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Dark Angels of the Sax |
| Section: THE ARTS / MUSIC |
| Author: Francis Davis |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/1990 |
| Size: 2,533 Words, 14,767 Characters |
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"Charlie Parker looked like Buddha," Jack Kerouac declared in a poem about the alto saxophonist who was the single most important figure in the gestation of modern jazz. The beat laureate wasn't hallucinating: Some photos of Parker, showing him with a pot belly, round face, and eyes that Kerouac described (in The Subterraneans) as "separate and interested and humane," do suggest a likeness to one popular image of Buddha. But Kerouac's analogy depended less on Parker's physical appearance than on vibes - an awed perception of his music as godlike in its complexity and power.
Kerouac wasn't alone in ascribing divinity to Parker ("Bird" to initiates). There were hipsters in California who swore that Parker once walked on water. Soon after his death in 1955, at the age of thirty-four (from the cumulative effects of heroin and hard liquor, although labor pneumonia was the official cause), the graffiti "BIRD LIVES" began to appear on New York subway walls. If interpreted to mean only that Parker's music was immortal, the message was indisputable. But who knows what else some of his more frenzied apostles had in mind?
Among fellow musicians, Parker was in the eye of the beholder: What he was like as a person depends on whom you ask. In the recently published Miles: The Autobiography, Miles Davis, who played with Parker as a neophyte trumpeter in the 1940s, portrays him as an id-driven monster willing to pawn a borrowed horn or pocket his ...
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...easure of this enigmatic man are rhythmically suspended soul-searchers like "Patricia" and the five versions of "Landscape."
Relaxation is supposed to be the secret of good jazz improvisation, but in these performances Pepper proves that tension can also do the trick. He played as though possessed during this period. Like Charlie Parker, he blew himself into his horn and was cleansed.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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