The Chaser

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The pursuer (original title: El perseguidor ) is a short story by Julio Cortázar from 1959 . In it, the author describes the last days of an outstanding artist who perishes in the search for a truth or intensity outside of space and time that he has only hinted at. The story is told from the perspective of the biographer of the brilliant, but drug addict and schizophrenic jazz musician Johnny Carter. The publicist represents an outside world that is superficially friendly, but ultimately incomprehensible to the artist, which sees itself questioned by the extreme artist in its bourgeois contradictions, but is not afraid to draw its personal gain from his radical existence. The persecutor of the idea of ​​an absolute quality of life becomes in turn one of supposed friends and a media industry.

Little alienated and with the dedication . In memoriam Ch P. provided Cortázar tells of the end of the black and since his youth heroin-addicted jazz - saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920-1955).

Table of contents

The first-person narrator and jazz critic Bruno describes the situation and behavior of the marijuana-consuming saxophonist Johnny Carter, who lives in a shabby hotel room, the only window of which is a dark light shaft, and who - once again - has no instrument at his disposal because he has one this time it was left lying in the Paris metro and not willfully destroyed as usual, whose appearance is therefore endangered two days later and which, due to the frequency of these incidents, can no longer expect to be provided with a replacement instrument.

Bruno, could I just live like in these moments, or if I play and the time also changes ... When you consider what can happen in a minute and a half ...

Bruno ( Be faithful to death , Revelation of John 2:10, preceded by the story) procures a new instrument, and Johnny performs as agreed. The next day he is late by hours in the recording studio, then has no desire to play, shortly afterwards he plays the title Amorous, a piece that will remain one of the greatest moments in jazz - only to immediately afterwards demand in vain that the recording be destroyed.

He rioted in the hotel at night, set fire to his room all the way up with marijuana, and not for the first time was he admitted to a mental hospital ( as has happened half a dozen times in San Francisco, Baltimore and New York ) where he doesn’t let go of a well-worn and scribbled little book by Dylan Thomas . The upcoming concerts have to be canceled again ...

His conquests are like a dream, he forgets them when he wakes up, when the applause brings him back, him who is so far away and lives his quarter of an hour in a minute and a half.

Bruno, who is also Johnny's biographer, tries to understand him beyond the published but still incomplete biography, observes him and his decline desperately (as a friend) and at the same time fascinated (as a biographer):

It's getting harder and harder to get him to talk about jazz, his memories, his plans to bring him back to reality.
... that Johnny is not a victim, not a persecuted one, as everyone believes ... Now I know that it is not the case that Johnny is the persecutor and not the persecuted one, that everything that happens to him in life is the The misfortunes of a hunter are not those of a hunted animal. Nobody can know what it is that Johnny is following, but that he is following something is evident, in Amourous, in marijuana, in his absurd speeches about so many things, in the relapses, in the little book by Dylan Thomas ...

However, Johnny only recognizes himself in his biography as one recognizes himself in a mirror - while on the other hand he believes that he is actually the one in the mirror.

Johnny receives news that his youngest daughter, Bee (who has long since left his family), has died of pneumonia in America.

... for example the difference between a bee who is dead and a bee who is alive. What I play is Bee who is dead you see while what I actually want ...

Johnny returns to the USA, where he suddenly dies in front of the television. His last words are said to have been: Oh, make me a mask - the other quote, now from Dylan Thomas, that precedes the novel.

A poor devil of barely average intelligence who, like many musicians, chess players and poets, has the gift of creating great things without being in the least aware of the greatness of his work ...

Comparison between the fictional character Johnny Carter and Charlie Parker

That's why I think Johnny doesn't particularly like the blues , in which masochism and longings ...

In complete contrast to this quote from Bruno about Carter, the saxophonist Charlie Parker built a large part of his work on the blues . Since the swing era of the 30s, the blues has not only offered a platform for individual, expressive design options, but has also proven itself as a field of experimentation for implementing new ideas, both in the melodic-harmonic as well as in the rhythmic area. Likewise, the beboppers , which Parker was one of, embraced the blues. In the Omnibook alone (the book in which most Parker topics and some solos are summarized) there are 18 blues out of a total of 56 pieces. Including the blues ballad Parker Blues , as well as three so-called Parker blues (e.g. Blues For Alice ), based on a certain harmonic chord scheme invented by Parker.

Johnny is not a genius, he has not discovered anything, he does jazz like thousands of blacks and whites, and if he does it better than all of them, one must admit that it depends a little on the taste of the audience, on the fashion, short of time.

Charlie Parker is considered to be the inventor, or at least a significant pioneer of bebop. His style of playing revolutionized jazz and influenced all musical events after him up into the 1960s. The musical innovations of the bebop include:

  • Expansion of polyrhythmic structures, both in the melody part and in the accompaniment; this includes 3: 4 overlays, as well as the melodic-improvisational play across the bar lines
  • strongly accentuated play, both of the drums, as well as the accompanying piano figures and the melodic lines
  • vertical play down to the upper structures of the chord
  • harmonic-melodic (chord) substitutions
  • Chromatics in the melody, the bass line and the piano accompaniment
  • the introduction of small ensembles, such as quartets and quintets, as an expression of new flexibility
  • improvising in extremely fast tempos