Half-Note, Five-Spot, V-Note
Gidi Avrahami
A week or so ago I caused some confusion when I referred to the
Dolphy/Booker Five-Spot recordings as the Half-Note sessions. As a
form of apology and an attempt at explanation, I hereby offer what
may become the first in an occasional series of literary excerpts.
From "V." by Thomas Pynchon:
Outside the V-note a number of bums stood around the front
windows looking inside, fogging the glass with their breath. From
time to time a collegiate-looking type, sally with a date, would
emerge from the swinging doors and they would ask him, one by one in
a line down that short section of Bowery sidewalk, for a cigarette,
subway fare, the price of a beer. All night the February wind wold come
barreling down the wide keyway of third Avenue, moving right over
them all: the shavings, cutting oil, sludge of New York's lathe.
Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin
was hard, as if it were part of ti]he skull: every vein and whisker on
that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you
could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower
lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions
of his mustache.
He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4 1/2 reed
and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual
divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average
of 1 1/2 sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off
or asking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened
hard, trying to dig. ``I am still thinking,'' they would say if
asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense
of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only
because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an
inscrutable look.
[...]
The group on the stand had no piano: it was bass, drums,
McClintic and a boy he found in the Ozarks who blew a natural horn in
F. The drummer was a group man who avoided pyrotechnics, which may
have irritated the college crowd. The bass was small and evil-looking
and his eyes were yellow with pinpoints in the center. He talked to
his instrument. It was taller than he was and didn't seem to be
listening.
Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and
when this happened it was like a knife fight or a tug of war: the
sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The
solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people
around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of
LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes
completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-
intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a
new conception, they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives.
Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a
hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had
been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is
still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar
scene and when he left it some curious negative will---a reluctance
and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact---possessed the lunatic
fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs,
the denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that
night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had
not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation.
``He plays all the notes Bird missed,'' somebody whispered in
front of Fu. Fu went silently through the motions of breaking a beer
bottle on the edge of the table, jamming it into the speaker's back
and twisting.
It was near closing time, the last set.
``It's nearly time to go,'' Charisma said. ``Where is Paola.''
``Here she comes,'' said Winsome.
Outside the wind had its own permanent gig. And it was still
blowing.
Srinandan Dasmahapatra
>
>From "V." by Thomas Pynchon:
>
>
What is a minor fourth? I thought there was only a semi-tone between a
third and a fourth?
> ``He plays all the notes Bird missed,'' somebody whispered in
I have heard this phrase used in the context of someone else? Was it
Ornette's "something else" that drew this kind of comment?
Curious,
Tutul
Mike Goodrich
>
>What is a minor fourth? I thought there was only a semi-tone between a
>third and a fourth?
>
I believe a 'minor 4th' is just an enharmonic spelling for a 'major 3rd'. This
is necessary because a diatonic scale may have its 4th scale tone just 4
half-steps above the root instead of 5.
mike goodrich
good...@uxv.larc.nasa.gov