> As I have stated before in the early days of the discussion list,
> I believe that Parker spent alot of time writing solos.
>
> In my opinion many of his tunes were just solos he wrote over standard
> tunes of the day that held up by themselves as tunes.
>
> If you write solos, that will happen to you.
First of all, I'd like to state for the record that I'm in agreement
with you on many if not most of your approaches to jazz study, and had
arrived at these conclusions before I'd heard of you and this discussion
list. I'm glad to have found some collaboration, because, as you've
seen, the bulk of jazz ed seems to focus on other approaches. In Jerry
Coker's book "How To Practice Jazz" he lists 18 'potential activities',
and topics such as playing transcriptions and learning tunes show up as
10th and 11th, respectively, behind activities like scales, arpegios,
and patterns. Melodic development places dead last. As you and I and
some others have found this is ass-backwards, unfortunately. Now that
I've stated my position...
I only wish there was more concrete evidence as to what and how Parker
practiced, because almost everyone who forms a theory about jazz
improvisation points to Parker for "evidence" that their theory is
correct. I know that you are stating your opinions as just that,
opinions, but in the interest of fairness I'm stating an objection to
using the "Parker sounded like this, so he must have done this" line of
reasoning. Unless you were there it's unverifiable. Now, onto another
minor point.
On another post I mentioned learning directly from Joe Pass and Pat
Martino. You mentioned that their partial transcription approach didn't
yield the best results, in your opinion. However, I never said that's
what they did, I was just stating that they didn't write the
transcriptions down, and that they used their instruments to transcribe.
I have no idea how much they transcribed or whether they learned them
start to finish or whatever. I know Pat learned a great deal from
transcribing; he learned Johhny Smith, Wes Montgomery and others from
recordings as well as knowing and playing with Wes personally. Pass said
that he played things from memory by hearing them at the record store,
but I never said that was his entire approach. I also question whether
Ray Brown and company wrote the 'scripts down or just memorized them.
THAT's what I meant by not following your exact method, not the learning
of complete solos.
I don't know if I've posted the following before, but it's the only
reference I have that can speak authoritatively on what Parker was
practicing, courtesy of Parker's longtime associate and bassist for just
about everyone at some point or another, Gene Ramey. Here it is from a
letter I sent to someone else:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As far as I know I have the only full copy of this interview, which was
done in 1984, a couple of years after Gene Ramey had retired back to
Austin and a few months before he died. There is a long section about
Gene meeting Parker when he (Parker) was 13 or 14, Ramey being around
20. He said Parker was terrible at that point, which concurs with the
legends re how he sucked and got the cymbal thrown at him, etc. There
are some sidetracks in the interview, and then the interviewer asks Gene
about how he would like to be remembered, what his contributions to the
music are. Gene talks a bit about how the bassists (in the 30s) played a
bass line, which they never deviated from.
Then he says "Bird and I used to practice all day, every day. No other
horn, no drums or nothing, just the two of us. We'd practice for
_hours_. This is how Bird developed, and this is the way I developed,
too. But in doing that I developed a style of playing bass where... I
would play the whole chord. I had to play the whole chord, just like a
piano would play the whole chord. Well, I would run (sings 1-3-5-1 over
a progression of chords) you know. So that was supposed to have been, I
was supposed to have been the first guy to do that. But the thing was, I
was actually playing the guitar part or the piano's part -the harmony
chords- for Bird to run his changes. And so that's why they said it's in
Bop. I knew how to play that, in fact I KNOW how to play that- know how
to play Dixieland, too. But long before they started calling it "Bop"
Bird and I had developed this pattern of playing, which the other
musicians started playing in later years. Today everybody plays that-
all the modern musicians now."
That's all I know about Parker's practice.
Clay