under the supervision of Mitch Miller, which included violin, viola, cello, harp and oboe playing arrangements by Jimmy Carroll, who also conducted.
Hard though it is to believe, Parker seems to have felt a genuine inferiority complex in the presence of classically-trained musicians, even though they were not remotely on his plane as a creative talent, and seems to have approached the sessions with considerable anxiety. The first set of releases in this format produced the most fully realised cut, a lovely version of ‘Just Friends’ which gave the saxophonist the biggest single hit of his whole career. In ‘Just Friends’, Bird and his collaborators found the optimum balance between his characteristically hard-edged, astringent alto style and the sweet, poppy string arrangements which are distinctly cloying on some of the other efforts from this session, and from the two subsequent studio dates in this format, in the late summer of 1950 and early in 1952, both of which featured arrangements by Joe Lipman. Bird also played tour and club dates with strings, and there are live recordings from the Apollo, Carnegie Hall and Birdland.
The most successful performances are generally those where Bird is able to free himself most emphatically from the insipid accompaniments. Nonetheless, he continued to work intermittently with strings until a disastrous night at Birdland, the Broadway club named after him, in August 1954. The scheduled three-week engagement began well enough, but as the first week wore on, Bird became increasingly argumentative with his sidemen, culminating in a stand-up row on the bandstand, and the public firing of the string players. He was banned from the club which bore his name at a time when his personal health and state of mind were already much battered – his daughter with Chan Richardson, Pree, had died earlier that year while he was working on the west coast, a loss which profoundly affected him. That night, he attempted to commit suicide by drinking iodine; his stomach was pumped at Bellevue and he survived, but not for much longer.
Parker’s decline in the 1950s was by no means a uniform one, at least in artistic terms. His drug-free interlude in the wake of Camarillo had been a short one and the cumulative effects of drugs and alcohol on his health grew inexorably more serious. He bickered with his various managers and agents, including the long-suffering Billy Shaw, battled with club owners, ran into trouble with the union over failure to fulfil engagements and pay his sidemen, and had his vital cabaret card revoked in 1951, without which no musician could undertake regular nightclub work in New York. Deprived of the crucial base of regular engagements in the city, he was forced to take on more out-of-town engagements as a soloist working with local rhythm sections. His employment became increasingly sporadic and the measure of financial success he had begun to enjoy in the late 1940s turned instead to mounting debts.
Nonetheless, he continued to produce memorable music throughout his final half-decade, both in the studio and, on the evidence of the surviving live recordings, on stage, where the lucid flow of his boundless invention is often worked out at greater length. The studio session reuniting him with Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk on 6 June 1950 was marred by Granz’s inclusion of the stylistically inappropriate Buddy Rich on drums, but both hornmen are in fine, highly characteristic fettle on ‘Bloomdido’ and ‘An Oscar For Treadwell’, the picks of the session, although Monk is more self-effacing throughout than posterity would have wished. It was the last time Bird and Diz met in a studio, although subsequent occasional live dates have been preserved, including sides from Birdland in 1951 and the famous concert from Massey Hall in Toronto in 1953, which does not quite live up to its frequent on-disc billing as ‘The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever’ but is essential listening nonetheless, bringing together as it does the titanic talents of Bird, Dizzy, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach on a single stage.
There was a further studio reunion on 17 January 1951, this time with both Miles Davis and Max Roach in a quintet which also included Bird’s regular piano-man of the period, Walter Bishop, Jr, and bassist Teddy Kotick. ‘Au Privave’ is arguably the classic outcome of the session, which also yielded ‘She Rote’ and ‘KC Blues’, as well as a re-make of ‘Star Eyes’, which he had cut with a quartet the previous year. (Miles went on to make his recording debut for Prestige later that same day, and one of his subsequent sessions for the label would feature Bird, credited as ‘Charlie Chan’ for contractual reasons, on a rare tenor outing in 1953, which Prestige released on LP as Collectors Items.) These sides were later combined with a quintet session of 8 August as the LP Swedish Schnapps. The second session featured trumpeter Red Rodney, who had taken over as Bird’s regular trumpet-man the previous year, and the rhythm section which would provide the platform for the formation of the Modern Jazz Quartet with Milt Jackson, comprising John Lewis (piano), Ray Brown (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums). The title track is again vintage Bird, while ‘Si Si’ and ‘Blues for Alice’ are not far behind. In an interesting historical footnote, he also returns to ‘Loverman’ – according to John Lewis, in response to a special request from Granz – but does not sound fully committed to a tune which presumably held bad memories from the infamous Dial version. If, as Red Rodney has suggested, it constituted some kind of purging of that memory, it does not sound like an entirely effective one.
There is some doubt over the actual dates of the quartet session which produced four more eminently worthy contributions to the Parker discography in either December 1952 or the following month. The sparkling ‘Kim’ and more relaxed ‘Laird Baird’ are both dedications to his children (Chan’s daughter Kim, and his son with her, Baird), while ‘Cosmic Rays’ is another blistering blues performance and ‘The Song is You’ a fine medium tempo treatment of that ballad. Whatever his personal state – and the decline was now well underway – the saxophonist could still rise to the occasion in the studio, and with a remarkable consistency of invention which belies his problems outside. Time, though, was starting to run short on one of jazz’s most spectacular flights.
The only other small-group session of 1953 saw Bird eventually turn up with only 45 minutes of the scheduled three-hour session left. The quartet – old hands Al Haig (piano) and Max Roach (drums), plus a slightly bemused Percy Heath on bass getting his first taste of Bird’s methods in the studio – brought the session in on schedule in the remaining time, with six full or partial takes of ‘Chi-Chi’, first time hits on ‘I Remember You’ and ‘Now’s the Time’, and, after two false starts, a rampant ‘Confirmation’. Max Roach had already recorded ‘Chi-Chi’, and recalls Parker sitting at the table in his basement apartment in the middle of the night writing the tune straight off ‘like a letter’ as a gift for the drummer’s debut recording session as a leader, which he was scheduled to make the next morning.
Bird’s last two small-group sessions were both for quintet, although it seems likely that he added guitarist Jerome Darr to a planned quartet date on one of his infamous last-minute whims for the session on 31 March 1954, and maintained that instrumentation on the 10 December date, but with Billy Bauer on guitar. The material was all from the Cole Porter book and the project was intended to be the first of what became a Verve trademark, the Songbook project. He also took part in the first of Granz’s JATP-style studio jam sessions in June 1952, and there were also studio ventures with a swinging big band (four sides recorded on 25 March 1952, with Joe Lipman as arranger and conductor) and a more experimental orchestra session under Gil Evans on 25 May 1953, which included a ‘Birth of the Cool’-style instrumental line-up with French horn, clarinet, oboe and bassoon alongside a jazz rhythm section and a sugary mixed vocal chorus led by Dave Lambert. Parker had spoken in Down Beat in January about his desire to make such a session, this time citing Hindemith as a precedent, but the attempt proved unsatisfactory. Both Evans and Bird blamed faulty engineering balances and offered to do it again but Granz, who disliked it intensely, refused the offer and the Parker – Evans combination remained one of unrealised potential.
By 1955, Bird’s health was in serious decline, and a number of musicians have reported him making portentous remarks about not being around much longer, including Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt and Charles Mingus (on the night of the Birdland debacle on 5 March). His gloomy predictions proved all too accurate. By the time he dropped into Nica’s apartment, he was very ill indeed, and the Baroness’s doctor would not allow him to travel to Boston,
