What exactly did Charlie Parker practice in the woodshed?

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Johnny StingRay

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Nov 24, 2006
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#1
I know this isn't about a bass player, but anything learned from one of the greatest musicians of all time is valuable information indeed.
Everyone has heard the story about Charlie Parker getting that cymbol thrown at him during a "jam" session, (which as I've read, the cymbol was not thrown like a frisbee, just tossed at his feet), then he went off and practiced for a year in his woodshed, (hence the term "see you in the shed" as popularized by Scott Devine).
Eveyone knows that story, but my question is, what exactly was Charlie Parker doing in the woodshed? What was he practicing? Was he playing along with records? Was he working through all the chordal structures and scales? Was he using sheet music? (I've heard the old jazzers didn't use sheet music to learn melodies or to get their improvisation together.) What exactly was going on in that woodshed that made Charlie Parker become one of the greatest ever??
If anyone knows, I'd love to hear all about it.
Thank you everyone.
 
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#4
Fun stuff, now for a couple of serious suggestions:

1. I've heard the person who threw the cymbal was Jo Jones, drummer for the Count Basie Orchestra. This will give you some idea the genre and caliber of musicians that 17 year old Parker was trying to "hang" with. Bird probably would have spent much of his practice time working on music in the style of Count Basie and related acts.

2. Parker's mentor at this time was a sax player name Buster Smith. Studying Smith's music, influences, who he played with, would give you some idea of what he might have passed along to his student.
 
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#5
Have you not consulted The Oracle (i.e.Google SEARCH) about any of this?

Anyway, I'm busy right now, but tonight when I've got a couple of glasses of wine in me, I'll take you children to school...
Hamster_in_wheel.gif
 
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#6
Bird proceeded to woodshed, memorizing Lester Young solos from recordings and, during a job in the Ozarks, acquiring postgraduate chordal knowledge from guitarist Efferge Ware. “It was from Ware,” Ramey is convinced, “that Bird fully learned the relationship of the chords and how to weave melodies into them.”

The Stacks: Charlie Parker’s Revolutionary Junkie Jazz Alchemy

I'm sure there is much more detailed information available in the biographies.
 
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#7
Lee- ain't that the truth. There's BIRD LIVES, BIRD:THE LEGEND OF CHARLIE PARKER, CELEBRATING BIRD, THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF CHARLIE PARKER, KANSAS CITY LIGHTNING etc.

The Cymbal Incident - the way Gene Ramey tells it, Papa Jo threw the cymbal not at Bird, not at his feet, but onto the dance floor, as a 'gong', "like Major Bowes on The Amateur Hour...". In an interview Bird himself says that he only played in one or two keys and had no understanding of key changes, secondary dominants, etc., pretty much any functional harmony. So when the tune they were playing, Honeysuckle Rose, went to the bridge, Bird kept playing in Bb. The thing to remember is that Bird is only about 15 years old when this happened.

What Happened Next and heroin addiction - so Bird is pretty determined to show everybody that he CAN cut it. He gets a gig with a band put together by the local black musicians union in a nearby resort area and, on the way to that gig, there's an auto accident that kills a couple of members of the band and Bird sustains 3 broken ribs and a fractured spine. The initial prognosis is that he'll never walk again. During his recuperation he's prescribed morphine and that starts a lifelong addiction to heroin. That was 1936, he's 16 years old. the next year, he's back in the Ozarks resorts and working with the other musicians on chord changes, substitutions, voicings and inversions, as well as taking Pres solos off recordings. The old fashion way, putting a 78 rpm vinyl on and weighting the tone arm on the player to slow down the recording so you can cop the notes. When he came back is when he started working with Buster Smith. Then Mcshann, the Buster Smith again in NYC.

What did Bird shed - well as outlined above. But throughout his life, he was always checking poopie out. There's recordings of him working on Klose etudes, Weidoft. Some folks say he was even playing through transcriptions of Paganini cadenzas. When he first got to NYC, he would work on extensions of chords with guitarist Biddy Fleet (who's kinda the unsung figure of bebop). Bird talks in another interview of how he had the epiphany of playing over the extensions of the chords as if they were the harmony of the tune, how that got him to the sound he was hearing in his head. Later in his career, he talked about trying to study harmony and composition with Stravinsky or Boulanger, THAT would have been some serious poopie.

So yes, he was using sheet music, but mostly clarinet and saxophone etude books. Improvisation in the jazz idiom isn't on the page, it's in your ears. But you've got to be able to understand what you're hearing and to have the ability to get to what you're hearing on your instrument. Hearing with clarity takes work.

Thus concludes today's edification.
 
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#8
Johnny StingRay said:
then he went off and practiced for a year in his woodshed, (hence the term "see you in the shed" as popularized by Scott Devine).
Click to expand...
That term, which was brought into being by the great Lester Young (as was pretty much ALL slang musicians still use to this day), was "popular" many decades before Scott Devine was a gleam in his father's eye...
 
#9
Johnny StingRay said:
I know this isn't about a bass player, but anything learned from one of the greatest musicians of all time is valuable information indeed.
Everyone has heard the story about Charlie Parker getting that cymbol thrown at him during a "jam" session, (which as I've read, the cymbol was not thrown like a frisbee, just tossed at his feet), then he went off and practiced for a year in his woodshed, (hence the term "see you in the shed" as popularized by Scott Devine).
Eveyone knows that story, but my question is, what exactly was Charlie Parker doing in the woodshed? What was he practicing? Was he playing along with records? Was he working through all the chordal structures and scales? Was he using sheet music? (I've heard the old jazzers didn't use sheet music to learn melodies or to get their improvisation together.) What exactly was going on in that woodshed that made Charlie Parker become one of the greatest ever??
If anyone knows, I'd love to hear all about it.
Thank you everyone.
Click to expand...
Not sure what Bird practiced in the Shed, but the term "see you in the shed" has been around long before Scott Devine.
www.basslessonslosangeles.com
 
#10
Another great guitarist spoke of the woodshed experience. According to Eric Clapton, when he did the Tribute to Robert Johnson CD, he spent some time in the woodshed, where he worked on acoustic blues songs of RJ. And a specific style of finger picking that RJ did where he swung the beat with added 16th notes in a specific pattern to the 4/4 time. This is the stuff EC said he worked on. Reason was, he wanted to get that specific finger picking technique down to record the CD. So I guess, what goes on in the woodshed is a lot of hard practice with a goal intended. For more info check out the EC RJ interview.
 
#11
I’m not hip to Charlie Parker’s life story, but from the sound of it he jumped in the pool before he could swim, then he went to the “woodshed” and made sure he never drowned again.

I think a lot of us wonder what we should possibly be practicing for hours on end, because we haven’t come sufficiently close to drowning yet. Until you feel yourself sink, you never even know you need to swim.
 
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