as Chan, his final partner but never his wife (Bird had never gotten round to divorcing his third wife), and his first wife, Rebecca, disputed the right to bury him. Rebecca won out and he was interred in Kansas City, with a service which seemed totally inappropriate.
By the time of Bird’s death, there were those in jazz who already saw him as a kind of historical figure no longer in tune with the changing face of the music, and there is some truth in that perception. If he made no real technical or conceptual advances beyond the awesome discoveries of the late 1940s, the saxophonist had already made an indelible impression on jazz history by then and, as Cootie Williams among many have pointed out, the music could never be the same again, not simply for saxophone players but for players on any instrument. The distinctive tone which he developed – astringent and penetrating, with little vibrato, in sharp contrast to the more lustrous richness and wide vibrato of his greatest swing era predecessors, Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter – became the prevailing model. The immensely complex but clearly defined use of minute variations of pitch and rhythmic accent which gave his hugely energised improvisations their unique character exerted a mesmeric fascination on jazz players all over the world. Improvisers everywhere studied and practised every nuance of the constantly ingenious routes he discovered through the familiar blues and song forms which continued to make up his repertory, just as he had pored over Lester Young’s recordings in the late 1930s. Several of his tunes – ‘Anthropology’, ‘Ornithology’, ‘Now’s the Time’, ‘Scrapple from the Apple’ – became standards in their own right, but he was seldom very concerned with composed material. Improvisation was the lifeblood of his art, and the extended possibilities thrown up by the harmonic structure of a given tune the veins through which it coursed. As an improviser, he was the supreme creative figure of his era, and his example remained the major influence on a generation of jazz playing, a stylistic pre-eminence which would only really be challenged with the emergence of modal and free jazz in the late 1950s.
Fats Navarro
Fats Navarro was dead before the LP era began, officially as a result of latent tuberculosis, although the disease was abetted by heroin addiction, the real cause of his decline. His recorded legacy came entirely from the days of 78 rpm releases, and from a variety of preserved broadcasts which make up around a third of the surviving recordings on which he is heard. Even from that limited source, however, there has emerged a general consensus among musicians, critics and listeners that the trumpeter stood alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis as the most significant performer on that instrument in early bebop.
Born Theodore Navarro of mixed black, Chinese and Cuban descent in Key West, Florida, on 24 September 1923, he played both piano and tenor saxophone as a youth but by the age of seventeen he was already touring in dance bands as a trumpeter. One such band dropped him off in Ohio in 1941, where he studied briefly before hooking up with the respected Indianapolis-based territory band led by Snookum Russell. In 1943, he joined Andy Kirk’s nationally-known outfit, where he partnered Howard McGhee in the trumpet section, but his big breakthrough to prominence came in 1945, when singer Billy Eckstine brought him into his historically crucial bebop-inspired big band as principal trumpet, replacing Dizzy Gillespie, who left to form his own unit.
Dizzy took Eckstine along to hear Navarro (who was variously known as Fats, Fat Boy or Fat Girl, from his high voice and effeminate manner as well as his girth) play with Kirk’s band, and it didn’t take long for the singer to make up his mind. As he recalled later for Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff’s oral history of jazz, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, he went with Dizzy to the club where the band were playing,
and the only thing Fats had to blow (because Howard McGhee was the featured trumpet player) was behind a chorus number. But he was wailing behind this number, and I said to myself, ‘This is good enough; this’ll fit.’
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