Kevin Sun

On the topic of concision in Bird's playing, Howard McGhee is quoted  as saying: Charlie Parker was something else. And he didn't play no nineteen choruses. He once told me, he said, "I can play all I know in eight bars."

Every weekday this month I'll be posting new content in observance of  Jazz Appreciation Month (J.A.M.) , so-designated by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History beginning in 2001.  International Jazz Day , so-designated by UNESCO in partnership with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, is on the last day of April, the 30th; it was first celebrated in 2012. Debating the relative merits of designating specific days or months for celebrating heritages, traditions, and the like aside, Jazz Appreciation Month is at the very least an excuse to dig into some material that I've been interested in for a while on the blog.  Friday's installment featured Johnny Griffin stretching out over Monk's "Let's Cool One." Tomorrow's will feature more about Teddy Edwards . †If you enjoy the content on this blog, please consider  supporting my band's homegrown effort to get our record through the final stages of mastering and production . It...

From an interview with Dizzy Gillespie in Art Taylor's Notes and Tones : Where did the term be-bop come from, and what are your feelings about it?   Duke Ellington once told me: "Dizzy, the biggest mistake you made was to let them name your music be-bop, because from the time they name something, it is dated."   They who?   Whoever named it; I don't remember who named it. I think it came from when we were on Fifty-second Street. We didn't have names for all our tunes, so I would say: "De bop da du ba di baba de bop," and they thought I was naming a tune or something like that.   Bop ba ba di ba do di la ba de bop.   Yeah. That was the introduction to "Max Is Making Wax." That's funny. I hummed the introduction, and you started the chorus. I guess it just happened from the way we used to hum things instead of saying the name of the tune. Say you play a number that goes be-bop. It just developed into that. I never thought o...