Wolfgang Schmidtke Orchestra Bird - Jw217 - - by Jazzwerkstatt

Occasionally, in art, there are individuals whose simple existence we struggle to understand in relation to their work. Mozart is one such enigma, regardless of whether we love him or not, if we just look at the amount of sheet music he produced in his lifetime, big questions arise - when did he do it? how did he do it? If there is one figure in jazz who remains similarly inexplicable, it is Charlie Parker. He started playing the saxophone pretty late, at the age of 17, and did not receive anything resembling formal training on this instrument, or in music generally. And yet, he played the saxophone with more virtuosity than anyone before him. And through his melodic ideas he probably shaped the vocabulary of jazz more than anyone else. The word ‘mainstream’ is often used dismissively to refer to styles of jazz that are relatively easy to understand because they use a familiar musical vocabulary. But there is nothing negative about that. Music is often described as a universal language. But dealing with languages only makes sense if I am able to speak and understand them. Charlie Parker has contributed so much to the syntax and grammar of jazz that no contemporary jazz musician exists today who is not influenced in some way by Bird’s jargon, either directly, or in echoes. Of course, every language has to be able to change with the times, otherwise it could not describe the atmosphere, the reality of the present. This mutability and the will to change is what makes Charlie Parker's dialect so special. His harmonic foresight and rhythmic sophistication had a truly unsettling effect in their time. It is a great pleasure to devote oneself to his melodic lines. We owe it to Bird to transfer them into the present.