The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (54 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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Page 223
The other session, also from 1951, finds Bird paired again with Miles Davis and Max Roach. Bird's playing on "She Rote," a workout at up-tempo on the chords of "Out of Nowhere," is fleet and beautifully lucid, full of surprising turns of phrase; this set of changes isn't usually played at this fast a tempo. "Au Privave'' is still a favorite Bird blues among musicians. "K.C. Blues" is another blues masterpiece, taken at a relaxed walking tempo, full of warmth and intensity.
Some Other Hair-Dos
Norman Granz had the imagination and the wherewithal to experiment with musicians he found interesting, putting them in different settings. One experiment was recording Bird with a string section, performing standards such as "They Can't Take That Away from Me," "Laura," "April in Paris," and "Just Friends." The resulting album, usually referred to as "Bird with Strings," brought Bird a degree of public recognition he'd never had. The strings brought out a sunny, romantic side of Bird, which must have seemed quite foreign to those for whom Bird was the flamethrower of "Ko Ko" only. But we can hear them now for what they are: some of the most beautiful music Bird ever recorded. They are currently available on the Verve box set and on various "best of" collections.
The basic routine for these sides is that Bird plays the melody straight but with embellishments and variations in phrasing, and then there is limited time for him to improvise. On some, such as "Everything Happens to Me" and "They Can't Take That Away from Me," he sticks close to the melody throughout, often ending the melodic phrase with a fillip or answering phrase of his own. On others, such as "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" and the masterpiece "Just Friends," he has more room to improvise.
His melody statements here put him up in the top rank of melody expositors of jazz, like Ben Webster and Lester Young. In fact, the sense of grandeur, release, and exhilaration in playing sheer melody on cuts like "East of the Sun" and "Easy to Love" is almost the equal of Louis Armstrong's, a facet of Bird that would have been very hard for fans to hear three years earlier. His Dial ballads, such as "Don't Blame Me" and "Embraceable You," were radical reworkings, abstractions of the song based on the harmonic structure almost exclusively.
Parker also used his string section on live gigs for a period, until finances forced him to stop, and there are several records of Bird playing live with his string section. The best of these are five tunes issued originally as
Midnight Jazz at Carnegie Hall
. They are well recorded and contain some stunning Bird improvisations on "What Is This Thing Called Love?" (with the strings riffing behind him like the reed section of a big band) and "Rocker."
 
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One unlikely sounding experiment that worked amazingly well was a session with a chorus arranged by jazz singer Dave Lambert, later of the group Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. The three tunes that were released, "In the Still of the Night," "Old Folks," and "If I Love Again,'' were unusual material for Bird, and he sounds as if he's having a ball as he swoops over, under, around, and through the chorus. "In the Still of the Night," especially, is one of Bird's most exciting performances. The Verve box contains seven takes of this song, complete with false starts and breakdowns, and nine takes of "Old Folks." It's a fascinating glimpse of Bird in the studio.
Lastly, Granz put Bird in a Latin-music setting several times, first with the Latin band of Machito, one of the most popular Latin big bands to combine a fiery, authentic jazz feeling with Afro-Cuban rhythms. Bird plays brilliantly on "Okiedoke" and "Mango Mangue." Granz also recorded Bird's regular small group in 1951 with Latin percussion added, calling the group Charlie Parker and His South of the Border Orchestra. The resulting sides are a little strange, with tunes like "La Cucaracha" and "Tico-Tico" providing unusual fodder for him, to say the least.
Live
There is a huge amount of live Bird available, either taped off the radio or recorded informally on portable equipment, with his own group or in jam sessions or sitting in with other people's groups. Among this material is some of Bird's greatest playing. People who heard Bird live at the time say that you can't really appreciate Bird's genius from his studio recordings, and in these live dates he often stretches out at length and with a sense of freedom and exhilaration that you don't find in many of the studio sides.
So much of this material has been issued, in so many forms - bootlegged, legitimate, mislabeled, painstakingly annotated, utterly unidentified beyond tune titles, combined and recombined in different packages - that it would take an entire book to unravel it all. I will concentrate on just a few of the highlights, and after that you are, of necessity, on your own. Be warned: the sound on many of the live Bird records, including some essential ones, ranges from bad to really bad. Some of these, however, contain such brilliant playing that they are worth owning anyway.
One of the best Bird records available,
Bird at St. Nick's
(Jazz Workshop/OJC-041), falls into this category. The sound is horrible; either you can hear Bird and nobody else except drummer Roy Haynes or the piano and bass are right in your face and Bird sounds like he's two blocks away. But the music ... Bird's playing is so inventive and fresh; he was truly "on" on this night, a dance at New York's St. Nicholas Arena in 1950. It sounds as if Bird could play
 
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anything that came into his head on this evening; he plays like a dancer on a high wire doing leaps and pirouettes, quoting from odd songs that pop into his head, playing incredibly intricate and balanced double-time phrases, starting familiar phrases at unexpected places in the measure, floating entirely above the rhythm sometimes, as Louis Armstrong could, and making up wholly original melodies, all while relating to what the other musicians are playing. Listen particularly to "Hot House" and "Now's the Time" for medium-up-tempo magic and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was'' for a ballad. On "Visa," Bird stops playing at one point and then inserts, verbatim, Louis Armstrong's trumpet introduction to "West End Blues." At the end of his solo on "Now's the Time," which features some truly unbelievable double-timing, he even makes the horn yodel. On a night like this, his well of ideas was inexhaustible. Here is one definition of freedom.
Also breathtaking, if a little less subtle, is
Charlie Parker Live at Rockland Palace
, originally issued as
Bird Is Free
on Charlie Parker Records and subsequently issued in as many formats as Lon Chaney had faces. The sound here is almost as bad as it is on the St. Nick's set; like the St. Nick's material, it was recorded at a dance, in 1952, where Bird had both his regular group and his string section on some tunes. Listen to the way he sears through "Cool Blues," "Moose the Mooche," "Rocker," "This Time the Dream's on Me," and, especially, the legendary performance of "Lester Leaps In," four minutes of white-hot improvisation. The fluency and authority of this performance are really unbelievable. One way of identifying this material on unidentified bootleg sets is by the presence of the calypso "Sly Mongoose"; this is the only time Bird was recorded playing it.
Savoy has issued four CDs of 1948 Parker radio broadcasts from the Royal Roost, one of the best-known of the bop venues, collectively titled
Bird at the Roost
(ZDS 4411-4). There is some excellent stuff on these sides, as well as some very expendable stuff. Most of the material consists of performances by his regular working quintet, with either Kenny Dorham or Miles Davis on trumpet. All the on-the-air patter by the radio announcers, one of whom is the legendary Symphony Sid, has been kept in; this is fun for the first couple of tunes, but it gets annoying quickly if you just want to hear the music.
Also excellent is
Charlie Parker and the Stars of Modern Jazz at Carnegie Hall, Christmas 1949
(Jass J-CD-16), which features a relaxed Bird with his regular quintet (Rodney, Haig, Potter, and Haynes) at Carnegie Hall playing "Ornithology," "Cheryl" (on which he again paraphrases Armstrong's "West End Blues" introduction), a blazing "Ko Ko," "Now's the Time," and a slower "Bird of Paradise," a beautiful, relaxed, cogent performance, reminiscent of the Dial masterpiece.
 
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Not to be missed are two sets available only as imports on French CBS and titled
One Night at Birdland
and
Summit Meeting at Birdland. One Night
has Bird in one of the most electrifying sets ever recorded, in the company of trumpeter Fats Navarro and pianist Bud Powell, doing phenomenal versions of "Ornithology," "'Round Midnight," ''The Street Beat," and much more.
Summit Meeting
has Powell again on piano and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet. The juice isn't cranked up quite as high here as it is on
One Night
, but it's fabulous, nonetheless, especially for a whirlwind version of "Anthropology."
Bird was an inveterate jammer, and some of his most unbuttoned and stretched-out playing happened in this kind of context, where he wasn't fronting a band and could be very experimental, playing long solos without worrying about pacing a show. One of the best of these sets was originally issued as
The Happy Bird
on Charlie Parker Records. Recorded in Framingham, Massachusetts, at a club called Christy's, the album shows Bird at his most relaxed and inventive on "Happy Bird Blues," "Scrapple from the Apple," "I May Be Wrong," and "I'll Remember April." Also present are the great and short-lived tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray (throughout the record, during Gray's solos, you can hear someone - is it Bird? - yelling, "
Go
, Wardell ...") and, on "I'll Remember April," bassist Charles Mingus.
A somewhat less relaxed but more fiery session is chronicled on
One Night in Chicago
(Savoy ZDS 4423). Taped on primitive equipment at a Chicago dance in 1950, Bird is accompanied by local musicians, and they must have made him feel at home. His brilliance, especially on the whirlwind "Keen and Peachy" (based on the chord changes of "Fine and Dandy"), will leave you stunned. A fun thing to listen for here is the reaction of an obviously hip crowd, who register amazement at appropriate places and laugh at Bird's musical jokes and references.
Charlie Parker "More Unissued," Volume 1
(Royal Jazz RJD 505) contains lots of interesting odds and ends; especially good are two informal duets between Parker and pianist Lennie Tristano on "All of Me" and "I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me" and two tunes recorded at sculptor Julie McDonald's Hollywood apartment.
Volume 2
(Royal Jazz RJD 506) has six excellent broadcast titles by the Parker quintet with Red Rodney on trumpet and Art Blakey on drums, along with three subpar tracks with trumpeter Tony Fruscella. The alto saxophonist sounds drugged here, and in places he plays phrases that are uncharacteristic of Bird; there is at least the possibility that it isn't Bird at all. I nominate Dave Schildkraut, a close associate of Fruscella's.
Apartment Sessions
(Spotlite SPJ146) is for hard-core Bird fans, consisting as it does of almost nothing but extended Parker blowing on his standard reper-
 
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toire ("Scrapple from the Apple," "Donna Lee," "Out of Nowhere," "Cherokee''). Ernest Hemingway once spoke of Bach "emitting" counterpoint; there is the same sense here of Bird emitting chorus after chorus of unbelievably inventive, logical melody in a new language. I wish that someday someone would take three choruses at random from, say, "Little Willie Leaps" in this set, have three saxophonists play them simultaneously, and see what kind of counterpoint it would make. The sound here is good; the set was recorded in a private apartment in New York in 1950.
In the 1950s Bird would tour, land in a city for an engagement at a local club, and play the gig with a local rhythm section. Some fantastic examples of Bird in this kind of setting can be heard on
The Bird You Never Heard
(Stash ST-CD-10), particularly the first four titles, which were recorded at Boston's Hi-Hat club in 1954. Parker plays "My Funny Valentine," the only known recording of him playing that standard, with staggering inventiveness, almost on a par with the St. Nick's material, and an equally amazing "Cool Blues." Also notable is a slow, medium-tempo blues from a 1950 engagement, which the producers call "Parker's Mood," after his famous Savoy recording. For some reason, Bird rarely played blues at this tempo in live gigs.
This collection also features two live tracks from Birdland in 1953, with Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and conga player Candido; these alone would be worth the price of the collection, which is rounded out by three 1953 concert performances at the University of Oregon with trumpeter Chet Baker, subject of his own hagiographic movie treatment, Bruce Weber's excellent
Let's Get Lost
.
Bird and Baker can be heard in a 1952 Inglewood, California, jam session context on
Bird and Chet: Inglewood Jam
(Fresh Sound TI-9801). Baker plays some very credible bebop trumpet, and Bird is inspired in places (the accompaniment of one of his favorite pianists, Al Haig, couldn't have hurt), but the really interesting thing is the presence of Sonny Criss, a highly regarded West Coast alto player who comes straight out of the Parker mode. It is rare to hear such a direct face-off between Parker and one of his disciples. Criss works in Parker's language, using his vocabulary, but without Bird's flexibility; you can really hear what set Bird apart from everyone else.
Another collection that should be mentioned, although none but the most fanatical Parker head will want it, is
Rara Avis (Rare Bird)
(Stash ST-CD-21). It consists of three broadcasts, from 1949, 1952, and 1954, the first two recorded from New York television shows. One of the tracks has Bird blowing a couple of scorching choruses on Cole Porter's "Lover" with a studio band behind a tap dancer. There are a couple of throwaway numbers, too, including an intriguing-sounding "Blues Jam Session" on which Parker is supposedly

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