Duende, The

And thenceforward all summer in the sound

of the sea,

And at night under the full of the moon in

calmer weather,

Over the hoarse surging of the sea,

Or flitting from brier to brier by day,

I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one,

the he-bird,

The solitary guest from Alabama.

Blow! blow! blow!

Blow up the sca-winds along Paumanok's shore;

I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.

Everyone senses the duende in Charlie Parker's savage and tender alto solos, which are masterpieces of winged calling, of spontaneous creation. I especially feel it in the bittersweet lament of "Parker's Mood," which has a nervously exacerbated blue passion, and in "Funky Blues" and "Embraceable You." "I was always in a panic," Bird once said. And: "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." He awakened his duende, in Lorca's phrase, "in the remotest mansions of the blood," and one feels it driving the adventurous pyrotechnics to something even further and stranger, something free-flying, forbiddingly solitary. One feels, to borrow Langston Hughes's title, Bird in Orbit. I hear the black sounds haunting the white wail of Art Pepper's alto sax, and the volatile moaning bass that Charles Mingus plays in the ensemble Mingus Ah Um (especially in "Better Git It in Your Soul") and in the sounds of Miles Davis's trumpet which is, as one critic put it, "deathly in its purity." Davis offers a particularly compelling case because he was the youngest member of the four musical architects who rebuilt jazz in the 1940s and never quite had the licks of the other three-Charlie Parker, Theolonius Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie. What he did have was a restless gift for innovation, a rockbed integrity, and something else ineffable. Davis loved the music of Spain and there are times, as in Sketches of Spain, when he tries to replicate the fluent wailing tone of Spanish folk song. In an insightful portrait of Davis that he wrote in I963, the critic Kenneth Tynan introduced the concept of duende to the readers of Holiday magazine. "It has no exact equivalent in English," he explained, "but it denotes the quality with which no flamenco singer or bullfighter can conquer the summit of his art." Tynan suggested that, for example, Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith had this quality, but that Ella Fitzgerald never reached it. He concluded, "Whatever else he may lack, Miles Davis has duende."

Davis used modes, rather than chords, as a basis for improvisation. The apogee of this modal approach -and one of the high points of collective improvisation-was reached forty years ago in the spring of I959 when the Miles Davis Sextet recorded Kind of Blue in two sessions. The result was five songs"So What," "Freddie Freeloader," "Blue in Green," "All Blue," and "Flamenco Sketches"-consisting almost entirely of first takes. The performance has a ravishing simplicity. It gives maximum room for individual creative improvisation, for Cannonball Adderly on the alto, for example, and John Coltrane on the tenor sax, to express themselves fully, while also knitting the group together into a singular texturally varied creation. Kind of Blue has a lasting soulful enchantment. Listening to it, I'm reminded of Emerson's statement that "The power of music . . to unfix and as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus."