Donna Lee

Here’s a Charlie Parker recording that’s not widely known outside of jazz, but is absolutely foundational inside it:

This recording features a very young Miles Davis on trumpet. Miles later said that he wrote the tune, and that its copyright attribution to Charlie Parker was a record label error. I believe him. It sounds more like a devoted Charlie Parker fan emulating his style than something Parker himself would write.

I’m embarrassed to say that my first exposure to “Donna Lee” was almost certainly hearing it get butchered by Phish. Still, I have to give them credit for introducing bebop to a wider audience. One of my main motivations for learning to read music as a college student was so I could play “Donna Lee” out of the Real Book. I succeeded, eventually, but it took an incredibly long time, and I wasn’t able to flow through it steadily until many years later.

Parker has godlike status among jazz musicians, but he was a controversial figure in his time. Mimi Clar infamously said in the April 1959 issue of Jazz Review that “Parker’s playing is like an electric fan being switched on and off.” (She continued, “Coltrane’s playing is like an electric fan turned on and left on.” She was more into Duke Ellington.) Parker tunes are still not much loved outside of jazz fandom. In this entertaining interview on NPR’s A Blog Supreme, a non-fan describes “Donna Lee” as sounding like “two geese having a merry time of it as they cavort around a pond.” In general, people study and practice Parker tunes more than they listen to them for pleasure.

“Donna Lee” is essentially a frozen bebop improvisation on the chord changes to a pop standard called “(Back Home Again in) Indiana.” The most delightful version of the tune I could find is by Mel Tormé and the Mel-Tones.

The second most delightful version is by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

It’s fun to sing the head to “Donna Lee” over these recordings so you can hear how it departs from the original melody.

Just about every jazz musician on YouTube has recorded “Donna Lee”, and each version is faster and more showoff-y than the last. Like “Giant Steps,” jazz nerds treat “Donna Lee” as a kind of video game boss battle. It’s more about beating your high score than playing it in a way that sounds good. This is unfortunate, because “Donna Lee” is actually a lovely melody if you slow it down enough to be able to hear what’s going on, how the dissonant chord extensions and unpredictable phrasing rub against the old-timey chord progression.

There are a couple of recordings of “Donna Lee” that I do actually like. Tito Puente’s arrangement has an incredible intro groove.

I also appreciate the minimalist elegance of Jaco Pastorius‘ fretless bass and conga duet, probably the most famous recording of the tune aside from Parker’s.

It’s especially cool when Jaco gets to the ascending chromatic riff in the head out, and just keeps going up and up until he lands in a different key completely. His chords and harmonics are wonderful too.

Most performances of “Donna Lee” are exhausting to listen to, but there is something cool about the role it plays in the participatory culture of jazz. A student in Wayne Marshall’s Technomusicology class combined a bunch of YouTubers’ takes on “Donna Lee,” and they add up to more than the sum of their parts.

I never had the discipline to do the ten thousand hours of woodshedding necessary to play bebop at bebop tempos. When you look up “woodshed” on Urban Dictionary, right above the “practicing music” definition is the “punishment” definition. This feels appropriate to me. As an adult I have learned to practice without making it feel like punishment, but it took many decades of maturing. The Parker recording of “Donna Lee” has a tempo of about 225 beats per minute, and most recordings are even faster. I can barely play it at half that tempo. I thought it would be nice to make myself a practice track with a funkier groove at a laid back 97 bpm.

When you slow a recording down this much, it creates some strange timestretching artifacts, and it exaggerates the out-of-tune and out-of-sync notes. I added a slow filter sweep to heighten the surrealism. The breakbeats are from “God Make Me Funky” by the Headhunters, the percussion is from the Tito Puente record, and the bass is a MIDI sequence of my own devising. Happy shedding!