i love charlie parker!!!! i recently got the charlie parker omnibook, which is a bunch of his songs and stuff, transcribed and transposed down for b flat instruments. and im doing the yardbird suite, as a serious piece, and practicing sightreading on a lot of the other stuff. but its just so cool. i mean, come on, this guy virtually invented bebop. but its reeaaaaaaalllllllyyyyyyy difficult. he was one of the first guys to accent on the offbeat. it sounds so easy... its not :) but im really enjoying the challenge. and it'll help a lot with my style, and the way that i choose to solo and improvise. hes an absolute classic of the genre. for those who know jack shit about jazz, charlie parker was the first guy to really combine arpeggios and scales in his improvisation, and, more significantly, he was the first to use substitute scales. before he started playing, most people relied on the chords, and maybe the scale that the chord was based on. blues artists used the blues scale. he introduced the blues scale to other forms of jazz, and played bits based on complementary scales. this was absolutely huge, and, 70 years down the track, we still owe him a huge debt for what he did to jazz and improvisation. his bebop style still sounds fresh and new, which is bloody amazing when you consider how long the recordings of what he did have been around. its hard to hear with some of the shitty recordings, but, even without his style, just the general tone of his playing... <drools> i play tenor (beats the shit out of alto) but i just admire his stuff so much. fucking difficult, but if i can learn to play even half as well as that, then i will have
cowboy
