Jazz
Did you ever say "I sure would like to have been a fly on the wall for the recording of that album?" Now you can be, with Verve's Master Edition of BIRD AND DIZ, the final collaborative recording date by the two giants of bebop. This was also the only time the duo ever recorded with Thelonious Monk. Every utterance from the session is preserved here, including mistakes, false starts and studio chatter. The quicksilver bop lines of Parker's sax and Gillespie's trumpet ride over the angular piano punctuation of Monk and the bombastic drumming of Buddy Rich.
This date from June 6, 1950, was an unusual one for Charlie Parker. He chose to play with fellow bop creators Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, in a striking reunion with the trumpeter and the only occasion on which Parker recorded with the pianist. Though the three may have felt encumbered by the presence of swing drummer Buddy Rich, they're in brilliant form, with Parker and Gillespie spurring one another to heights that range from the warm to the electric. Bird's ideas flow with characteristic ease and swing while Gillespie sparks and flares. It's unlikely that anyone else but Gillespie could match Parker on the dazzling interplay of "Leap Frog", a performance supplemented by several alternate takes. Monk's characteristically skewed solos are a rare delight in what is otherwise an orthodox bop setting. The tunes are all Parker's except for "My Melancholy Baby", which inspires witty play.
By Stuart Broomer. AMG.
**
Charlie Parker played in some strange settings during his career—with a cowboy band in Hollywood, a "Gypsy" string trio in a Manhattan restaurant, the street busker Moondog, and several klezmer bands—but such liaisons tended to be random, unrecorded encounters in clubs and restaurants. Aside from a 1945 session which included the novelty hipster, vocalist and guitarist Slim Gaillard and the New Orleans drummer Zutty Singleton, which was issued under Gaillard's name, bop's pre-eminent saxophonist preferred to record with carefully chosen, like-minded A-listers.
Which makes this 1950 session for producer Norman Granz a strange one, particularly as it came so late in Parker's career. For the date, a world class bop line-up of Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Thelonious Monk and bassist Curly Russell was completed by the barn-storming big band drummer Buddy Rich. A fine technician and swing auteur, Rich was so massively unsuited to bop's rhythmic subtleties it's a wonder the other guys didn't laugh him out of the studio. That instead, they treated the encounter seriously and Rich himself politely, we know from the scraps of studio chatter heard on some of the breakdown takes included on Bird And Diz, a new, warts and all, completist reissue of the session.
Maybe Granz was aiming to broaden Parker's appeal, as he intended with the Parker-with-strings sessions later the same year. But from a rhythm section perspective, the experiment was a failure. Rich's explosive, take-no-prisoners style, exciting and propulsive as it was in a big band context, here sounds lumpen and bombastic. If you can filter Rich out however—and that's easier to do than it sounds, for there's so much else going on worth listening to—the music survives. In the company of three of his chief constituents, Parker plays blistering and coherent, mostly up-tempo, primetime bop, rising above a little local difficulty just as he did with the string sections.
There are two blues ("Bloomdido" and "Mohawk"), two "I Got Rhythm" chord change derivations ("An Oscar For Treadwell" and "Leap Frog"), another using the changes from "Stompin' At The Savoy" ("Relaxin' With Lee"), and the delightfully cheesy 1912 ballad, "My Melancholy Baby," played with gusto by Parker (and belly up for one of Monk's semi-parodic Tin Pan Alley deconstructions, had playing time permitted it). The eighteen alternative and breakdown takes, lasting between four seconds and three minutes, forty-eight seconds, all of them previously released, make for an interesting extended coda to the six master takes which start the disc.
Archivists won't need to be told that this was the last time Parker and Gillespie recorded together in the studio, or that it was the only time they recorded with Monk. Gillespie, like Parker, is strong throughout, perfectly in sync with Parker on the theme statements and a consistently stimulating soloist; comping was never Monk's forte, but he delivers some quirky, if brief, solos. Bird And Diz is often dismissed out of hand because of Rich's presence. It shouldn't be.
**
Charlie Parker- Alto Saxophone
Dizzy Gillespie- Trumpet
Thelonious Monk- Piano
Curly Russell- Bass
Buddy Rich- Drums.
**
01. Bloomdido
02. My Melancholy Baby
03. Relaxin' With Lee
04. Leap Frog
05. An Oscar For Treadwell
06. Mohawk
07. My Melancholy Baby (Complete Take)
08. Relaxin' With Lee (Complete Take)
09. Leap Frog (Complete Take)
10. Leap Frog (Complete Take)
11. Leap Frog (Complete Take)
12. An Oscar For Treadwell (Complete Take)
13. Mohawk (Complete Take)
14. Relaxin' With Lee (Breakdown Take)
15. Relaxin' With Lee (Breakdown Take)
16. Relaxin' With Lee (False Start)
17. Relaxin' With Lee (Breakdown Take)
18. Leap Frog
19. Leap Frog
20. Leap Frog
21. Leap Frog
22. Leap Frog
23. Leap Frog
24. Leap Frog
**
NoPassword
*
DLink
*
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario