given his alleged chafing against the restrictions of form, it is surprising that Parker did not explore that possibility more fully. Two sharply contrasting blues, the serpentine ‘Cheryl’ (with Powell in formidable flow) and ‘Buzzy’, completed the session.
Bird played tenor on his next studio outing, a date for Savoy under the leadership of Miles Davis in August, with John Lewis on piano, Nelson Boyd (bass), and Max Roach (drums). The trumpeter sounds much more at home with the music this time around, while the bigger horn blunts Bird’s attack a little, but not his rhythmic or harmonic acuity. This is a relaxed and inventive session (one of only two Parker would record on tenor), and includes Miles’s first tune under the title ‘Milestones’ (he would write the other, better-known one a decade later), his adaptation of a Tadd Dameron line as ‘Half Nelson’, a sophisticated blues in F he called ‘Sippin’ at Bells’, and the bustling ‘Little Willie Leaps’, the tune which would precipitate the bust-up with Powell at Birdland (the pianist insisting on playing it when the rest of the band were playing something else entirely). Bird was on a roll, however, and 1947 would be widely seen as marking the start – and perhaps the apex – of his period of greatest ascendency in the music, one which lasted until the early part of the next decade. He was off heroin at this point, although drinking heavily, and the recordings left to us clearly reveal the saxophonist restored to full command of his mature powers.
Dial were finally able to get their ‘exclusive’ signing back into a studio for a series of three sessions in October, November and December 1947, which completed his output for the label, although a home jam session at the house of Chuck Kopely in Los Angeles is also included in the complete issues of the Dial material, recorded Benedetti-style by Howard McGhee with a hand-held microphone, leaving the other musicians largely inaudible. It is all too indicative, incidentally, of the neglect of jazz in its homeland that it was left to a tirelessly dedicated English ornithologist, Tony Williams, to gather and issue the definitive collection of the complete Dial recordings on his Spotlite label in the late 1960s.
The Dial sessions provide a strong indication of why Parker preferred the relative anonymity of Duke Jordan (or the even more sympathetic Al Haig) to the quirky individuality of Monk or the ebullient dazzle of Powell, and the cool, understated middle-register work of Miles over the pyrotechnics of Gillespie or Navarro. The group is designed to support and complement the brilliance of his own playing and his own harmonic conception, and another incendiary talent on or near his level was likely to prove a distraction. The exception, of course, was the drummer, and while Bird valued the solid support of a compliant rhythm section, he also saw the necessity of having it fired up by Max Roach’s incomparable drumming (though sadly, the finer details of his work are not convincingly captured by the recording processes of the time).
The October session added six tunes to his discography, including arguably his finest ballad performance in the studio on ‘Embraceable You’. The ensembles have that lived-in feel which only comes with night after night spent together on the stand, and the now-familiar structures dominate, with three AABA tunes (‘Dexterity’, ‘Dewey Square’ and ‘Bird Of Paradise’) and two blues (‘Bongo Bop’ and ‘The Hymn’). His control of tension and release is startlingly evident on ‘Dexterity’, a ‘Rhythm’ contrafact in which he explores the alternation of measured phrases with sizzling double-time passages in a masterly exhibition of musical and emotional control, but one which feels entirely organic and unforced. That ability to combine exhilarating spontaneity with impeccable balance is a constant of his best work.
Bird was clearly in more reflective mood on the November session. Unusually, three of the six tunes were ballads and, equally unusually, two of them, ‘My Old Flame’ and ‘Don’t Blame Me’, were gracefully dispatched in a single take. The three takes of ‘Out Of Nowhere’, although made only minutes apart, provide another fascinating example of his ability to radically redefine his approach to the same tune, while the uptempo cuts include two more classics, the phonetically titled ‘Klact-oveeseds-tene’, a fine example of his ability to build a brilliantly coherent solo out of seemingly fragmentary phrases, and ‘Scrapple from the Apple’, taken at the ‘medium bounce’ tempo he loved, and built in part on one of the first tunes he ever learned, Fats Waller’s ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, but with an altered bridge. The session began with the inevitable blues, a concoction entitled ‘Bird Feathers’.
His Dial output was completed the following month, this time with trombonist J.J. Johnson drafted in to enlarge the band to a sextet. The first thing which strikes the ear is the additional lustre of the alto sound, courtesy of a brand new Selmer saxophone which Bird had acquired just before the session. The trombonist dovetails neatly into the ensemble, and his own solo statements reveal how far he had progressed in tailoring his intractable horn to the demands of the bebop idiom, and vice versa. The session contains another version of ‘Embraceable You’, this time in a medium bounce version entitled ‘Quasimodo’, a furious version of Benny Harris’s ‘Little Benny’ re-cast as ‘Crazeology’ (of the four extant versions, two have survived only as alto solos), and ‘Charlie’s Wig’, a choice contrafact of ‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream’, as well as the blues tunes ‘Drifting on a Reed’ and ‘Bongo Beep’, and a ballad, ‘How Deep is the Ocean?’
At the time he was making these sides, Bird also took part in a series of broadcast sessions which reflect the in-fighting of the period. The post-war years saw a concentrated animosity between jazz’s traditional wing (dubbed the ‘mouldy figs’, often with the mock-anachronistic spelling ‘fygges’ to underline the point), and the emerging modernists, whose champions in the press included the editors of Metronome, Leonard Feather and Barry Ulanov. In September, Ulanov organised a battle of the bands on radio, with his own hand-picked selection going up against the resident band on Rudi Blesh’s This Is Jazz show, with a programme billed as ‘Bands For Bonds’ as the chosen battleground. Parker took part in all three sessions in September and November (the latter a celebration for the triumphant modernists, who won the listeners’ votes). The tapes have survived and were issued – again by Spotlite – in the early 1970s, with the altoist in typically fine fettle. For lovers of the curious, the second session of 20 September includes a radical re-interpretation of the New Orleans warhorse ‘Tiger Rag’, with Bird and Dizzy taking no prisoners. Their version prompted Ulanov to comment in the November issue of Metronome that what they did with a tune which was ‘entirely new to all of them as a piece to perform, surely must rank high in jazz history. Its remorseless progression from B flat to A flat to E flat was never accomplished with more ingenuity and less confinement’.
Shortly after that second broadcast, Bird and Dizzy were reunited again, this time on the stage of Carnegie Hall, where the saxophonist appeared as Dizzy’s guest in a concert which, as the play-bill proclaimed, brought The New Jazz to that august venue, and featured the trumpeter’s big band and singer Ella Fitzgerald. Parker received secondary billing (perhaps in part because his notorious unreliability left doubts as to whether he would actually show up), and joined Dizzy on five quintet tunes after the interval, with a rhythm section drawn from the big band, featuring John Lewis (piano), Al McKibbon (bass) and Joe Harris (drums). The music they played that night was recorded and has been issued in various forms, initially by a pirate company called Black Deuce as 78 rpm discs, and later in legitimate form by Savoy. The rivalry between the two mainstays of bebop is readily apparent as each pushes the other to more and more remarkable feats – both musical and athletic – and the rhythm section comes close to surrender at times, notably on a furious ‘Dizzy Atmosphere’ and ‘Koko’, all spurred on by their partisan supporters in the sell-out crowd. The result has to be declared an honourable draw, with the music the ultimate winner.
The final Dial session had been cut in the shadow of another recording ban called by James Petrillo of the American Federation of Musicians and scheduled to commence on 1 January 1948. Savoy, however, managed to get the quintet back into the studio for one final pre-ban session in Detroit on 21 December. ‘Klaustance’ and ‘Bird Gets the Worm’ are particularly interesting products of this session (which was completed by two blues, ‘Another Hair-Do’ and ‘Bluebird’).
