at Berg’s, Bird and Dizzy cut some sides with singer and hipster Slim Gaillard, which includes an exchange with Bird on the vexed subject of reeds on ‘Slim’s Jam’. Both men were featured in a poll-winners’ concert at the Philharmonic Auditorium in LA on 28 January 1946, an occasion which was the genesis of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic touring presentations, an attempt to recreate the jam session ambience in a formal concert setting. (Although he quickly found alternative venues to the stuffy and unwelcoming Philharmonic, he retained the prestigious name.) This was the first time that Bird had shared a stage with his hero, Lester Young, although it was a very different Lester from the one he remembered tearing up the Reno a decade before. Bird turned up late from his score and can be heard making his entrance on ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ just before the interval on Granz’s recording of the date, which now features on the first disc of the ten-CD set Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve. It also boasts a famous Bird solo on ‘Lady Be Good’ among the five selections, and although the jazzmen were quickly shown the door from that pompously august venue – the owners argued the crowd were too exuberant, but Granz attributed the ban to their dislike of the racially integrated group he put on stage, and his musicians agreed – the concept was now launched and continued as a very successful touring package under the JATP banner for many years.
The notion of taking the jam session onto the concert stage was not entirely new with Granz (Eddie Condon, for example, had organised a series of traditional jazz jam sessions at Town Hall in New York in 1942), but it was JATP which took the idea onto the international stage. Bird would be featured on further recordings in that context in 1949 and 1950, all included in the Verve collection.
As the engagement at Berg’s closed, however, Parker was in a downward spiral. He cashed in the flight ticket provided to get the band back to New York, which Dizzy had unwisely given him, and disappeared, forcing his collaborators to leave him behind on the coast. He scuffled for a while, working at a new bottle club (so-named because customers brought their own booze) called the Finale, in LA’s Little Tokyo district, a club which Russell, one of its regular customers, described as a ‘West Coast Minton’s’ in its brief existence. Bird’s presence brought in the best of the emerging beboppers on the coast, and musicians passing through on tour would drop in to jam.
Five very lo-fi cuts recorded live at the Finale were included on Spotlite’s Yardbird in Lotus Land album, with a quintet which featured Miles Davis, pianist Joe Albany, Addison Farmer on bass, and drummer Chuck Thompson. (The album also features invaluable broadcast recordings in much better sound of the Gillespie quintet/sextet/septet during their stay in Los Angeles, probably from January, and an alto summit meeting with Benny Carter and Willie Smith.) The Finale was a short-lived venture, but during its tenure Parker cut his first session for Russell’s Dial Records, with the exception of an aborted affair with Dizzy and pianist George Handy, of which only a raggedy run-through of ‘Diggin’ Diz’, a contrafact of Richard Rodgers’s ‘Lover’, was completed. The four sides cut that day (28 March 1946) were all classic Parker creations, and, as in much of his work from the Savoy and Verve catalogues, survive in multiple takes, each featuring the saxophonist’s fabled ability not to repeat himself in his solos. The playing length of compact disc technology has encouraged companies to exhume a mountain of alternate and discarded takes to pad out re-issues or make up lavish collected editions. These are often of scant value, either in themselves or in what they add to our knowledge, but Parker’s are a different matter, and his alternates were among the first deemed worthy of re-issue on LP long before the compact disc made its appearance. His rejected takes (very often due to some lapse by a sideman) offer a constantly shifting view on his thought processes in negotiating the tune in question, not only in his chosen melodic and harmonic route, but also in tempo and rhythmic nuance, while Ross Russell has also observed that he tended to play best on early takes, which were often precisely those not released at the time.
The bustling ‘Moose the Mooche’ was built on the ‘Rhythm’ changes, ‘Ornithology’ on ‘How High the Moon’, ‘Yardbird Suite’ on ‘What Price Love’, and the session was rounded out with the Gillespie original, ‘Night in Tunisia’. Bird’s chosen trumpet-man was Miles Davis (whose playing still lacked conviction), with Lucky Thompson on tenor, and the fine, under-recorded west coast pianist Dodo Marmarosa. The rhythm section struggles at times, but Parker is in gloriously inventive form throughout.
That was certainly not true by the time he re-entered the studio at Dial’s behest for the ill-fated session of 29 July which precipitated the disastrous sequence of events which saw him committed to the federal hospital at Camarillo. Parker had been off heroin since the arrest of Moose the Mooche, but was drinking heavily, and both his behaviour and playing had become increasingly unpredictable. Trumpeter Howard McGhee had re-opened the Finale and taken Bird into his home, and it was he who organised the band for the session, despite both his and Russell’s fears regarding the outcome.
Parker was in a bad way, and the results have become notorious, notably his pained reading of Ram Ramirez’s ‘Loverman’, on which the saxophonist already seems on the verge of collapse. The recording has an awful fascination even now, and it is symptomatic of the veneration in which Bird was held by his followers that saxophonists actually learned and replicated the faltering, tortured chorus which he manages to squeeze from his horn, alongside his masterpieces. Bird never forgave Russell for releasing the four tracks cut that day, but they provide an all-too-vivid aural portrait of a man on the verge of complete breakdown.
The inevitable followed quickly. Parker was arrested that night after a fire in his hotel bedroom and some string-pulling by his admirers saw him committed to the best of the three state mental hospitals. It probably saved his life at that time, and while at Camarillo he was restored to the best health he had enjoyed in years. The resident physician assigned to the case suspected he might be schizophrenic, but Ross Russell reports that Richard Freeman (the brother of the co-owner of Dial, Marvin Freeman), a psychiatrist who had taken a particular interest in Bird before his incarceration, believed that the saxophonist exhibited a classic psychopathic personality.
A man living from moment to moment. A man living for the pleasure principle, music, food, sex, drugs, kicks, his personality arrested at an infantile level. A man with almost no feeling of guilt and only the smallest most atrophied nub of conscience. One of the army of psychopaths supplying the populations of prisons and mental institutions. Except for his music, a potential member of that population. But with Charlie Parker it is the music factor that makes all the difference.
Parker was also a master of the put-on, a trait observed by many, and was expert in disguising his feelings – as Miles Davis put it, ‘Bird always wore a mask over his feelings, one of the best masks that I have ever seen’. That almost schizophrenic change of face was noted by others, but as a symptom of lifestyle rather than basic personality. In his autobiography, Unfinished Dream: The Musical World of Red Callender, bass player Red Callender recalled working with the saxophonist on the coast during this period.
To most people Parker would have seemed a trifle remote because he was always preoccupied with his thing, music. He could sit and write out a chart in a matter of a few minutes. Anything he played he could put on manuscript. Charlie Parker was actually a brilliant man who was unfortunate enough to be into drugs. When he was straight, he was a beautiful person to talk to, he was well-versed, even erudite on many topics. Bird would talk Stravinsky or Bartók, he’d talk politics too. Often he’d discuss what was happening with President Truman, who was from his home state, Missouri. He was very articulate, had opinions on everything, especially the structure of the capitalist system and racism in America. Bird wasn’t at a loss on any subject, particularly when his head was together. When he was strung out he became another person.
He was released into the custody of Ross Russell early in 1947, and claimed much later that the record producer had made him sign a contract as a condition of release, a claim denied by Russell. The deal was struck, however, and it was a very different Parker who went back into the studio on 19 February with a band which also featured pianist Erroll
