I'm not sure what I ever did to you that would make you want to make my hobby of jazz music so difficult. You've been dead longer than I've been alive, but I feel like everything you ever did in the pantheon of jazz was simply to confound and frustrate me. Can I help it if I became a fan of jazz late in life? Can I help it if kids half my age know more about your contributions to jazz than I'm ever going to know? (Not to mention the "whys" and the "hows", too.) Should I be held responsible for my lack of knowledge about jazz, completely handicapping my understanding of how you advanced our art form? And since none of it is really my fault, why make me despondent with your infernal "Parker heads", your huge number of standards, and a recorded legacy so large, it defies imagination and explanation? Did you sleep and eat in the studio, too, just to cut a few extra tracks, in case somebody would doubt your genius after the immense legacy you built?
Damn you, Charlie Parker!
What do you mean, I shouldn't hate you, Charlie? Of course I should. Case in point: Last week at jazz ensemble practice, our group had gotten done fooling around with a blues in F, and the instructor says, "Turn to Blues for Alice". Great, I think. A Parker head, but at least it's a tune I actually know. I even played a lick or two as we flipped through out notations, and some of the group go, "Yeah, yeah man." Unfortunately, playing it in a half-assed way so that it sounds good to my own ears when playing in my dining room because I only know one inversion of each chord, however, is not the same as playing it with multiple inversions in a band setting. I got tore up in five seconds flat. I couldn't keep up with the melody (which nobody was bothering to play), couldn't follow the chord changes (because nobody was playing the fundamental root-third-fifth chords), and couldn't make the chords I knew fit in even when I could figure out where we were in the song. I've been more musically frustrated, I'm sure, but no, I can't remember when, and even if I could, it wouldn't make me feel any better about you, Bird. Which is why I repeat:
Damn you, Charlie Parker!
You say I should listen to more of your music? You say if I only listen, I will understand? You say I need to embody the spirit of your chord changes, imitate your use of the modes over a given key, discover the vibrancy of an off color chromatic that leads back to the basic ii-V-I progression? Okay, what should I listen to? I haven't got a single one of your recordings, so tell me where to start. The complete Dial recordings? The complete Savoy recordings? The Dial and Savoy? The complete Verve? The complete live recordings? Charlie, those suckers are sixty, seventy, a hundred bucks a pop! My CD habit is already more expensive than your drug habit, you ...
OK, that was out of line. Still, damn you, Charlie Parker!
All right. You win. I'm not giving up jazz, but I don't want you and your music haunting me the rest of my amateur jazz musician days. I've ordered a set of eight CD's of your music, 225 tracks (or something like that) of about 60 songs (or something like that). I'll sit and listen to them, really listen. I'll even follow along with the score for the songs that are in The Real Book. I've already been practicing Blues for Alice with no roots and a 6th and a 9th in every major seventh chord. I'm even trying to play Ornithology and Donna Lee again. So, if my ensemble instructor yells out another one of your tunes on Wednesday night, I won't get mad. But, if after I've played these tunes the way you did, and if after I've listened to the ten hours of music I just bought, if after all that effort I'm still struggling, still bashing my head against a wall of out-of-key, out-of-synch, bone crunching, nerve twisting dissonance, well then, I'll go back to cursing you.
I'm going to give you a chance, Charlie Parker. I'm going to sincerely give you a chance. If it works out, I'll be eternally grateful. If it doesn't, well,
Damn you, Charlie Parker! Damn you to hell.
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