Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-01-30 - 11:53 a.m.

Charlie Parker is interviewed � I think in 1952. Paul Desmond the alto player with Dave Brubeck is there too.

DESMOND: know many people are watching you at the moment, with the greatest of interest, to see what you're going to come up with next, in the next few years -- myself among the front row of them. And what have you got in mind? What are you going to be doing?

PARKER: Well, seriously speaking, I mean, I'm going to try to go to Europe to study. I had the pleasure to meet one Edgar Varese in New York City. He's a classical composer from Europe... he's a Frenchman, very nice fellow, and he wants to teach me. In fact, he wants to write for me, because he thinks I'm more for, more or less on a serious basis, you know -- and if he takes me on, I mean, when he finishes with me, I might have a chance to go to the Academie Musicale in Paris itself, and study, you know. My prime interest still is learning to play music, you know.

McLELLAN: Would you study playing or composition, or everything?

PARKER: I would study both -- never want to lose my horn.

DESMOND: Yeah, and you never should. That would be a catastrophe.

PARKER: I don't want to do that. That wouldn't work.

McLELLAN: Well, we're kind of getting ahead of the record sequence here, but it's been most fascinating. Do you want to say something about Miles Davis?

PARKER: Yeah, well I'll tell you how I met Miles. In 1944, Billy Eckstine formed his own organization -- Dizzy was on that band also, Lucky Thompson, there was Art Blakey, Tommy Potter, a lot of other fellows, and last and least, yours truly.

DESMOND: Modesty will get you nowhere, Charlie.

PARKER: I had the pleasure to meet Miles, for the first time, in St. Louis, when he was a youngster. He was still going to school. Later on he came to New York. He finished Juilliard, Miles did, he graduated from Juilliard and, at the time, I was just beginning to get my band together, you know, five pieces here, five pieces there. So I formed a band and took it into the Three Deuces for maybe seven to eight weeks, and at the time, Dizzy -- after the next time the organization broke up -- Dizzy was about to form his own band. There was so many things taking place then, I mean, it's hard to describe it, because it happened in a matter of months. Nevertheless, I went to California in 1945 with Dizzy, after I broke up my band, the first band I had, then I came again back to New York in '47, the early part of '47, and that's when I decided to have a band of my own permanently, and Miles was in my original band. I had Miles, I had Max, I had Tommy Potter and Al Haig in my band. Another band I had, I had Stan Levey, had Curley Russell, I had Miles and George Wallington. But I think you have a record out there, one of the records that we made with Max and Miles, I think, and yours truly, Tommy and Duke Jordan. What is it? I think it's "Perhaps." Is it not so? Well, this came along in the years of say '47... '46, '47. These particular sides were made in New York City, WOR 1440 Broadway, and this is the beginning of my career as a bandleader.

NYC here I come � well actually its three weeks away � where else in the world?

It�s the middle of the First World War � Varese is emigrating to NYC � who can blame him. A shell explodes on a battlefield � on the Austro Hungarian side a man sits in a trench unconcerned poring over some papers. The paper says:

6.32 The law of causalty is not a law but the form of a law

6.321 It�s a general name. Just as in mechanics there are general laws, minimum principles such as the law of least action. So too in physics there are causal laws � laws in causal form

6.3211 People even thought there might be a �law of least action� before they knew exactly how it went.

6.33 We do not have an a priori belief in a law of conservation � but rather a priori knowledge of the possibility of logical form.

The man is Wittgenstein and the papers will become the Tractatus. It will be set to music by Elizabeth Lutyens � her father will design memorials to soldiers killed in the war. Around this time Schoenberg writes tonal music as a Christmas present for his fellow officers in the German army. Lutyens will use Schoenberg�s atonal principles � do we think the serial principles she will use are examples of ordered logical possibilities in aesthetic space? A kind of musical metaphysics?

30 years later a man is talking about these sections of the Tractatus on Radio 3 � a few years later than the Parker interview . He is explaining metaphysics:

�Leibniz said that it was an important characteristic of reality that like a scientific system it exhibits the greatest simplicity of hypotheses and the greatest wealth in phenomena � everything in nature turns on the greatest and the least. Leibniz had seen that Fermat (he of the last theorem) had used this principle in geometric optics. He used the idea (at first a vague one) that certain quantities are always minimised. Developments of this idea subsequently led to elegant unifications of dynamical, optical and electro-dynamical theory.�

I suppose he might of added that this theory � the Helmholtz and Maxwell one - underpinned the broadcast medium he was using. He is interested that what starts as metaphysical principles can become powerful explanatory devices. The metaphysics is not nonsensical and misleading as the early followers of Wittgenstein thought but generative and potent. The man is Gerd Buchdahl and he is interested in how � as science develops � we look for not only evidence that the laws are true but also reasons for believing that laws like that are likely to be the deep truths.

I was pretty taken with this stuff. My neighbour Alan Bundy (now Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh) besides discovering Bob Dylan (Freewheelin) in 1963 had discovered the Vienna Circle and got me interested � my music teacher was Viennese. Bundy also told me about Maxwell�s Demon and the Turing Test. I suppose at the time this was all one with Desolation Row � the ideas are equally metaphysical and exciting � not least in suburban West London.

(Derek lived in the same street � what a funny place � one teenager discovers Dylan� Turing and Ayer, the other Warhol and Cale � I don�t really have to discover anything . Actually Cale read Ayer � so did Trane and Shorter � I suppose it must have been in the air. Ayer taught Williams whose seminars I went to in Kings where Frith and Smalley were . When I was 14 one of Bundy�s friends � David Head � lent me Kind of Blue and Ole because I said I was into jazz � that�s how I get to hear modal jazz. Then when I was 17 I won a prize with an essay on hedonism and community � was the sixties after all.)

Bundy had caused me to start writing philosophy and thus I ended up at Hoggwarts although I was taught at St Johns. By this time I Buchdahl was at Cambridge and had written a book about classic metaphysics and the history and philosophy of science. I was using this book as my crib for my Finals � cos at least I knew some of the science � which I could use to cover the lectures I had bunked off.

I suggested to my tutor at St Johns that I use these ideas for my finals dissertation � I had written some essays in this area. He wanted to know if I had any other ideas? I started to busk � well I said � I could always do the aesthetics of improvisation. Its probably a bit overarching to imagine that Varese and Parker might have provided material for this had they collaborated � although its not too far fetched - metaphysics of open form say � inspired by looking at de Kooning and Pollock � the metaphysics of abstract short stories. An account of why pieces rendered in these ways � might be worth doing.

I looked at Wollheim. He goes back to the Tractatus and addresses the idea of �name�. Here�s a thing � here�s a symbol � the symbol is the name of an entity. This sign is �Bb� and it names the chord you get when you put your fingers on the guitar in this way. In the Tractatus names link language to the world in this way. This is what makes logical inference possible.

You will see that this is before Derrida discovers language is stoned on its own illusory properties.

Wollheim follows Wittgenstein in passing through the simple picture of naming to something else. I think he must be mixing in Fuxus circles at some point maybe around 1962.

Wollheim puts it like this. We might think that �the aesthetic attitude� names something inside us which exists independently and causes us to create. The analogy might be with the sexual instinct which is inside us and causes us to have sex. This causation works whether we are in Namibia Brazil or St Johns.

We can�t reasonably suppose there is a �matrimonial instinct� inside us which causes us to get married. Getting married doesn�t exist independently of context, history, society.

The aesthetic attitude is more like getting married than having sex. Obsessiveness might be like having sex. Obsessiveness may be an element in the aesthetic attitude as sex is an element in marriage.

The aesthetic attitude doesn�t work by naming in the way the Tractatus gives a general theory of names. How obsessive ness integrates to aesthetic practice may vary.

Coltrane practiced obsessively, Miles never rehearsed. Shorter says that in the 2nd great 5tet he studied �never rehearsing � just blowing�. Jack Bruce says that doing 300 gigs a year with Ginger in the Bond Organisation was an alternative to practising.

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