![]() ![]() Then you see that there is no flimsy architecture – there is no meaningless playing that the fast tempo is hiding. The way to get into solos like this is to bring them down at first to a medium groove and explore them up close. That this solo is packed with so much substance is all the more astounding when you consider the ridiculously fast tempo of this performance. Here is a stream of ideas worthy of Bird himself in terms of variety of phrasing, melodic and harmonic invention. Notice those triplets that Harris admonished us about – here they are in abundance: This is the second A section and the bridge of a chorus of Bud’s solo. Bird himself sounds incredible on them, Bud hangs in there valiantly, and most other players sound anywhere between limited and silly. When I was coming up with other guys, trying to play these kinds of tempos, we simply called them “Bird tempos”. The tempo is stupid-fast – we need to split the time to get an existing metronome marking and come up with 168 half notes per minute. Here is a snatch of Bud’s right hand only from a solo on the Denzil Best blowing vehicle, “Move”, in a band led by Bird. ![]() Powell, perhaps more than anyone else in Parker’s immediate realm, approached the rhythmic variety – and virtuosity – of Bird. One great exception for Barry Harris was Bud Powell. It got me thinking along the lines of what I touched on earlier: that limitation in jazz has its own beauty, which has to do with the expression of humanity. It was the way the music grew: incrementally not always in great leaps and bounds. On the other hand, I heard that their limitation was also part of the beauty of their expression: The way a player like Hank Mobley isolated key phrases from Bird and then placed them in the context of his own sound, his own compositions, and the bands he played with, was a beautiful tribute to Bird, but also built on Bird, forming a continuity. They didn’t knock me out of my chair in quite the same way that Bird himself could at his best. One the one hand, I heard their limitations – I heard how their improvisatory vocabularies contained a piece of something Bird had done, but could never contain the whole of what he had expressed, and how that fact meant that there was a certain predictability in their playing. They were mostly from the hard bop era that followed the bop revolution, roughly from the middle ‘50s to the early ‘60s. I went back to those players who didn’t measure up for Barry Harris – those who didn’t have the triplets in their playing – and examined them in a more critical light. Creativity in Beethoven and Coltrane Installment 6 – Bud's Dance Between The Intuitive and The Counter-Intuitive ![]()
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