Question:
Who wrote Dexterity?
I've found it credited to Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon in different sources. Which is it?

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dexterity composer
I have an old cheat sheet that says Miles Davis wrote it - don't know if it's true, but can pass on publisher / author if needed. Just have to dig it out.

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Some people claim that Miles Davis wrote Donna Lee too, but I'm skeptical for both songs. The heads lay in so well on saxophone, it doesn't seem likely that anyone other than Bird would have written them.

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Dexter Gordon wrote a tune called "Dextivity", not to be confused with "Dexterity". To me Dexterity seems an awful lot like a Bird tune. Just how the lines are written.
Just my 2 cents.

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Sounds like Parker to me, as I said in the other thread.
And Donna Lee sounds like an intelligent musician copying Parker's style, but failing to get very close. Too stiff rhythmically. Also I think it was generally accepted (known?) among other musicians that Miles wrote it; somewhere -- has anyone else seen this? -- I read an account by Lee Konitz of recording with Miles. Konitz had brought in a tune in an unusual key, like B major, and Miles "just looked at me" and didn't play it. Konitz thought (to himself) that that wasn't very professional "as I can play HIS Donna Lee in all twelve keys."

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Correction
I dug the cheat sheet out and it said Parker... also the CDs I have credit Parker with it.

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Originally Posted by amg Sounds like Parker to me, as I said in the other thread.
And Donna Lee sounds like an intelligent musician copying Parker's style, but failing to get very close. Too stiff rhythmically. Also I think it was generally accepted (known?) among other musicians that Miles wrote it; somewhere -- has anyone else seen this? -- I read an account by Lee Konitz of recording with Miles. Konitz had brought in a tune in an unusual key, like B major, and Miles "just looked at me" and didn't play it. Konitz thought (to himself) that that wasn't very professional "as I can play HIS Donna Lee in all twelve keys."
Well, there have been plenty of times where credit is given to Miles on a tune and the fact is he did NOT write it. Like "Four" and "Tune-Up." Miles claimed he wrote them for years, but the fact is Eddie Vinson was playing them before Miles was even around.
And Blue and Green. Again, Miles claimed the song was his, but Bill Evans said that HE really wrote it, and Miles just gave him two chord changes to "do something with." I dunno, I'm just a little skeptical that a 19 year old Miles Davis would write something so close to a Charlie Parker bop line.

Answer:
Donna Lee
If you listen to some of Miles' other compositions from this period (47-49) like Sippin' at Bells and Little Willie Leaps, you'll note that they sound very much like Donna Lee in overall feel - long flowing lines of mostly eighth notes. Parker's compositions on the other hand are not so "flowing eighth note' oriented; they tend to have a lot more twists and turns with more breaks in the rhythm. (ie. Confirmation, Billies Bounce, Relaxin' At Camarillo, Blues For Alice, Scrapple etc.)
Dexterity is Parker and very reminiscent of Thrivin' On A Riff.
Very obvious to me that Miles wrote Donna Lee.
However -Bill Evans wrote Blue In Green, Jackie McLean wrote Dig, etc.
ciao!

Answer:
Yes, I think SonnyMurphy is right. Parker's tunes are much more fluid rhythmically - Donna Lee and Little Willie Leaps are basically strings of eighth notes. Parker's melodies are more syncopated -- note his fondness for dropping an offbeat crotchet (quarter-note) into an 8th-note line, often as a way of setting up the end of a phrase -- the opening phrases of Dexterity and Confirmation are examples.
Or notice how artfully he varies the lengths of phrases; often a tune starts with a long flowing phrase (Perhaps, Cardboard) but breaks down into a series of short exclamatory pick-up notes which somehow act as a kind of springboard generating more energy for the rest of the tune. And the subtle use of repetition or echo phrases ... or the way successive phrases seem to belong to different voices, as if the tune is a kind of conversation with itself -- containing propositions, interjections, counter-arguments (Visa is a tune I hear that way).
Furthermore, notice how closely Donna Lee and Little W L cling to the harmony. They "run the chords" in a rather literal way. Parker's tunes tend to have a much looser connection to the underlying harmony.
In fact, as I suggested before, Donna Lee etc strike me as EXACTLY what you'd expect from a talented 19 year old trying to internalise someone else's language -- not entirely succesfully. And I think Miles' later career demonstrates that the "bebop" style was rather a dead-end for him -- his own genius was very different from Bird's. He didn't really find himself as the creative musician we know he was until he'd definitely turned away from Parker's influence.

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Dexterity and Donna Lee
Amg -
I really appreciated your enlightened description of Parker's compositional style - I often wonder if Bird just made these up in the taxi on the way to the studio or had them brewing for sometime in some corner of his mind.
One more thing about Miles; to his credit i would say that in a short time see he evolved from Donna Lee, which is almost like an exercise a student would make up to familiarize himself with the changes, to tunes like Little Willie Leaps which really swings though still in the "bop" idiom.
From the same 1947 session as the latter, his Milestones (the first one) and Half-Nelson go even further towards the burgeoning cool style. Very melodic, and sophisticated. Again, I've also heard that John Lewis might have written Milestones. Although Boplicity, which followed soon after is credited to Miles' mother Cleo Henry and by association, with Miles, I think Gil Evans might have had a hand in it. Deception is a reworking of George Shearing's Conception...and so it goes.

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About whether Parker wrote his stuff in a taxi or something, well, Parker's drummer (I can't remember his name now) said that he wrote Moose the Mooche on the drive to the studio for a recording session. So its probably logical to say Parker wrote a lot of his other stuff under circumstances that probably would have made someone like Stravinsky scream, heh heh.
The reason I thought that Donna Lee was Parker's was because of its chromatacism, and when I think of chromaticism I think of Bird. But I guess you're right.
Although I'm wondering why you say "not very successful." Donna Lee is great jam session fodder, especially for people wanting to prove themselves, and numerous artists have rerecorded the song. And Jaco Pastorius even turned it into a great bass line. I think Donna Lee was very successful, regardless of who wrote it. Though I think I agree with you now that it was probably Miles.

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Sonny Murphy wrote:
I often wonder if Bird just made these up in the taxi on the way to the studio or had them brewing for sometime in some corner of his mind.
My guess is -- both. There are several accounts of Parker apparently coming up with a tune in the time it took to write it down. But he may have had it in his head for a while. Or he may have had a few phrases in his head, plus the knowledge that those phrases would come together into a blues line, or that they would fit the chords for Embraceable You, IF he spent a few minutes concentrating on them.
There exist some lead sheets for the session that included Swedish Schnapps, Blues For Alice, Si Si and Back Home Blues. According to Chan they are in Bird's handwriting. They are for trumpet (i.e. transposed for a Bflat horn). They contain no evidence of second thoughts or indecision. They suggest very strongly that Bird kept those tunes in his head in their final form and only wrote them down to make life easier for Red Rodney in the studio.
On the other hand, consider the date with Diz and Monk (June 1950). According to Teddy Blume Bird turns up at the studio, Blume says, "Where's the music?" and Bird says, "Shucks, I forgot it." Blume goes on "He handed out pencils and paper. He calls out the chords. So we sit there and wait. Then comes the greatest music I ever heard."
But if you look at what was recorded that day, there are three classic Parker originals, Bloomdido and Mohawk (both Bflat blues) and An Oscar For Treadwell (rhythm changes). I'll bet these were in Parker's head the day before when Blume nagged him about not forgetting the music (the story is in Robert Reisner's book). He just couldn't be bothered to write them down, he knew Diz would pick up the lines without any trouble. After that, though, he had nothing prepared, so they cut Melancholy Baby as a random ballad, then filled out the studio time with two cuts with no heads. Leap Frog is kind of like Broadway with a Rhythm bridge, and Relaxing with Lee is Stomping at the Savoy. For Relaxin' Bird invented a little head to wrap it up, and he probably did invent that on the spot -- because it's much more perfunctory than his real tunes. But basically they just blew on a couple of numbers they had known for years. Well, it sure impressed Teddy Blume.
Minatar12 wrote:
Although I'm wondering why you say "not very successful." Donna Lee is great jam session fodder, especially for people wanting to prove themselves,
Yes, it is a nice tune to play, but part of the reson for that is what SonnyMurphy says, that it's like an exercise someone wrote "to familiarize himself with the changes". Therefore it's very attractive to people who are learning to improvise, as it provides a model of running changes that can be assimilated quite easily. And though it's CONCEPTUALLY easy -- the connection between melody and harmony is very obvious -- it is TECHNICALLY quite hard, especially at the fast tempos people prefer to play it. I mean it requires some dexterity (?!). One could be cynical and say that's a good combination for someone who wants to impress. Or one could be less cynical and say it's a good exercise for improvisors.
On that level, as you say, minatar12, it is "successful" as a much-played number. I think it's not a very successful composition in an artistic sense for the reasons SonnyMurphy and I have mentioned. (In fact I think it's a WORSE piece of music than Indiana, whereas Parker's tunes to my ear are generally more interesting, more charming, more original, than the standards he based them on).
As for the chromaticism, yes, it is chromatic, but it's chromatic like Bird's improvisations, not like Bird's composed melodies, which are often quite diatonic. Take the opening phrase of Donna Lee, which descends scale-fashion to A natural, a very obvious note used in a million bebop lines to fit the change I to VI7 (or in this case VI7 flat 9, which is outlined arpeggio fashion exactly as Bird plays it in dozens of solos). Or note the way in bar 14 the line slithers down to a concert E natural above a Bflat7 chord -- a habit of Bird's when he's faced with a dominant seventh chord on degree II of the key (though Bird often plays a complete augmented arpeggio, as in bar 5 of the head ofDewey Square). What all this says to me is that someone has listened to Bird as a model of how to get through the changes, and has tried to distill his licks into a head.
But Bird's own tunes are much less like distilled licks. And the way they use chromaticism is rather more mysterious than the obvious change-running of Donna Lee. Take bar 6 of Cheryl, or bars 6 and 7 of Perhaps where you have a very prominent B natural (over an F7 chord) shortly followed by a beautiful Gsharp implying a an augmented tonic chord (?) which resolves naturally but mysteriously into a IIIm7 chord. Bird is not outlining blues changes here! He seems to be following some parallel harmonic universe related to the blues but not quite the blues -- all this makes it sound very egg-heady, but the ear instantly perceives these melodic twists and turns as being completely logical and consistent, and in fact quite simple and inevitable. But it's a different logic from the logic of Donna Lee, and a much more beautiful one to my ears.
I think that's enough pretentious talk for now. I'm going to practise Donna Lee.

Answer:
Thank you all for turning my question into a very interesting discussion on compositional style.
I must say that Donna Lee seems like an odd one in terms of Parker's style. I don't think I know enough, especially about Davis' style, to say one way or the other. I think it would be unusual for Bird to write a tune with the melody starting on the downbeat of 3, when the triplet starting the tune. Those long lines of eighth notes, as was mentioned earlier by SonnyMurphy, without the off-beat quarter note throwing in the bounce is very atypical of Bird's writing as I know it.
That chromatic passage in the B section is too regular, up and back chromatically a minor third. Compare that phrase to Scrapple from the Apple, where the chromatic triplet in the fifth bar serves to change the melodic direction before reaching the targetted note. His use of chromaticism on the whole seems much more finely tuned in terms of giving a melody a particular flavor, oftentimes blues and oftern providing a sort of surprise twist.
Dexterity, on the other hand, seems much more typical of Parker's style. While not knowing Dexter Gordon's well enough to say, I would say that Dexterity sits well along with tunes like Bloomdido and Billie's Bounce the way that Donna Lee doesn't.

Answer:
Dexterity
Great discussion to follow!
For me, Dexterity is one of those euphoric kind of lines that drew my attention to Parker some 30yrs ago. Listening on a car radio, a great, exhilarating Parker recording came on and I KNEW it had to be him though I'd only known him by reputation.
One thing I notice is that the bridge sections of most of famous "rhythm" heads are very uninteresting and a definite letdown after the "A" sections. I guess Sonny Rollins was smart to keep the bridge to "Oleo" free. Speaking of which, Miles solo on Oleo (first version) has a great "song-like" bridge on the first chorus of his solo. Fit for a head! (Defending Miles again) :wink:
cheers