A Portait of Horace Parlan

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2015

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1931, during the Depression, an unknown young black woman took her new-born son to a Pittsburgh orphanage. And so began jazz pianist Horace Parlan´s life. At the age of five, he was struck by polio and lost the use of three fingers on his right hand, yet somehow, against the odds, he managed a long career as a professional musician.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:04.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to BBCWorld
0:09.0	Service.com slash podcasts. Denmark has a bit of jazz history. It's a kind of a colony and then of American jazz musicians.
0:35.0	Let's see, there was Dexa Gordon,
0:40.0	Ben Webster, Stan Gets,
0:47.0	Oscar Pettiford, Pianist Kenny Drew, Tooty Heath, and now. he's now now actually I'm the only one no that's not true there's a drummer
1:00.8	but he's retired also.
1:04.0	A retirement home in a small coastal town in Denmark.
1:13.0	I like the atmosphere here.
1:16.0	We're very close to water.
1:20.0	I can walk.
1:22.0	Well, see, I don't walk but I mean if somebody goes for a walk with me in my
1:29.9	chair I can go right down almost down to the water.
1:37.1	I'll actually never live that close to the water.
1:41.4	What I need to hear?
1:48.0	This is what the Danish call a fly, and we would call it a nursing home actually.
1:52.0	An old man in a wheelchair, classy blind eyes. I was born in the
1:59.8	state of Pennsylvania and the city is called Pittsburgh. I was
2:06.7	born in 1931. His long fingers rest on the arm of the wheelchair. I guess I'm where I'm supposed to be because I'm at the other end of my life actually
2:20.4	piano fingers I've lived a little more than half of my life here in Denmark.
2:28.0	They're stiff now, crooked.
2:30.1	They don't play anymore, but they used to.
	...

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