Charlie Parker’s Higher Octave

Happy New Year!

We’re back with weekly free content; you can expect a new blog post every Monday.

Several times during our first two months of blog posts, an expression kept recurring: “higher octave.” In this piece, to show what the term means to us, I’ll share a representative anecdote featuring one of the grandest of grandmasters in jazz, Charlie Parker.

The Word on Bird

As the most influential jazz improviser after Louis Armstrong, Charlie “Bird” Parker’s genius manifested as a synthesis of downhome Kansas City blues, a technical sophistication akin to Art Tatum’s on piano, and a rhythmic melodicism as soulfully moving as harmonically precise.

Today we’ll focus on his breakthrough moment on the jazz standard “Cherokee.”

But first, check out this four-minute interview with Bird by fellow alto sax man Paul Desmond.

If you haven’t listened to this fascinating and insightful discussion, where Bird reveals his thoughts on the purpose and qualities of music generally and jazz specifically, the role of education and deep study, and, in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way, the practice regimen underpinning his astounding technique, take five minutes.

You won’t regret it.  

Bird’s Revelation

Now, I had been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at that time, Parker said, and I kept hearing that there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night 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 things I had been hearing.

—Charlie Parker 

In basic musical terms, the typical chords (the “stereotyped changes”) played during the Swing era in the 1930s were confined to the 1-3-5-7 of the eight-note do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do scale. Charlie Parker began to play and create melodies using the 9-11-13 of the scale in the next eight notes, in the next octave!

To explain the innovation a bit further, let’s view the above with a “C” major scale: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. The first note to the eighth, C-C, is an octave. Bird began playing the D, F, A notes of the C scale, which bring tension and some dissonance within the frame of the first octave. But from the perspective of the next octave, those notes serve as passing tones to a higher resolution.

Parker resolved his problem through a literally higher level of understanding, action, and performance, forever changing jazz.

Leadership Application

How often do we have a problem, a situation, a conflict that can be resolved like Bird did?

By the time Bird made his breakthrough, he had apprenticed in Jay McShaan’s big band and had logged over 10,000 hours of practice on his horn, as revealed in the interview above. He also performed in Billy Eckstine’s big band with others open to shifting the paradigm of jazz to bebop and beyond even before his revolutionary reading in 1945 on the chord changes of “Cherokee”—called “Koko.”

Likewise, leaders must put in the time, energy and study to not only master the technical aspects of whatever work they do in whatever field but to gain the interpersonal skills of communication to ground collaboration, as individual quests together become a dynamic equilibrium, an evolving culture.

When Parker wrestled the angel to divine the musical secrets already there, to unveil the answers to the aesthetic mysteries within, he became free artistically.

Likewise, leaders must look within to become free without. Is there the equivalent to “stereotyped changes” in the conditioned responses we give based on conditioning—parental or social? Are we, as leaders of the self striving to make a contribution willing to shift our own paradigms, to level up, to have the courage to play passing tones and passing chords that may sound wrong to those stuck in the previous paradigm, but that in reality are modulations to a higher octave?