Bird Lives!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I included this video in the original post. I agree - it's a fantastic, inspired Moose the Mooche...

Apologies! I missed your original post, I came to this movie half way through. Agree, Moose is extraordinarily incentive and nothing is "thrown away", even his "High Society" lick. He's also assisted by a very good rhythm section with Red Garland and Roy Haynes who give as good as they are given, Garland especially "there" behind Bird.

The Cool Blues is also great, the opening unexpected phrases of Bird's solo, kind of sardonic. If not Sonny Rollins, it's a broad hint.

It's a very fine release all round.

[Jazzrook]

Charlie Parker with Stan Kenton & his Orchestra in 1954:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=tk1CJo7XbV0

JR

[Joseph K]

Apologies! I missed your original post, I came to this movie half way through. Agree, Moose is extraordinarily incentive and nothing is "thrown away", even his "High Society" lick. He's also assisted by a very good rhythm section with Red Garland and Roy Haynes who give as good as they are given, Garland especially "there" behind Bird.

The Cool Blues is also great, the opening unexpected phrases of Bird's solo, kind of sardonic. If not Sonny Rollins, it's a broad hint.

It's a very fine release all round.

Agreed.

[Serial_Apologist]

This is a pretty good latish live Parker set from 1953 that I hadn't heard in full before, in OK sound, at the Storyville in Boston, with Red Garland on the first tracks, Sir Charles Thompson on the others. "Cool Blues" apparantly has Bird quoting Wagner.

http://youtu.be/Raxg2lO5460

Red anticipates the chord changes just before the start of the first repeat of the bridge by about half a bar-length (in the second chorus repeat, I mean) - something Bud Powell did in a few places during the Massey Hall concert. I've always assumed that this was because Bud was either pissed or spooked by onstage antics and had lost track of where he was in the sequence - which was also happening if one listens carefully to him backing the interesting stuff up front; but either way it's a great device, something Schoenberg would have appreciated as he used harmonies anticipatively in a similar fashion, "jumping the gun, as it were", but if it was not intended by Bud it's a good example of the unintentional having salutary consequences!

[Serial_Apologist]

Charlie Parker with Stan Kenton & his Orchestra in 1954:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=tk1CJo7XbV0

JR

Thanks for this! It's pretty much the same arrangement used for Parker's recording with a specially assembled big band two years earlier, which was ...(let me just check my EP)... Joe Lippman, under Norman Granz's, er, curation. I hope the Kenton empire paid him his royalties! By the way, us 16-year olds always used to laugh our socks off at Al Porcino's cringey trumpet entry on "What Is This Thing Called Love?" on that, and I still haven't grown up at 74!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

One thing that strikes me, and probably a reflection of when I came into jazz, 1959/60, is that Parker was in some way (to me) the past of jazz, a "historical"figure, to be caught up with. Whereas Coltrane was "contemporary" or its future. I bought Giant Steps when it first came out, My Favourite Things etc etc. Coltrane also seemed a much younger figure generationally although there was only four years between him and Parker. I also get the feeling that Bird was in some way "imprisoned" in the style & idiom he largely created, unlike say Trane or Miles who reinvented themselves. Even Kenny Dorham who moved from being a fluent Dizzy-ish player to a far more personal approach, removed from his beginnings.

And having kicked back at "What might of been", I have recently wondered what Parker would have sounded like working with Monk in say 1960, the role taken by Charlie Rouse, and with that rhythm section. Parker, as well as blazing technique, also had that sardonic and oblique strain. He would only have been 39 or 40 in 1960. Anyway...

[Serial_Apologist]

One thing that strikes me, and probably a reflection of when I came into jazz, 1959/60, is that Parker was in some way (to me) the past of jazz, a "historical"figure, to be caught up with. Whereas Coltrane was "contemporary" or its future. I bought Giant Steps when it first came out, My Favourite Things etc etc. Coltrane also seemed a much younger figure generationally although there was only four years between him and Parker. I also get the feeling that Bird was in some way "imprisoned" in the style & idiom he largely created, unlike say Trane or Miles who reinvented themselves. Even Kenny Dorham who moved from being a fluent Dizzy-ish player to a far more personal approach, removed from his beginnings.

And having kicked back at "What might of been", I have recently wondered what Parker would have sounded like working with Monk in say 1960, the role taken by Charlie Rouse, and with that rhythm section. Parker, as well as blazing technique, also had that sardonic and oblique strain. He would only have been 39 or 40 in 1960. Anyway...

Interesting that you say that. My entree into jazz must have come around 1962 or 3: we purloined an unused storage room in a new block at the school, stuck a sign on the door which read "The Jazz Hole", pasted pages of our heroes around the whitwashed walls and boxed the sole naked lightbulb behind some coloured perspex. Then one of the boys, of rich parentage to judge from the size and proportion of the hi-fi he brought along, followed by the rest of us (about five in all) added our collections of LPs and EPs, which took up the window ledge space, which, fortunately, never saw the sun. They had to be "modern jazz" - my Humph "Blues in the ight" failed the admission test as being "mainstream", though for contradictory reasons Coleman Hawkins was judged admissable, probably because he'd recorded with Monk.

What was remarkable, given the fascistic character of the régime at that school, and strict rules about being where you should be at any given moment, was that we were allowed to get away with it for two years; but, come to think of it, we were probably considered beyond rescue by that point, victims of to much Existentialism culled from reading Sartre and Camus (who was actually in the French A level syllabus) and seeing too many French movies. But to address your point, much of what we listened to was hard bop in range; Dolphy was still within that definition, just about, in what was available in the shops in '62/'63, and we were just being introduced to Ornette, though not yet - and not in my case until much later - to Cecil or Albert. Coltrane was useful as an object lesson in being able to follow developments - or A Development - from orthodoxy, which meant chord-changes, to wherever he was travelling, and having established his "legimitimacy", we were willing and eager to follow. But apart from Dolphy and Coltrane - and Mingus, who were were just getting to know about - I think we had a sort of consensus going that nothing presented by hard bop we knew of - which would have included Stan Getz or Milt Jackson guesting with the Oscar Peterson Trio, I know, I know - amounted to an advance on Parker and Gillespie in 1947, which was therefore by definition still "contemporary" in our way of thinking.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Yes, as I said it's probably me. But, by example, one of the first EPs I bought was Gerry Mulligan (with Bob Brookmeyer) live in Paris in 1954, "Walking Shoes" etc. And this was far more "modern" to me than Parker although still "1954". I remember playing this to Nick Evans who was a school friend at the time, and was totally into trad trombone. I don't think we ever talked about Parker, he was as "other era" as Lester Young. But Cannonball, Blakey, Trane, Jackie McLean (another first EP) were all "immediate", Bird not so much. I made up for this a few years later by virtually listening to nothing but Charlie Parker! Everything I could get my hands on! Suddenly he "SPOKE" to me and all "his language" made sense. I remember Art Pepper saying much as he respected Parker, he just didn't like his tone, and maybe that was my initial problem too. Cannonball was far more relatable.

[Jazzrook]

Charlie Parker with Brew Moore & Paul Bley in Montreal, 1953:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=u1rQ3dyOfuA

JR

[Jazzrook]

Charlie Parker with Lennie Tristano & Kenny Clarke(phone book?) playing 'I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me' in 1951?

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=ejB69aF7adg

JR

[Ian Thumwood]

Charlie Parker with Lennie Tristano & Kenny Clarke(phone book?) playing 'I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me' in 1951?

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=ejB69aF7adg

JR

This is a fabulous combination yet I think the recording quality reals lets it down. I had no idea there was a recording of Bird with Tristano in a duo so I suppose we will have to make do with this. I seems like Tristano's approach had some effect on Parker's playing insofar that the alto lines seem to be phrased less stridently. It is a fascinating combination. Tristano is a player I greatly admire and similarly relied heavily on contra-facts although I think he seemed a more "considered" player in contrast to the more spontaneous approach of Parker. Parker's rhythm does not seem so heavily articulated as under his own name. I wish there was more of this and in a better audio condition.

I love the tracks made with the Metronome All-stars where Tristano and Parker were part of a big band line up.

[Serial_Apologist]

This is a fabulous combination yet I think the recording quality reals lets it down. I had no idea there was a recording of Bird with Tristano in a duo so I suppose we will have to make do with this. I seems like Tristano's approach had some effect on Parker's playing insofar that the alto lines seem to be phrased less stridently. It is a fascinating combination. Tristano is a player I greatly admire and similarly relied heavily on contra-facts although I think he seemed a more "considered" player in contrast to the more spontaneous approach of Parker. Parker's rhythm does not seem so heavily articulated as under his own name. I wish there was more of this and in a better audio condition.

I love the tracks made with the Metronome All-stars where Tristano and Parker were part of a big band line up.

Me too - especially that line-up of trumpet players at the forefront, each one staking his relative independence of Dizzy in the solos.