My example -- Beautiful Music.

Two versions of the same tune. One is much more famous than the other, and sadly, that famous recording is also inferior to the other one.  I bring this up a way to generate knowledge questions about how we value the arts.

Charlie Parker is part of a very small group of jazz musicians who changed music, bringing a completely new way of playing and thinking to the art form.  He's in a special class of artists, along with other great innovators. Pablo Picasso may be an apt analogue in the visual arts.

Unlike a visual artist, however, a musician's art is captured in performance. Every time a musician plays on stage or records in the studio, the work on display is the product of a career of study and of daily practice. Predictably these performances vary. That's why musicians make multiple takes of recordings. Even with technology available in the 1950's, it's possible to "correct" mistakes by cutting out a phrase and pasting in a correction.

This technique has been used and overused. In the 1990's, one of the great classical clarinet players published a recording with over a thousand such edits in a twenty minute recording. This recording leads to a knowledge question: To what extent can a recording be altered before the recording is not authentically the artist's work?  With modern improvements to recording technology, it's possible to electronically correct a player's intonation and change the timbre of their sound. Are these "doctored" recordings still recordings of the artist, or are they something else? At what point does the music just become a product of the machine? And is that music less "artistic" than something performed live, or performed with minimal editing? In other arts, this issue doesn't come up: Painters correct their mistakes, authors employ proofreaders.

Which brings us back to these two recordings of Charlie Parker playing the song "Loverman." The better version was recorded in 1951. It showcases his strong, full sound, his natural ability to speak through his instrument, his completely fresh and original phrasing, and absolutely virtuoso technique.






The more famous recording, however, was made earlier, in July of 1946. Charlie Parker suffered from drug dependency, and this recording was made when he was experiencing withdrawal symptoms from his heroin addiction. According to most accounts, he was drinking heavily in order to take away the withdrawal pains, and was so drunk while recording that he literally had to be propped up by someone while he was playing. When you listen to this recording, you can still hear some of his virtuosity -- in fact, he uses some similar phrases to the ones that appear in the later recording. His tone, however, is much thinner, and he frequently ends phrases abruptly, as if his air is cut off. His original statement of the melody begins at about measure three. After the recording session he went to his hotel room and lit the curtains on fire, almost burning himself to death. Then he was sent to the Camarillo mental asylum. where he spent the next 8 weeks. It's a recording that ought to have been discarded.




But Charlie Parker didn't have any say in the matter. He was under contract to produce records that would be sold, and so this inferior display of his artistry became part of his recorded body of work. It also became his most famous recording of this particular song. Parker, of course, was very upset that the recording was ever released.

So what value does this recording have? Some say this recording has become so popular because it captures a moment of great human suffering. "It's what pain sounds like," said someone. And whether that's fair to the artist or not, it gives another kind of insight into the human condition.