Billie's Bounce - Charlie Parker & Miles Davis (1945)
The birth of modern jazz, on a tight schedule
Welcome back, Jazzsters!
Time to get the week off to a cracking start!
In the last post, you heard a tribute to Miles Davis, by the pianist Keith Jarrett. So today we’re talking about Miles himself.
Today’s track:
Billie’s Bounce - Charlie Parker & Miles Davis
Artists: Charlie Parker & Miles Davis
Album: Charlie Parker’s Reboppers
Date of recording: 1945
Image By William P. Gottlieb, Public Domain
Olly’s Take
When I hear this music I think: “Here’s where it all began. Modern jazz started here.”
Think: Dark, smokey, New York jazz clubs at 3am.
There’s an amazing raw, electric energy to this music, which is clearly captured on the crackly recordings.
I think of a new generation of musicians, riding on the post-war euphoria, high on creative energy, literally inventing a new kind of music. People would clock-off their regular jobs in the evening, and then head down to the clubs of 52nd Street, taking part in jam sessions late into the night.
Try and picture that scene as you listen to this.
Who am I listening to?
Miles Davis (trumpet), the most famous name in jazz, and probably the most important, too. (He’s centre-right in the picture.)
Miles was active from the 1940s to the early 1990s, and single-handedly invented a new style of jazz every decade. (Including a jazz-hiphop fusion in the 80s… not my favourite!)
“It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.” - Miles Davis.
We’ll be coming back to Miles a lot in future posts.
Today’s track, though, is right back in the 1940s. Miles didn’t have his own group yet, so here he’s playing in Charlie Parker’s quintet.
What’s the music?
Today, you’re listening to birth of modern jazz.
It was the mid-1940s, and a new style of jazz had emerged, called bebop. Charlie Parker (the bandleader) is credited with inventing this style.
Miles Davis appears here in Parker’s quintet, in one of many recording sessions from the late 1940s, known as the Savoy and Dial sessions.
The instruments that make up the quintet are:
Tenor saxophone
Trumpet
Piano
Bass
Drums
3 things to listen for
Bebop style
This track probably sounds really dated to you, but at the time this was as cutting-edge as it gets. Why? Because, with bebop, individual musicians had real freedom to improvise for the first time.
(Before bebop, jazz music was still mostly composed, like big band music.)
Listen for improvisations in the middle of the track:
Charlie Parker’s long, soaring saxophone solo. He was in his element.
Miles Davis’ more cautious, searching trumpet solos. He was young, and not all that confident yet.
Standard song format
Listen out for the standard structure of the tune:
The theme tune played briefly at the start
Improvisations in the middle (based on the harmony of the tune)
The theme tune again to finish
Bebop-style songs are quite short, and angular, with lots of repetition. Listen out for that too. (The song itself is called “Billie’s Bounce”… does the song sound like its name?)
Solo length
Technology in the 1940s only allowed for a maximum recording time of around 3 minutes.
So, whereas in the jazz clubs of the 40s, soloists would take long solos — really strutting their stuff — on recordings they only had time for a short solo each.
If you’re wondering why the track is so short, that’s why!
As you listen, put yourself in the shoes of the soloists. Can you sense their frustration in not being able to take longer solos? :)
Share the music!
That’s all for today.
Please email me back and let me know which bits of the post you find most useful. That way I know what to do more of!
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Until tomorrow,
Olly Richards