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How Did Charlie Parker Influence Jazz

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“Charlie Parker was a legendary Grammy Award–winning jazz saxophonist” . If there was a previous era of Jazz, due to the emergence of Louis Armstrong, a completely new and transformed Jazz Age came after and was created by Charlie Parker. Although Charlie Parker lived a short life, he accomplished a great achievement in jazz, as he still remains as a legendary figure to many people. Charlie Parker is one of the most famous and influential jazz alto saxophonist and composer that influenced the course of jazz with the creation of his unique Bebop style. Charlie Parker was born on August 29th 1920 in Kansas City. His father provided him with some musical influence as he worked as a pianist, dancer and a singer on the T.O.B.A circuit. However, …show more content…

Charlie Parker is the leader of the new and fresh genre of Jazz after the Swing era. “With the focus on improvisation, Bebop allowed for an explosion of innovation. Inspired by the more harmonically and rhythmically experimental players in swing era” The word bebop came from the sound “bebebebe bopbopbop” that people makes when they sing Jazz around in joy. Bebop is the freewheeling style of Jazz where the tempo gets fast with intense improvisations and where the progression of harmony and melody gets complicated. Bebop that contains dynamic and rough improvisation used the “Blue Note”, which is the technique that plays one semitone down to a few specific sounds. By adding fast rhythm and passage to the blue note, the unique sound of bebop has finally been produced. However, this new format of Jazz was highly regarded to have an artistic value but it was lack of popularity where people love jazz as an entertainment source to dance and not mainly focus on their emotions. Bebop brought a huge impact on the history of Jazz; it brought huge changes of foundational melody, rhythm, and harmony. Moreover, we can see that Charlie Parker changed the whole era by playing bebop with saxophone and it opened the start of Modern

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