produced bebop classics like ‘Groovin’ High’ and ‘Salt Peanuts’. His playing is striking at this stage, but is still a step away from the full unfettered flow of musical discoveries which he would unleash as his phrasing and rhythmic style reached maturity in the exhilarating ferment of the quintet music he was creating with Gillespie at The Three Deuces on 52nd Street. It all came together in the recording studio on 26 November 1945, when Bird cut a session with a quintet which featured both Miles Davis, sounding rather out of his depth, and Dizzy, who played piano as a late stand-in (depending on which source you consult, the scheduled pianist was either Thelonious Monk or Bud Powell). To complicate matters, another pianist, Argonne Thornton (also known as Sadik Hakim) was pulled in to contribute to the session and is heard on ‘Thriving On A Riff’.
Curly Russell and Max Roach provided a real bebop rhythm section for the band, who cut five tracks as well as Parker’s alto exploration on the literal ‘Warming Up a Riff’, which he did not know was being recorded – his outrageous interpolations have Gillespie shouting with laughter towards the end. They included two very different blues tunes in F, ‘Billie’s Bounce’ and ‘Now’s The Time’ (which later became a rhythm and blues dance hit as ‘The Hucklebuck’, although Bird received nothing as composer, which may have been a form of poetic justice since the tune may not have been entirely original with him in the first place – one theory credits it to saxman Rocky Boyd), as well as the riff tune mentioned above and an informally recorded, abruptly terminated ballad based on ‘Embraceable You’ which was given the non-committal title ‘Meandering’ but no matrix number.
The final tune laid down that day is one of the most incendiary slices of jazz ever committed to record. Even now, ‘Koko’ remains an astonishing piece. It is a contrafact of one of his favourites, ‘Cherokee’, and the band actually start into the theme of the tune following the complex introduction in the first, aborted take (Hakim plays piano in the intro here, and it may be he who is heard behind the alto solo on the completed master take). That is quickly dropped, though, probably to extend the alto solo, in the master take, which sizzles along at a ferocious pace (about quarter note = 300). It begins with a highly unusual 32-bar introduction: eight bars of unison chorus, followed by eight bars each of trumpet (played by Gillespie rather than Davis) and then alto, then a final 8-bar section which begins by repeating the unison theme of the opening, then abruptly executes a sharp-angled turn leading into the first solo chorus. The effect is immediately arresting, and a portent of things to come.
Parker then soars into a two chorus, sixty-four-bar solo which quickly became an icon for saxophonists. It is a tremendous outpouring of rhythmic and harmonic ingenuity, and if it was not intended as a clarion call for the new music, it certainly served as one. Parker’s steely tone and the calculating complexity of his invention can seem daunting, but the sheer explosive exuberance of the music remains breathtaking. Max Roach follows his leader with a drum break which maintains the high-strung tension of the piece, and the ensemble fall back into the final flourish of that complex introduction, this time repeated as a triumphant coda. The whole piece has the air of a defiant ultimatum: this is our music, take it or leave it.
Parker always complained about the use of what he saw as the demeaning word ‘bebop’ to describe his music, preferring the naïve option of just calling it music. When it came to naming the works that posterity would view as masterpieces of a serious art form, however, he was as cavalier and careless as any of his contemporaries, and just as guilty of leaving us with a legacy of tune titles which belong in the playroom rather than the conservatory, in direct opposition to the musical polarities they represent.
In the case of ‘Koko’, the designation of this immortal slice of recorded history was left to producer Teddy Reig, who came up with the title (possibly inspired by the alliterative effect in the closing bar) after the fact, thereby fulfilling the saxophonist’s obligation to provide four original tunes for the session, despite the piece’s distant harmonic roots in ‘Cherokee’. (It is not, incidentally, related to the famous ‘Koko’ recorded by the Duke Ellington Orchestra.) That casual indifference was not a one-off, since Reig was left with the job of inventing names for a number of other tunes during his association with Bird (and with other beboppers in the Savoy fold, including Dexter Gordon) – documented examples include ‘Donna Lee’, a Miles tune named after Curly Russell’s daughter, and ‘Cheryl’, a Bird tune from the same session named for Miles’s daughter (see Douglass Parker’s ‘“Donna Lee” and the Ironies of Bebop’ in The Bebop Revolution in Words and Music.
The session again underlines Parker’s reliance on a set pattern of formal structures: the blues, with its twelve-bar choruses and formalised but malleable I-IV-I-V-I chord progression; the harmonic structure of the AABA, thirty-two-bar popular song exemplified by the ‘I Got Rhythm’ changes; and, more distantly, the riff tunes of his south-western roots. These were the foundations of his art, and although what he did within them transcended those origins in spectacular fashion, he eventually grew to feel that his music was artificially constrained by his dependence on too narrow a structural basis. His aspirations to work in more complex modernist compositional forms, which he revealed to the composer Edgar Varèse and others, were never to be fulfilled, and it is hard to know how serious he was about them.
That New York session, like the earlier sessions with Tiny Grimes and those under his own name, was made for one of the most important of the independent labels recording the new jazz. Savoy was founded in 1942 by a traditional jazz fan named Herman Lubinsky, and its most successful releases were in the swing and blues fields. The stimulus to bring the modernists on board came from producer Teddy Reig, who arranged important pioneering recording sessions not only with Parker, but with Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro, J.J. Johnson, Sonny Stitt (in a band which featured Bud Powell), Miles Davis and Serge Chaloff, among others. The label continued to record some jazz in the 1950s and 1960s (including free jazz sessions with the likes of Sun Ra and Archie Shepp), and their work has been extensively re-issued in various forms.
Next came one of the most troubled episodes of Parker’s life, and one which took him away from the city for well over a year at a crucial time in the development of the music. In December of 1945, the Dizzy Gillespie All-Stars were booked into a six-week engagement at Billy Berg’s nightclub in Los Angeles, the first time that a New York-based bebop outfit had been scheduled to appear on the west coast. Knowing Bird’s already well-established reputation for unreliability, Dizzy and promoter Billy Shaw hired Milt Jackson as an extra member of the band who could fill in when the saxman did not make the gig. As it turned out, they also added the underrated tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson once they reached LA, and he replaced Parker with increasing regularity as the run went on.
The portents were ominous right from the start. During a much-delayed train journey to the coast, Bird, suffering from withdrawal symptoms, wandered off into the desert in the midst of a panic attack and had to be strapped to his bed for the remainder of the trip. He managed to score morphine from a doctor on arrival, and although he missed the first two sets, he eventually made the gig on the opening night at Berg’s on 10 December, an occasion which was, in Ross Russell’s words, ‘a red letter event, its attendance de rigueur for everyone with any claim to status in the west coast jazz community’. The public, though, proved more resistant to the new music, and audiences quickly fell away.
Bird was up and down, ready to sweet-talk his acolytes and go jamming in the jumping after-hours club scene along Central Avenue on the good nights, short-tempered and withdrawn on the bad. The determining factor was, of course, whether or not he had scored – again, as Russell observes, ‘for the first time in his life, heroin had caught up with him’. Ironically, his connection in LA was a man called Emry Byrd, whose more familiar monicker has gone down to posterity through the tune Parker named for him – ‘Moose The Mooche’. From his wheelchair, he ran a shoeshine stand on Central Avenue which fronted for his dealing activities, and Parker became so dependent on his back-door services that he signed an extraordinary document giving Byrd half of his royalties under the exclusive deal he had just signed with Ross Russell’s Dial Records. The dealer was jailed shortly afterwards, and
