A Power Stronger Than Itself - Alejandrocasales.com

xx : : Acknowledgments
Special thanks are due to the staff of the University of Chicago Press,
including senior editor Carol Fisher Saller, whose sharp eye and ear for
language nudged the text toward greater readability; Tim McGovern for
his excellent work with the images; and Rob Hunt, whose marketing acumen
worked to ensure that the book would be known as far and wide as
possible.
I was particularly grateful when, in September 2001, I was notifi ed that
I was to join my AACM colleague and friend Anthony Braxton as a Mac-
Arthur Fellow. At the same time, the truly extraordinary resources—half
a million dollars over a fi ve- year period (not to mention the moniker of
“genius,” which pleased my father and sister greatly) came with a set of
implications for my creative life that I am still working out at this writing.
Paradoxically, rather than speeding up the work, the fellowship slowed
down the pace, as I felt empowered to dig more deeply into areas that I had
previously thought were beyond the scope of the book. Those readers who
would be quick to insist that in the case of jazz or jazz- related practices,
many major innovations took place with nothing like the level of infrastructure
I used to write this book, might want to ask themselves the question
that so many musicians ask—namely, what those innovations might have
looked like given additional support. Even if we lend particular credence to
the old African American saying “We’ve done so much with so little, now
we can do anything with nothing,” at the very least, one wonders what, for
example, Charlie Parker’s orchestral music might have sounded like had he
managed to live long enough to pursue his plans to study and collaborate
with Edgard Varese:
cp: Well, seriously speaking I mean I’m going to try to go to Europe to
study. I had the pleasure to meet one Edgar Varese in New York City.
He’s a classical composer from Europe. He’s a Frenchman, very nice
fellow and he wants to teach me. In fact he wants to write for me because
he thinks I’m more for . . . more or less on a serious basis you
know, and if he takes me over . . . I mean after he’s fi nished with me I
might have the chance to go to the Academy of Musicalle [sic] out in
Paris itself and study, you know. My prime interest still is learning to
play music, you know.
pd: Would you study playing or composition?
cp: I would study both. I never want to lose my horn.
pd: No, you never should. That would be a catastrophy [sic].
cp: I don’t want to do that. That wouldn’t work. 4