Embraceable You
Posted in Jazz on Aug 3rd, 2008 No Comments »
My admiration for Charlie Parker has always been grudging. It comes as no surprise to me that he was a egomaniac sponger on everyone he came into contact with – you can almost hear it in his music. That acid tone, the flippancy of his phrasing – that irritating Woody The Woodpecker phrase – and his clever-dick quotations – the clarinet break from High Society being the one he seems to throw in most often when he runs out of ideas. And there are rarely any moments of silence in his solos. Everything is a waterfall of quavers, semiquavers and demisemiquavers, endless and unstoppable, bludgeoning you into admiration, an exercise in domination, putting us all in our place. A harangue at the top of his voice. I sometimes catch myself listening to him with my mouth open.
Lester Young plays no more notes than he needs. As if no-one else was there. We’re listening in on a soliloquy. His silences are eloquent, as if he is searching for his note, like the right word, to express just what he feels. His improvisations are parallel melodies, conjured in an ethereal world of the sublime.
Here is one of his greatest solos. ‘Embraceable You’ from a live performance in 1949. Roy Eldridge opens with a lovely, and uncharacteristically subdued, chorus. Young follows him. After Young, Tommy Turk on trombone. Then Parker, seemingly calmed by his surroundings, and the tune, into thinking a bit more carefully what he wants to say. At times he still plays twenty notes where one would do, but there’s less of the incontinent rush than is normal. A fine final solo from Flip Phillips on tenor.
