Charlie Parker and Jazz

Bebop represents modern jazz, which emerged as a distinctive style from movements taking place from the 1920s. Ted Gioia associates bebop with the larger force of modernism, and he notes that jazz had from the first been a modernist music whose leaders always looked forward and developed new musical forms. The rise of a new and more open modernism in the 1940s seemed an abrupt shift but was in reality a continuation of a trend, jazz's tendency to mutate and shift over time. Early modern jazz was a rebellion against the populist trappings of swing music:

The simple riffs, the accessible vocals, the orientation toward providing background music to social dancing, the thick big band textures built on interlocking brass and reed sections--these trademarks of prewar jazz were set aside in favor of a more streamlined, more insistent style (Gioia 201).

The thirty-two-bar song form and the twelve-bar blues remained the accepted forms, and the instrumentation of jazz remained the same as well. How t

. . .
uster Smith, the musician he admired most, and who was now forming his own twelve-piece group after playing with Walter Page's Blue Devils. Parker was with this new group for several months before joining a small group formed by pianist Jay McShann. By now, Parker had developed into a strong and unique soloist, and he was such a musical inspiration to the rest of the band that McShann made him the deputy leader of the group. Unfortunately, Parker was becoming more and more controlled by the heroin addiction which had started when he was about 15. It was now causing him to miss work or fall asleep on the bandstand. Parker took a leave from the band and went to New York in 1939, and there he had his harmonic breakthrough playing "Cherokee." He also was then first heard by Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, and other founders of bop. When he returned to McShann in 1942, they played New York. In time, Parker left McShann and returned to New York for good (Rich 46). For a time, Parker earned money by taking an engagement with vocalist Noble Sissle's non-jazz orchestra, where he played clarinet as well as alto saxophone. In 1943, he joined Earl Hines's band, playing tenor saxophone, and he joined Billy Eckstine's bop-era big band
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Approximate Word count = 1374
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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