Since I unfortunately missed what sounds like an absolutely cracking evening, I'll have to fall back on quoting the sleeve notes, by one Charles Fox, in full...
Neither a wake nor a full-scale cultural celebration, the concert that took place at Carnegie Hall, New York in March, 1965 was more a gathering of old friends, an occasion for swapping anecdotes ? some hilarious, some painful, a chance to play the tunes that evoked nostalgia, an opportunity to mark the passing of ten years since the death of a man who, in a very real sense, needed nobody to sing his praises or remind the world of his achievements. For the man this concert set out to honour was Charlie Parker, a musician who changed the sound and shape of jazz, whose playing still reverberates today in the work of jazz performers all over the world.
A sizeable number of the musicians taking part in the concert had played with Charlie Parker. A sizeable number of the themes they used were based on the twelve-bar blues, a form Parker excelled at, one that he heard all around him during his childhood years in Kansas City. No fewer than four of the six tracks on this LP are of blues, including NOW?S THE TIME, one of Parker's own variations on the pattern. The other Parker theme, DONNA LEE, draws upon another of his favourite chord sequences, that of INDIANA. Also here is GROOVING HIGH (this time the chords come from WHISPERING), a Dizzy Gillespie tune which Parker and Gillespie often played together.
It was Dizzy Gillespie who started off the proceedings, backed up by his regular quintet of the period, a group that included James Moody, one of the finest saxophonists of the bebop generation (he plays tenor on UM-HMM! and alto ? inevitably like Parker ? in GROOVIN? HIGH). And in the background can be heard the insistent shimmer of the jumbo-size top cymbal that Gillespie?s drummers are handed as soon as they join his group. As if to emphasize the concert?s sense of tradition, the following track, NOW?S THE TIME, contains a solo by Roy Eldridge, the trumpeter who bridges the historical and stylistic gap between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. Also playing here is another pioneer, Coleman Hawkins, who was busy fashioning a style for the tenor saxophone at a time when Parker was still, quite literally, in short pants, yet who was the first of the older generation of musicians to come to terms with bebop. Another musician with his own niche in jazz history hides behind the pseudonym, C. C. Siegel; this was, in fact, an alliteratively-named trombonist, famous for adapting his instrument to the demands of modern jazz.
Most of these musicians pop up again in the jam session at the end of the concert. Once again they used a twelve-bar blues ? it starts off as Billy Taylor's BIRD WATCHER and ends up as Coleman Hawkins? DISORDER AT THE BORDER ? and solos were taken by Billy Taylor, Tommy Potter, Kinny Dorham, Lee Konitz, C. C. Siegel, and Dizzy Gillespie. Just before this, Dave Lambert ? to be killed in a road accident within only a couple of years ? scatted his way through DONNA LEE. But the concert?s genuine highspot was Lee Konitz?s unaccompanied alto solo, BLUES FOR BIRD, a beautifully controlled, marvellously sustained piece of improvising ? it lasts for almost six minutes ? by a musician who was influenced by Parker yet who developed a very individual style of his own.
Time will be kind to Charlie Parker. Future anniversaries of his death will be marked by more concerts like this one, by records, monographs, books, by all the paraphernalia through which a civilisation honours its artists. Yet those hipsters who after Parker?s death went around chalking ?BIRD LIVES? on walls and hoardings all over New York were wiser than they knew. For Parker exists today not only in the records he made while he was alive, which keep their freshness, their uniqueness, just as Louis Armstrong's early solos do, but also within the playing of musicians who were probably too young to read the news of his death. It is the best epitaph a man could possibly ask for.
