Word: birding
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...made it happen. Now I suspect something similar is in store. She will listen until she hears the right idea and then move decisively. "You know," she told me, "if you look back, you see that the First Ladies tended to focus on just a few issues. Lady Bird Johnson with wildflowers and highway beautification. What a lasting impact that has had on the country. And the First Ladies were generally more successful than their husbands. Their husbands had to deal with every issue, and so their legacy is more mixed. I have a forum. I won't have...
Hank Williams? He's on the juke box, singing about long country roads and broken hearts, and there is Charlie Parker, the man who turned jazz inside out as if he'd just pulled it through the sleeve of his coat, listening. Entranced. A bystander asks Bird to explain what he's doing paying such close attention to music that is so beyond--no, beneath--the jazz horizon. Parker has an easy answer. "Listen to the stories," he says, and keeps on listening...
...huge spiritual yearning of John Coltrane, who died believing in the salvation his music could bring. Parker, the greatest and most lyrical and most forbidding pioneer of bop--a word he disliked--who exerted an irresistible force on the music and a more perilous influence on anyone around him. "Bird was like fire," says John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. "You couldn't get too close...
...there is Parker's pal Dizzy Gillespie, who said Bird was "the other half of my heartbeat," a formidable spirit and great artist who tried, and failed, to save Parker from the demons that drove and devoured him. Clifford Brown, dead in a car wreck, whose only vice was chess. Miles Davis, who beat back his inner darkness and took jazz to the peak of its last great popularity. Thelonious Monk, a generative spirit of compulsive genius, who applied a kind of circular geometry to the keyboard and gave jazz new contours. Billie Holiday, the beautiful desolation angel, the most...
Brubeck. Marsalis. Miles and Duke and Louis and Lady Day and Count Basie and Bird and Prez, and Benny Goodman too: it's folly to rank on Burns for spending so much time on these looming figures because, at the last, they are the ones who made the history he is setting down here. Writer Ward has compared the various warring partisans of jazz to a dysfunctional family, and all the sniping and complaining about short shrift for today's talent miss the mark that he and Burns aimed for. They are laying a foundation, making this music, whether...