Eckstine-style singer the saxophonist had discovered in an LA club. It was not the session that Russell had in mind, but it did produce two dazzling, impromptu instrumentals in ‘Bird’s Nest’ and ‘Cool Blues’, which not only provide a taster for the relaxed feel evident on Parker’s final Hollywood session for the label a week later, but benefit from the more spacious ensemble textures provided by Garner’s fine trio. ‘Cool Blues’ is especially good, and if you have the Spotlite issues of the complete Dial sessions on either LP or CD, it is intriguing to trace the evolution of the final master through the three alternate takes which preceded it, with a particularly overt reconsideration of tempo, which is clearly much to Garner’s liking.
While the septet featured in the second session looks a more homogeneous bebop unit than the trio, with Howard McGhee and Wardell Gray on their respective horns, and Marmarosa joined by guitarist Barney Kessell, Callender, and Don Lamond on drums, in practice the procession of soloists tends to get a little congested. In both sessions, though, Parker could hardly sound more different than he did on the fraught ‘Loverman’ date, and the benefits of rest and rehabilitation are obvious on his informal blues creation ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’, said to have been cooked up in a taxi on the way to the studio, and on three tunes wisely provided by McGhee on the assumption that the saxophonist was unlikely to show up with the four commissioned new pieces. They announced that Bird was back, and ready to resume the flight so rudely interrupted the previous summer. That resumption, though, was not to be consummated on Central Avenue, but back in the cradle of bebop, 52nd Street.
Before he left for New York, however, Dean Benedetti, already a devoted acolyte of the master, began to make the celebrated series of recordings which achieved an almost legendary status for over four decades. Benedetti was an alto saxophonist who experienced a conversion of almost religious intensity when he first heard Bird play. Between 1 March 1947 at the Hi-De-Ho club in LA, and 11 July 1948 at The Onyx on 52nd Street, he set up his recording devices in a number of clubs in the hope of preserving Bird’s gorgeous flights for posterity. And he did mean Bird. For the most part, he was interested only in recording the saxophonist, and either omitted or quickly cut off the other musicians on the stand, however distinguished or unique the occasion. The results constitute an astonishing, fragmentary, and in truth at times barely listenable record of obsession: Benedetti had the right idea in wanting to catch Bird’s evanescent creations on the wing, free of the artificial environment of the recording studio, but lacked the technical means to achieve it. Most of the fragments are in poor sound quality, but what they have to reveal about Parker’s methods as a creative improviser has helped flesh out the picture already available from the canonic sets of recordings on Dial, Savoy and Verve, as well as a whole range of broadcasts and other unofficial sources.
For a long time, though, it seemed as if the Benedetti recordings would remain firmly part of the Parker myth. A smattering of the material had been commercially released, but the huge majority of this remarkable archive was thought lost. In fact, they were in the possession of his brother, and were finally unearthed and lovingly assembled by Mosaic Records in 1990, as The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings, a seven-CD set which, unlike all other Mosaic limited edition sets, will remain permanently available, since they own rather than lease the rights to the material. They are, however, likely to prove compelling only to the devoted and the scholarly.
Bird returned to New York early in April 1947, by way of a stop-over in Chicago to play a gig with Howard McGhee. He settled in the Dewey Square Hotel (commemorated in his tune ‘Dewey Square’), and put together a famous quintet for an engagement at The Three Deuces, playing opposite Lennie Tristano. The band featured Miles Davis (trumpet), Duke Jordan (piano), Tommy Potter (bass) and Max Roach (drums). There is some debate about the dates of this engagement, but in his autobiography Miles Davis puts the opening as April. Bird ‘seemed happy and ready to go’, Miles recalls, and the band had their work cut out in adjusting to his radical rhythmic experiments.
I was really happy to be playing with Bird again, because playing with him brought out the best in me at that time. He could play so many different styles and never repeat the same musical idea. His creativity and musical ideas were endless. He used to turn the rhythm section around every night. Say we would be playing a blues. Bird would start on the eleventh bar. As the rhythm section stayed where they were, then Bird would play in such a way that it made the rhythm section sound like it was on one and three instead of two and four. Nobody could keep up with Bird back in those days except maybe Dizzy. Every time he would do this, Max would scream at Duke not to try to follow Bird. He wanted Duke to stay where he was, because he wouldn’t have been able to keep up with Bird and he would have fucked up the rhythm section. Duke did this a lot when he didn’t listen. See, when Bird went off like that on one of his incredible solos all the rhythm section had to do was to stay where they were and play some straight shit. Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time. It was like he had planned it in his mind. The only thing about this is that he couldn’t explain it to nobody. You just had to ride the music out. Because anything might happen musically when you were playing with Bird. So I learned to play what I knew and extend it upwards – a little above what I knew. You had to be ready for anything.
Miles paints a typically graphic image of the discomfited musicians as Bird launched into one of his flights: ‘Anyway, so then, sometimes Max Roach would find himself in between the beat. And I wouldn’t know what the fuck Bird was doing because I wouldn’t have never heard it before. Poor Duke Jordan and Tommy Potter, they’d just be there lost as motherfuckers – like everybody else, only more lost. When Bird played like that, it was like hearing music for the first time.’ That sense of freshness and surprise, though, is underpinned by an equally crucial element in his music: structural logic. Even in his wildest inventions, his most dazzlingly dense solos, Parker’s music is informed by a clear architectural sense of purpose, a remorseless musical logic which may have torn up expected preconceptions, but was thoroughly if intuitively thought through in the process of its creation (‘it was like he had planned it in his mind’). This was not only the expression of an exceptional musical intelligence, it was also the pay-off for all the wood-shedding of a decade before, which left him with the technical capability to realize the dazzling array of ideas and heightened emotions flowing through his horn.
With a typical disregard for such frivolities as contracts, Bird’s first recording session on his return to New York was for Savoy, despite his still-current ‘exclusive’ deal with Dial. The studio band featured a change favoured by both Miles and Max, which brought Bud Powell to the piano chair, despite the personal difficulties that existed between Bird and Bud and that would surface periodically over the years, culminating in an infamous occasion on Parker’s final appearance at Birdland, just days before his death. After a confrontation on stage, the pianist, drunk and all but incapable of playing, smashed some keys with his elbow and stalked off stage, leaving the saxophonist repeating his name over and over into the microphone. Eventually, as the tension became unbearable, Charles Mingus, the bass player for the date, apologised to the audience (‘This is not jazz. These are sick people’), and the gig – and Bird’s career – ground to a premature halt, although some observers have claimed that Parker played on as a trio without Powell and trumpeter Kenny Dorham, whose own account of the incident appears in Reisner’s Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker.
On this studio date, though, Powell was in scintillating form, with the inner demons held at bay and the creativity in full flow on take after take. Potter and Roach provide a buoyant underpinning for the music, but a youthful Miles Davis sounds distinctly out of his depth much of the time (he would find his forte in a different direction by the end of the decade), and Bird is uneven, as an inspection of the four completed takes of ‘Donna Lee’ will readily confirm. Although Miles wrote the line (it was wrongly credited to Parker on the record), he struggles to play it and intonation remains a problem for both hornmen through all the takes.
While yet another contrafact on the ‘Rhythm’ changes, ‘Chasing The Bird’ is unusual in Parker’s discography in that it features contrapuntal lines for the alto and trumpet, rather than the usual unison statements, a refreshing
