Feb 20 2008
Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins
Watch and listen to the way these two very different jazz saxophonists play “Ballade,” which is just a fancy French way of saying they are playing a ballad. Hawkins, on the tenor sax, plays the melody emotively, with some improvisations, because it is jazz after all. Parker reminds me of the scene in “Amadeus” when the Emperor Joseph II tells Mozart “There are simply too many notes.” The exuberant flourishes and cascading arpeggios of Parker’s playing were confounding to the jazz musicians of the 1940s. Charlie Parker was trying to recreate on the alto sax what Art Tatum did on the piano.
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Parker is a twit!
I think I would have disliked his style if I had been born in the generation preceding his.
He is obviously amazing… but the playing, juxtaposed with Hawkins, reminds me of people I have known who can’t stop talking.
Nice clip
Marc, did you listen to the Art Tatum clip? Both play these dazzling bursts of notes. I agree that they sound too busy, yet they are perfectly crafted, perfectly musical. I like Hawkins style, too. I think because it is more comprehensible.