Friday jazz, in brief

 Just a quick one for today, so I'll go with something vaguely topical.  Charlie Parker, "Confirmation."  As in, bias.  Along with Dizzy Gillespie, Parker was one of the founding fathers of bebop, which was the point at which jazz veered away from pop.  Swing, even at its most complex, was still basically dance music, and instrumentalists of a certain caliber needed more freedom for exploration.  So, they got together at a club called Minton's after hours, and playing together, bebop just developed from their jam sessions.  It was not dance music.  It was too complex, too cerebral, and when those who don't listen to jazz describe the genre as being abstruse or impenetrable, it is often bebop that such people have in mind.

The primary reason is that bebop is not generally based around a hummable melody with a catchy hook, like a pop song.  Instead, a bebop piece will have a core structure which is often just... odd, constructed that way because it happens to be amenable to the kind of improvisation that bebop musicians do.  So here's "Confirmation."  You'll notice that the core "melody," such as it is, is not the kind of thing that you'll hum all day long.  It is a little jarring, if you aren't a regular jazz listener.  Yet when Parker and the other instrumentalists break into their solos, while the notes come fast, they tend to organize more cleanly around blues-based concepts.  If you study the music theory, you learn how the improvisations are connected to the chord structures, but the point is that the melody is about creating a chord structure that allows interesting improvisation, not a hummable melody.  That's what gives you bebop.  In very brief, introductory terms, for the purposes of how to listen to Charlie Parker.  Which everyone should do.