What All the Fuss was About....
Thomas Plotkin | West Hartford CT, United States | 02/09/2008
(4 out of 5 stars)
"This 4-disc box set is a magnificent survey of Charlie Parker's concert work, from his apprenticeship in Jay McShann's big band to his Bird-with-Strings final days. Scrupulously edited by scholar Brian Priestly, at a bargain price, and well-remastered, this is (almost) all the live Parker you will ever need. And if you want to know why CP stopped the musical world dead in its tracks, you will want to hear it. Because of variable audio quality, and the fact that these sides lack the polish and perfection of Bird's studio work, I would recommend this primarily to die-hard fans; but if you want to hear Parker playing with a mad, wild abandon comparble only to Jackson Pollock dancing on the canvas or Jack Kerouac in full flight as his fingers whiz over the keys of his Underwood, these snap-shots of the greatest saxophonist ever in concert are essential.
Parker's innovations are of course so firmly embedded in our musical culture, that they have lost their ability to shock as they did in 1945. However, Parker in the studio and Parker on the bandstand were two very different animals. In the studio, his solos were the product of much rehearsal and many takes, with great attention paid to structure and cramming as much information as possible into the confines of a 3 minute 78 piece of shellac. Live, Parker was a tightrope walker without a net, a bomb-thrower, a man who seemingly could do the impossible. Musician's testimony, from Dexter Gordon to Miles Davis to Sonny Rollins, all tell the same story when remembering Parker on the stand: our jaws dropped, we put our instruments away, went into hiding and practiced for a year, we became junkies and destroyed our lives emulating Bird, just to touch the hem of his garment. Hearing Parker live, stretching out, you hear why; rhythmically reckless, harmonically out there, the orderly blues player on the studio sides before an audience sounds not just like the most advanced musican of his day, but also a harbinger of things to come -- more than once listening to this box I thought I was hearing Eric Dolphy or Ornette Coleman, only playing at superhuman speeds.
These recordings, more than the (great) studio works show Bird the Promethean bringer of fire, playing at length as though bar-lines didn't exist. Disc One highlights include late '45-early '46 LA shows with Diz and Miles respectively, and a rare appearance by the reclusive piano great Joe Albany. Sound here is terrific, and Parker plays like a man possessed, it's his Picasso/Desmoisselles d'Avignon moment, where you can tell the audience is in shock and he knows the world is his oyster, before the Fall. Also included is the quintet material from Carnegie Hall '47 with Diz, negating the need to buy the Blue Note resissue. Disc Two summarizes his '47-'48 dates as a leader at the Royal Roost, again in pretty good sound, with first Miles (cocksure and fleet, in the process of launching the Birth of the Cool) and then with Kenny Dorham; again the sound is good, and Bird is at a healthy peak. The Savoy releases of this material has a lot of dead and rote spots, this is a spot-on best-of, again negating the need for that collection.
Disc Three is the cream of the set: Birdland '49, with Fats Navarro, Bud Powell, Art Blakey. Blakey is over-miked, Navarro is often off-mike, it's the weakest audio of the set, but this may be some of the most outrageous playing of Parker's career. Like the infamous Massey Hall gig with Bird, Mingus, Powell, Roach and Diz, no-one was talking to each other (Powell and Navarro were feuding, Parker and Powell weren't speaking, and to boot, Navarro was apparently near death, though to hear him play you would not know it); I'm guessing the backstage tension fueled rather than dampened everyone's creativity. This material has been out of print for years, and it's a revelation, worth the price of the set.
Disc Four covers Bird's final half-decade, includes 5 cuts from Birdland '49 with a smoking Red Rodney on trumpet, a tremendous Powell-Diz reunion at Birdland in '51, 3 cuts with the Modern Jazz Quartet from '52 and 4 burning cuts from the legendary Rockland Palace gig. This was Parker's most erratic phase, and the editors have cherry-picked the cream of the years of Bird's collapse.
This is a tremendous survey, because the 10 million extant Parker bootlegs are such a dicey phenomenon -- recordings of entire gigs tend to have drop-outs, dead spots, uninspired bits outweighing the good stuff, tinny sound that after three cuts gets wearing, sidemen who are boring, unwelcome voice-overs from Symphony Sid; this box, for a mere 24.00 bucks, negates those issues by including only the choicest material, and plenty of variety. The only other live Parker you'll ever need are the '45 Town Hall date on Uptown, and the aptly named Greatest Jazz Concert Ever, Massey Hall '53 on OJC. The absence of a fifth star is only for audiophiles (though in previous incarnations, much of this stuff has sounded far worse than here); for the rest of us, this is a 6-star recording."
Track Listings (12) - Disc #1