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PARTISAN REVIEW
changes kept him at his saxophone and partly because he had ingested
enough pharmaceutical aids to keep him sleep-free and flying.
At this point let me suggest that Parker's solos-the distinctive brand
of up-tempo, intricate changes, and assorted riffs that one hears in such
trademark tunes as "Ornithology," "Koko," and "A Night in
Tunisia"-are akin to what Roth does in his characters' overheated,
accelerated speeches. By that I mean, what both artists illustrate is
excess brought under artistic control.
Granted, jazz gives improvisation its due, but improvisation within a
fixed musical frame. When Louis Armstrong made solos a prominent
part of jazz composition-in the Hot Five and Hot Seven studio record–
ings he made during the mid-1920s-trading twelves was not at all
what some post-Parker be-bop musicians meant to imply when they
talked about "free jazz." The term, as Albert Murray pointed out in the
Ken Burns's documentary, "Jazz," is a misnomer because jazz cannot,
by definition, be
free.
One way to better understand Murray's dead-on remark is to remem–
ber
T.
S. Eliot's observation that there is often much more
libre
in
vers
libre
than there is
verso
Far too many poets, so far as Eliot was con–
cerned, took free verse experimentation to mean that literally anything
goes, once the shackles of rhyme and meter had been removed. Roughly
the same thing applied to the multiple directions that be-bop took after
the 1950s.
If
the term was always somewhat of an embarrassment, be–
bop became even more diffuse as nearly every jazz musician after Parker
adapted the spirit, if not always the letter, of his techniques.
A final word about the odd relationship between jazz and fiction. In
both cases, what we finally mean by a distinctive voice is a function of
the complicated, intricate mosaic of texture. Parker added layer upon
layer to the jazz solo; Roth's increasingly nuanced, nearly Jamesian sen–
tences probed evermore deeply into what it means to be an American
citizen. As a result both artists changed what we mean by excess and
what we mean by voice.
