Learn the changes and then forget them.
-- Jazz musician and composer Charlie "Yardbird" Parker (1920-55)
According to the wikipedia article on Charlie Parker:
Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuoso technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker's innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. ... He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. ... His themeless blues improvisation "Parker's Mood" represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz.... At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others.
I haven't been writing much in my blog lately. It's not because nothing's been going on. A lot has been, and still is. This is a significant time, a profound turning point. But it's felt as though reducing it to writing now would solidify something that doesn't need to be solidified yet. There will be time enough to do that, when it's time. I guess you could say that I've been busy learning the changes and then forgetting them. ;)
As a friend of mine once said, stepping stones are there for you to use in crossing the river. You don't pick them up and carry them with you. It may well be that some of those stepping stones will offer more than just a foothold in travel to my creative process and to my life; if so, they will show up again in one form or another.
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