Oct 5, 2017

Charlie Parker's "Cool Blues" and Bizet's "Carmen"

Charlie Parker's "Cool Blues" is a "riff blues" in C, first recorded in 1947. 

The riff itself was in Parker's vocabulary at least as early as his March 28, 1946 recording session in Los Angeles for Ross Russell's Dial label; he uses the lick in his "Yardbird Suite" solo. About a year later, on February 19, 1947, Russell set up a recording session with Parker, pianist Errol Garner, and Garner's rhythm section. Parker had recently been released from Camarillo State Hospital. He was relaxed and refreshed, and playing beautifully. One of the tunes recorded was "Cool Blues," a setting of the riff as a 12-bar blues. Here are the four takes from this session:               




These recordings of "Cool Blues" were titled differently in various Dial releases: "Cool Blues," "Hot Blues," and "Blowtop Blues."

In the biography Charlie Parker: His Music and Life, author Carl Woideck mentions some possible sources of the "Cool Blues" riff. One possibility is the very brief use of a similar lick in Duke Ellington's "Blue Ramble" (1932). The riff occurs at 1:40 and 1:58:




Woideck also quotes Phil Schapp's liner notes for The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker as stating that "Cool Blues" is "similar to a set-closing theme...reportedly used several years beforehand by bassist John Kirby's sextet." In a telephone conversation with Woideck, Schaap also mentioned that "at least one musician who remembered the Kirby theme sang it to Schaap in a way similar, but not identical to, Parker's version."

A footnote in Schapp's liner notes:
Bird told Benedetti that his title for "Cool Blues" was "Blues Up and Down." This same blues theme was used earlier by the John Kirby Sextet to take the "Biggest [Little] Band in the Land" off the stand. Bird learned it by hearing the Kirby Sextet and through his friendship with Russell Procope, that group's alto saxophonist.
This speculation on the origin of the tune does seem credible. However, there is another likely source, in Georges Bizet's opera, "Carmen."

The "Cool Blues" riff shows up briefly, but unmistakably, in Act 2 of "Carmen." In this recording, it occurs from 1:16:22 to 1:16:52:




Woideck added the Bizet information in the (later) Italian edition of his Parker biography, mentioning also that the Kirby group was known for its jazz interpretations of European classical music. The Italian edition also mentions that "[the Kirby set-closing theme] does not appear in any of the official records of the orchestra for various labels, and the search for live performances and radio tunes for the band has not identified any version as yet."

Schaap makes a good case that Parker might have adapted the Kirby melody. But Parker might equally well have lifted the theme directly from "Carmen" - he was definitely a classical music fan. Or both, or neither. The Ellington fragment is pretty fleeting, and seems less likely as a source.

Quite a few recorded live versions of "Cool Blues" exist; below are four from Youtube:

With Fats Navarro and Bud Powell (1950):




 "The Washington Concerts" (1953) (note the "Habanera" quote):




"Summit Meeting at Birdland" (1953), with John Lewis:




With a very young Chet Baker (1953):





6 comments:

Mark B. said...

Not that it can't happen, but I'm suspicious when I read about early jazz musicians liking/knowing classical music. piano players would have learned etudes and pieces, but horn players, not so much. Back in the 1970s I read that Duke Ellington learned voicings and harmony from Debussy and Ravel. James Lincoln Collier has debunked that one - Duke studied with a piano teacher for a very short period, and was largely self-taught. It was writers (in particular, European) who claimed that they heard these classical composers in Duke's work - Duke never cited them himself, and never studied composition or evel listened to classical records. There's also a much-cited reference to Bird digging Stravinsky, but I suspect that was from a single hearing of a record. First, Bird was a self-taught player, and an obsessive practicer, not leaving much time for classical music listening. When he got to NY, he was already a junky, and was just trying to get gigs and score dope - not much time for the Philharmonic.
So where there certainly were particular jazz musicians who were familiar with the classical repertoire, they were rare before the rise of the music school jazzer. Tatum was one for sure.

Peter Spitzer said...

Mark, I'd give Bird a little more credit. Regardless of his drug dependency, he was a brilliant and driven musician, who was intellectual in his own way, as was Dizzy, and some other NY bop pioneers. Reading Bird biographies, it seems that among the originators of bop, Parker was the one who could take a musical concept that interested him, and almost immediately incorporate it into his musical language, in a natural and melodic way. Studying his solos, I see pretty clear evidence that he was meticulous about his harmonic concept, to a degree that just having a gifted "ear" doesn't explain.

I don't hear any Stravinsky in his musical language, but I don't doubt that he had some records at home. Actually, though, I sometimes think he might have checked out Bach. The structure of Parker's lines sometimes reminds me of the cello suites. Pablo Casals' recordings of the cello suites came out in the late 1930s.

Brian Hunker said...

I think it's fascinating to hear the similarities between Cool Blues and Carmen. But when Jazz musicians quoted something, they generally let you know that's what they were doing. Note the audible crowds reaction to hearing the quote from the "Habanera". Note also that Bizet's "Habanera" is itself a quotation, the source of which is a historically anonymous Afro-Cuban man or woman.

As for 'lifting' lines, whether intentional or not, I usually disagree that such a thing takes place. Bird didn't need to hear the Cool Blues riff from Carmen or Kirby or anywhere else. Just try playing the riff on your own instrument. You can see how it arrises out of a single dominant seventh arpeggio structure, adorned and animated in the way that is deeply integral to Parker's signature musical voice.

Also, in all the examples Parker plays it as a C7 (concert), whereas the in the Carmen clip its a Bb7. Some self taught musicians transpose like in their heads, but musicians who possess the sense of absolute pitch would not accidentally transpose a riff they are remembering.

I agree that Bird's recorded performances make it clear that he had more than just an ear for harmony. It takes much more than that to communicate so sophisticatedly with his peers - often at breathtaking tempos!

But i think this quest to sort out who is the rightful author of this or that line is cuts against the grain of what music is. It's a matter for lawyers and businessmen who want to own music for profit. Now, because economics so dominates our whole way of thinking, even we musicians want to "own our music" without really thinking through what that entails, or where that thinking comes from.

I think we'd do better to imagine musicians as discoverers of melodies and harmonies as opposed to authors. The same melody can be discovered and rediscovered independently at different times and places because, like laws of physics, music's internal logic is surprisingly consistent. It almost feels cosmic, or at least deeply human in a way that becomes more clear the more closely we look at it.

Peter Spitzer said...

Brian - Thanks for your comments!

I hadn’t realized Bizet lifted his “Habanera” theme from a pre-existing source. In fact, Wikipedia, in the article: “Habanera (aria),” has this entry:

"The score of the aria was adapted from the habanera "El Arreglito", originally composed by the Spanish musician Sebastián Iradier. Bizet thought it to be a folk song. When others told him he had used something written by a composer who had died 10 years earlier, he had to add a note to the vocal score of Carmen acknowledging its source."

I am mostly with you on the question of “ownership” of music, especially in the ridiculous way copyright has sometimes been litigated. I think that copyright is a valid, necessary concept, but standards of application and enforcement are really problematic, since judges and juries may be easily persuaded by “experts.” It’s hard to see how this problem could ever be resolved.

I wasn’t exactly looking to "sort out who is a rightful author.” It’s really just a minor point of Parker analysis. I plead guilty to having an interest in this sort of trivia.

About “lifting” lines - Take a look at Henry Martin’s article on the thematic origins of four Parker tunes: http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.18.24.2/mto.18.24.2.martin.html. In particular, check out the origins of Parker’s “My Little Suede Shoes,” clearly consciously lifted from two pre-existing French pop tunes.

About the key of “Habanera” vs. “Cool Blues” - It’s very easy to transpose a simple theme like this into any key. Any reasonably well-trained jazz musician could do it (many of my high school students could). Bird may or may not have had absolute pitch, but that really doesn’t apply here.

The “Cool Blues” riff is not particularly dominant-chord related. It’s a major scale riff, using a major seventh note rather than a minor seventh. Parker did in fact often use major scale licks over the tonic chord in a blues. Perhaps he just liked that sound, or perhaps it helped bring out the contrast when he (often) used a minor seventh in bar 4 of a blues, to create a V of IV sound going into the IV chord in bar 5.

Anyway, I do appreciate your comments. I like your outlook in your last paragraph, and pretty much agree with you. I’m sure quite a few musicians feel the same way.

Brian said...

Hi Peter.

Thanks for reading my comment and for your responses to various points. I do have to apologize for writing too much and coming down so hard with my strange opinions. Sometimes I get on the internet in the morning and I see the comments I left the night before and its feel like I'm the American Werewolf in London!

I really do appreciate that you are so interested in Charlie Parker trivia, and sharing what you've learned as evidenced by these articles you've written here. I didn't mean to minimize or impugn your interest in music in any way. Surely you can tell by my untempered enthusiasm how recently I've arrived at my opinions regarding Jazz. I do love it though.

I like that you cited the wikipedia entry which points Sebastián Iradier as the 'composer' of the Habanera. I went one layer deeper and read the entry on Iradier himself and read this:

"[Iradier] is known primarily for his habaneras, especially the one titled "La Paloma", written around 1860 after a visit to Cuba."

This is inline with my original supposition that the earliest people who sang and danced to what Europeans later dubbed the "Habanera", were people who were brought to Cuba as salves from Africa. If anyone deserves any kind of credit for any of this its those people who's names our official history was simply too brutally racist to even record. I read a book by Ned Sublette called Cuba and its Music a few years back that chronicles not only the development of American musics through Cuba, but the hundreds of years of horrible exploitation and expropriation that befell the people who developed the music. Please forgive me, but its a shadow cast over the subject of music that I find hard to set aside even in a polite conversation.

...And you absolutely caught me being sloppy in my description of the Cool Blues riff. I meant to say "Maj7" throughout and I'm shocked to see that I wrote it down as dominant 7ths! I'm a guitar player, and so my ear and concept of harmony has sort of developed around how tonal patterns arise on the guitar. The thought of calling up a dom7 structure and expecting it to sound like Cool Blues makes me feel foolish for saying that. The raised 7th is precisely the tone that puts the "Cool" in "Cool Blues"! All I can say in my defense is it was late at night when I was writing that.

Thank you also for sending me the link the article by Henry Martin. It looks extremely interesting and straight-dope academic. I will read it carefully in the hope of learning more about how Parker composed his melodies.

Many thanks again for your writing and taking the time to read my rambling.

AdamP said...

Listening to Lily Fayol singing Le Petit cireur noir just now - I was immediately struck by how sharp she sings on that - just like Bird! Did he get that from her?!