"Swinging in Bird's Paradise"
The king of bebop has returned to haunt us. Lynden Barber reports:
For modern jazz players, Charlie Parker is ``like Bach is to classical musicians'', says Australian saxophonist and composer Sandy Evans. She's explaining her involvement in the music-and-theatre piece Testimony -- The Legend of Charlie Parker, which gets its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House on Wednesday as part of the Sydney Festival, before a slot at the Melbourne Festival in October.
You keep going back and looking at him as an example of a classic way to swing, to create beautiful sound, to put melodies together, to incorporate spontaneity while outlining structure,'' Evans says, calling Parkersuch a perfect role model for how to be an improvising horn player that you constantly refer back to him''.
Alto saxophone genius Parker -- famously nicknamed ``Bird'' -- died in 1955 at the age of 34. His life was marked by heroin addiction, suicide attempts, a six-month spell in a psychiatric hospital and frequent outlandish behaviour. It also saw the creation of some of the most brilliant and original jazz the world has heard.
Parker, with his trumpet-playing colleague Dizzy Gillespie, revolutionised jazz during the 1940s swing era, distilling popular music into a sharply angled modernist art form called bebop. He introduced a technical virtuosity and harmonic sophistication that had the jaws of contemporaries dropping in disbelief (and sometimes jutting in hostility; then, as now, the new was seen in some quarters as a threat).
Having begun life as an ABC radio piece, Testimony, under Nigel Jamieson's direction, draws on music, poetry and elaborate lighting and production design to reassess Parker's life story.
Evans has put her well-known tenor and soprano sax playing in the back seat to concentrate on her role as composer and arranger, with American poet (and former Australian resident) Yusef Komunyakaa providing the words.
Playing the music is Paul Grabowsky's 19-piece Australian Art Orchestra (with the crucial alto saxophone roles taken by Lachlan Davidson, Paul Cutlan and Elliott Dalgleish), while 11 local jazz and blues singers -- including Shelley Scown, Kristen Cornwell and Joe ``Bebop'' Lane -- handle a song apiece.
For Komunyakaa, Parker's life represents the struggle and tragedy of African-Americans of the '30s and '40s. Yet this was hardly a conventional hero or a victim, rather someone who would take a leak in a club phone booth or, for kicks, have sex with the most obese woman he could find. A man sometimes so stoned he would nod off on the bandstand, be nudged awake when it was his turn to take a solo, and astonish everyone with his playing before sitting down and falling back to sleep. How might such a larger-than-life persona represent the tragedy of an entire race?
Evans says that Bird's drug habit and his spell in the Californian mental home, Camarillo, are in the text and that ``one of the exceptional things about Yusef's poetry is that he just has a way of marrying an image, an event and the sound of words. It sounds like a big ask, but he does bring those things together with his passion in a way that does express the struggle and suffering of African-Americans of that time. Having said that, it's not as if the piece is a big political statement -- it's more multi-layered.''
There's also the question of how to be true to the spirit of a once radical music that familiarity has long since rendered safe. A couple of Parker tunes -- Ko Ko and Moose the Mooche -- are included, but elsewhere Evans has written contemporary pieces inspired by, and quoting from, Parker's music. Her approach, she says, has much in common with the rearrangements of '30s jazz tunes in Robert Altman's film Kansas City, and producer Hal Willner's 1992 CD tribute to Charles Mingus, Weird Nightmare, where contemporary players bring a fresh sensibility to classic jazz.
Testimony, she promises, will be a new musical experience. For example, her overture and finale include fragments of Parker themes -- but played against one another in counterpoint, with a new bassline and samples of radio broadcasts from the era. Mostly, though, this is a vocal project, Evans says, and all the songs are original compositions. ``For example, I might have used chord progressions from a Parker song and written my own melody, or used some lines from his solos as backing figures in the arrangement -- or even more [avant-garde] 20th-century devices [like] using some of his lines played backwards.''
She recalls her reaction on hearing for the first time a recording of Parker and Gillespie's celebrated 1953 concert at Toronto's Massey Hall. The energy and danger of that performance just jumped out at you,'' she says,so with the arrangements I've tried to create that energy from a contemporary perspective. That's why I'm really thrilled about [working with] the Art Orchestra, which has a very good chance of creating that life and energy from the modern perspective. Which I don't feel we'd do if we went in there and said, `OK, we must play this solo the way Charlie Parker played it.'''
- The Australian (Lynden Barber), 11.01.02
