of post-war jazz, what had been associated with just one section of the jazz community soon became associated with its whole. In this way, the styles the press had associated with bebop ceased to define a subculture of black musicians but came to embody and express a certain discontent with mainstream American society.

This short work will look at some possibilities for using Arnold Schoenberg’s symmetrical set from his Serenade Op. 24 Mvmt. 5 as pitch material in Jazz/Fusion improvisation.

I will examine some harmonic and melodic uses of the set’s two hexachords using an accepted Jazz Chord/Scale Relationship pedagogical methodology. My approach will look at these pitch groups as unordered sets or collections only, although their use as ordered sets is of course certainly possible. As many Jazz and Fusion Improvisers are familiar with Nicholas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns , I will reference this text in relation to the sets and subsets present in this survey for ease in cross referencing.

The aim of this paper is to show how Prince Rogers Nelson’s lewd on stage antics and perverse song lyrics were not the only factors that contributed to his sexually charged compositions. By examining the use of anthropomorphism (the ascription of human characteristics to what is not human), in the analysis of several of Prince’s early works between the years 1980-1984, the researcher makes the argument that his musical arrangements taken from this earlier musical cannon embody the stages of Masters and Johnson’s human sexual response cycle. Ultimately, the researcher views Prince’s musical arrangements and improvisations to be metaphors for his own genitalia having intercourse with his public.

The author analyzes the improvisational music
recordings by the jazz sound engineer Jim Anderson. The basic aspect of the article is the concept of
an individual sound engineering style, first identified in the works of an art critic N. Rakhmanova.
The author considers stylistically diverse recordings
of jazz musicians T. Blanchard, J. Zorn and P. Barber, highlighting the author’s attributes in mixing,
sound and instrumental balance. Each of the jazz soloists included in the article is considered not only
from the point of view of sound engineering of his
recordings, but also from the point of view of the
place he occupies in the space of modern jazz culture and improvisational performing art. Endowed
with creative ideas, J. Anderson’s recordings might
represent a benchmark of jazz music sound mixing.
They represent a result of work of a specialist with
a deep understanding of musical culture and performers’ intentions. On the example of individual
recordings, the author demonstrates J. Anderson’s
openness not only to modern methods of panning, The author analyzes the improvisational music
recordings by the jazz sound engineer Jim Anderson. The basic aspect of the article is the concept of
an individual sound engineering style, first identified in the works of an art critic N. Rakhmanova.
The author considers stylistically diverse recordings
of jazz musicians T. Blanchard, J. Zorn and P. Barber, highlighting the author’s attributes in mixing,
sound and instrumental balance. Each of the jazz soloists included in the article is considered not only
from the point of view of sound engineering of his
recordings, but also from the point of view of the
place he occupies in the space of modern jazz culture and improvisational performing art. Endowed
with creative ideas, J. Anderson’s recordings might
represent a benchmark of jazz music sound mixing.
They represent a result of work of a specialist with
a deep understanding of musical culture and performers’ intentions. On the example of individual
recordings, the author demonstrates J. Anderson’s
openness not only to modern methods of panning,The author analyzes the improvisational music
recordings by the jazz sound engineer Jim Anderson. The basic aspect of the article is the concept of
an individual sound engineering style, first identified in the works of an art critic N. Rakhmanova.
The author considers stylistically diverse recordings
of jazz musicians T. Blanchard, J. Zorn and P. Barber, highlighting the author’s attributes in mixing,
sound and instrumental balance. Each of the jazz soloists included in the article is considered not only
from the point of view of sound engineering of his
recordings, but also from the point of view of the
place he occupies in the space of modern jazz culture and improvisational performing art. Endowed
with creative ideas, J. Anderson’s recordings might
represent a benchmark of jazz music sound mixing.
They represent a result of work of a specialist with
a deep understanding of musical culture and performers’ intentions. On the example of individual
recordings, the author demonstrates J. Anderson’s
openness not only to modern methods of panning, The author analyzes the improvisational music
recordings by the jazz sound engineer Jim Anderson. The basic aspect of the article is the concept of
an individual sound engineering style, first identified in the works of an art critic N. Rakhmanova.
The author considers stylistically diverse recordings
of jazz musicians T. Blanchard, J. Zorn and P. Barber, highlighting the author’s attributes in mixing,
sound and instrumental balance. Each of the jazz soloists included in the article is considered not only
from the point of view of sound engineering of his
recordings, but also from the point of view of the
place he occupies in the space of modern jazz culture and improvisational performing art. Endowed
with creative ideas, J. Anderson’s recordings might
represent a benchmark of jazz music sound mixing.
They represent a result of work of a specialist with
a deep understanding of musical culture and performers’ intentions. On the example of individual
recordings, the author demonstrates J. Anderson’s
openness not only to modern methods of panning, but also to less popular techniques of the past decades, which are rarely used in modern jazz recordings. Particular attention is paid to the selectivity
with which the sound engineer chooses his projects.
His professional interests are focused primarily on
acoustic jazz, stylistically related to bebop, post-bop
and unconventional jazz. Mentioned above allows
us to characterize J. Anderson as a true professional
who demonstrates deep competencies and an outstanding understanding of the artistic foundations
of the music with which he works. At the same
time J. Anderson’s style of sound engineering can
be characterized by the clarity of sound, perfect instrumental balance and the ability to solve any kind
of a problem associated with precise fixation of the
performing material.

In Langston Hughes’s poetics, the blues assumed a cathartic role in facing adversities, taking the shape of both a declaration of sorrow as well as of a therapy helping to relieve it, often by weakening its tragic elements through irony. To this purpose, Hughes wrote poems that could reproduce the rhythms, melodies and harmonies of the blues, using the music as an accompaniment to his suggestive poetic readings. This paper addresses the interaction of poetry and music in some of Hughes’s works. In particular, we shall focus on the one hand on the issue of the interplay between poet, musicians and public, and on the other on the influence exerted by his readings on a contemporary movement such as hip hop, revealing itself both in formal terms – rhythmic and syncopated lyrics, ideal to be read aloud – and in content, encouraging an assertive ethics aimed at the development of a form of art freed from the white dominant culture.

Jarmusch első nagyjátékfilmjében egy alapvetően beatnik szellemiségű karakter állít a középpontba, és kiemelt szerepet tulajdonít válogatott egzisztencialista tanoknak. A Permanens vakáció az ötvenes évek végi beatmozgalom kései reprezentánsa, jóllehet, a beatfilm kasztrált variánsainak reneszánszáért is felelős.

Listening to a recently rediscovered home cassette recording of South African musician and activist Hugh Masekela, which was a gift from the late legal theorist Peter Fitzpatrick in 2004, unleashed are a series of recollections and reflections on the distinctiveness and significance of Fitzpatrick's scholarship, especially in relation to the emerging field of critical legal studies in improvisation. This short piece recalls Peter's boundless wisdom, kindness and generosity and the lasting impact his thought and texts have had on his students, colleagues, and readers the world over.

Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions—collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media—quickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artist’s practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as “the black Picasso,” probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artist’s interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identity—as a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writer—via the manipulation of texts in his own library.