music clip of the day

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Tag: Charlie Parker

Monday, 1/10/11

Happy Birthday, Max!

No drummer is more clear, more precise, more melodic.

Max Roach, January 10, 1924-August 16, 2007

“The Third Eye,” live

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“The Drum Also Waltzes” (Drums Unlimited), 1966

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With Sonny Rollins (saxophone), “St. Thomas” (Saxophone Colossus), 1956

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With Clifford Brown (trumpet), “Sweet Clifford” (Brown and Roach Incorporated), 1955

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With Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Charlie Parker (saxophone), Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), “Salt Peanuts,” live, 1953

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

In this music, you have to find out who you are, what you feel, what you want to say. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so American. You have to be yourself.

That’s also one way jazz is different from classical music. In classical music, you learn to study and come up with the finest interpretation of a work that you can. That’s a different way of expressing your personality. You have to learn to use what’s written already to express yourself. In jazz, you have to learn to be who you are, and create the music from that.

—Max Roach (in Gene Santoro, Highway 61 Revisited [2004])

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radio

Today it’s all Max all day at WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University).


Friday, 1/7/11

This would be riveting even with the sound off.

James Brown, “I Got You (I Feel Good),” live (TV broadcast), c. 1965

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Like Lester Young and Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, James Brown floats over the bar lines, defying, as he dances, the gravitational pull of the downbeat.

Want more? Here.

Saturday, 10/17/09

Charlie Parker & Igor Stravinsky

Walk into any record store and one would have been over here and the other over there. But that made no difference to the kinship they felt.

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Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing; he was speaking something close to their language. When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on ‘Salt Peanuts’. Two years later, playing Birdland in New York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately incorporated a motif from Firebird into ‘Koko’, causing the composer to spill his scotch in ecstasy.—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

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Charlier Parker & Dizzy Gillespie, “Hot House,” live (TV broadcast), 1952

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), The Firebird (excerpt; 1910), Berlin Philharmonic (Simon Rattle conducting), live, 2005

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Want to try a little experiment?

Play the Parker clip for about, say, 10-20 seconds. Then go to the Stravinsky clip and do the same. Then back. And forth. And back. And forth.