[Today: Bird is the word...]
Legend has it that a young Charlie Parker was badly embarrassed onstage in the mid-30s, when drummer Jo Jones tossed a cymbal at his feet and effectively gonged him off the stage. Whether or not that tale is true, it’s a fact that Parker spent the final three years of that decade practicing his saxophone for 15 hours a day, every day, in search of a new sound. What he found would change the history of popular music.
Parker: “I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.” It was also the birth of Bebop – a lightning quick evolution of Jazz that almost overnight made the big band and swing music that preceded it sound like something from a previous century.
Charlie Parker wasn’t just fast – he also played with a harmonic dexterity and rhythmic imagination that caused his jazz peers to re-think the way they approached their instruments. If Bird drove his horn like a race car at 180 mph, he was also taking it through hairpin turns without touching the brakes. Unfortunately, his blazing speed on the sax and debilitating (and eventually fatal) heroin habit have overshadowed the music itself. Like Robert Johnson and Elvis Presley, Parker’s legend has nearly swallowed his music whole.
Thankfully, The Legendary Dial Masters, Volumes 1 & 2 captures Bird in full flight, and serves as living proof of his genius. Recorded in February and March of 1946 (Volume 1) and February and November of 1947 (Volume 2), these are perhaps the most accessible sides of his turbulent and challenging career. He mainly worked for three labels during the 1940s and 50s – Savoy, Dial and Verve. His Savoy recordings are truly impressive and made his name, but at times the sheer velocity of those sessions renders them less than enjoyable. Many people consider his Verve albums to be masterpieces, but to my ears they sound like sad miscastings of a talented artist. Making Charlie Parker play with strings is like setting a beautiful diamond in tinfoil.
At the very least, Parker’s mid-period Dial recordings are an excellent place to get familiar with his music. He forged a new sound out of old ballads (‘Ornithology’ for instance, mutated from a lick in ‘How High The Moon’), and the 35 songs collected here are nothing less than the foundation of Bebop. Bird OD’d in March of 1955, at only 34 years of age, but his music is still very much alive…
Listen: Dexterity
Listen: Ornithology
Listen: Yardbird Suite
