Charlie Parker - The 1949 Downbeat Interview
Six years after this was published, Charlie would be dead at the tragically early age of 35, so any primary source about him is invaluable.
Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
The following interview appeared in the September 9, 1949 edition of Downbeat magazine, although at times, the style employed by Michael Levin and John S. Wilson feels more like an interrogation than an interview.
“Pushed further,” “He Admits,” “Whether He’ll Admit it or Not,” these are not phrases usually employed to generate an atmosphere of warmth and cordiality aimed at putting the interviewee at ease.
On the other hand, six years after this was published, Charlie would be dead at the tragically early age of 35, so any primary source about him is invaluable, especially given the hagiography that followed his death. And further to its credit is the amount of accurate and detailed information the article contains about the earlier years of Charlie’s development as an instrumentalist who would uniquely alter the course of Jazz.
The interview appeared in the magazine under the following by-line:
NEW YORK—"Bop is no love-child of jazz," says Charlie Parker.
“The creator of bop, in a series of interviews that took more than two weeks, told us he felt that "bop is something entirely separate and apart" from the older tradition; that it drew little from jazz, has no roots in it. The chubby little alto man, who has made himself an international music name in the last five years, added that bop, for the most part, had to be played by small bands.
"Gillespie's playing has changed from being stuck in front of a big band. Anybody's does. He's a fine musician. The leopard coats and the wild hats are just another part of the managers' routines to make him box office. The same thing happened a couple of years ago when they stuck his name on some tunes of mine to give him a better commercial reputation."
Asked to define bop, after several evenings of arguing, Charlie still was not precise in his definition.
"It's just music," he said. "It's trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes."
Pushed further, he said that a distinctive feature of bop is its strong feeling for beat.
"The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it," Charlie said. "It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible."
He admits the music eventually may be atonal. Parker himself is a devout admirer of Paul Hindemith, the German neo-classicist. He raves about his Kammer-musik and Sonata for Viola and Cello. He insists, however, that bop is not moving in the same direction as modern classical. He feels that it will be more flexible, more emotional, more colorful.
He reiterated constantly that bop is only just beginning to form as a school, that it can barely label its present trends, much less make prognostications about the future.
The closest Parker will come to an exact, technical description of what may happen is to say that he would like to emulate the precise, complex harmonic structures of Hindemith, but with an emotional coloring and dynamic shading that he feels modern classical lacks.
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