CSS for Bird — Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker performing “Cherokee” at
Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, New York, 1942
“I’d
been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used…
and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it
sometimes. I couldn’t play it… I was working over ‘Cherokee,’ and, as I
did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody
line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play
the thing I’d been hearing.
