The History of Jazz (47 page)

By the close of his high school years, Davis seemed poised for a promising musical career. He was playing professional gigs and making some money from music. At home, relations with his mother were strained, and his parents finally separated around the time Miles graduated from high school. His mother, with whom he stayed after the breakup, wanted him to attend Fisk, but Miles protested that he would be better served by studying music at Juilliard. Miles’s father intervened in favor of his son’s choice. In September 1944, Miles arrived in New York, passed his audition at the conservatory, and enrolled as a student.

As it turned out, Davis acquired a first-rate musical education in New York—but one in which the Juilliard School of Music played little part. Instead, Miles’s “classrooms” of choice were Minton’s, the Savoy Ballroom, the Three Deuces, the Onyx, the Spotlite, and other centers of jazz activity. But he was mostly drawn to the new generation of bebop players then making a name for themselves on the New York scene. “I spent my first week in New York looking for Bird and Dizzy. Man, I went everywhere looking for those two cats,” Davis wrote in his autobiography.
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Finally he tracked down Parker at a Harlem jam session. Although he was only twenty-four years old at the time—just six years older than Miles—Parker soon took on a fatherly role with the young trumpeter, encouraging him, introducing him to other musicians, and eventually hiring him as a sideman. Davis’s approach to the trumpet was now evolving into a streamlined modern jazz style. Here Dizzy was an obvious role model—not just for Miles, but for a whole generation—but perhaps just as influential was the more controlled and sweeter-toned work of Freddie Webster and Fats Navarro. Surrounded by these extraordinary players, Davis soon lost what little interest he retained in studies at Juilliard and eventually dropped out of the conservatory.

These were heady surroundings, and Miles was still in the process of coming to grips with his playing. His lines suffered by comparison with his models, lacking the balance and clarity of a Navarro or Webster, the electricity of a Gillespie. Yet when Parker went into the studio to record for Savoy in November 1945, he brought Miles along on trumpet—an even more telling decision when one considers that Dizzy was also present that day, but enlisted to play piano. This was an extreme vote of confidence in the nineteen-year-old trumpeter. On the blues numbers recorded at the session (“Billie’s Bounce,” “Now’s the Time”) Davis contributes thoughtful, if somewhat cautious solos, but when the band came to record “Ko Ko,” the fast showpiece based on “Cherokee” changes, Miles simply refused to play. “I wasn’t going to get out there and embarrass myself,” Davis later explained. “I didn’t really think I was ready.” The choice was fortuitous: Gillespie stepped in for Davis and played a commanding solo on what was destined to become the most important bebop side to date at the time of its release.

When Parker left for Los Angeles in December 1945, Davis decided to follow him, using a gig with Benny Carter’s band as a way of getting to the West Coast. In Los Angeles, Davis played with Bird at the Finale, and again recorded with him for the Dial label. After Parker was committed to Camarillo, Davis went on the road with Billy Eckstine, and then returned to New York where he worked with Gillespie’s big band. (Has there ever been a more spectacular trumpet section than the one Dizzy brought to an April 1947 gig in the Bronx with, in addition to Davis and Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Freddie Webster, and Kenny Dorham?) Parker, now back on the scene, occasionally sat in with the band.

But Bird, now at the peak of his career, was no longer content to work regularly as sideman—or even coleader—with Gillespie. In April 1947, Parker opened with his new quintet at the Three Deuces on Fifty-second Street. In forming his new group, Bird again selected Davis, along with Max Roach, bassist Tommy Potter, and pianist Duke Jordan. The following month, Parker brought this band into the studio to record for the Savoy label, the only change being the substitution of Bud Powell for Duke Jordan. The melody line for “Donna Lee,” a classic performance recorded that day, has sometimes been attributed to Davis, but the claim is hard to believe. With its rich chromaticism, it comes the closest of any of Parker’s themes to matching his style of improvisation. “Chasin’ the Bird” from the same session is equally noteworthy, with Parker abandoning the standard unison lines of his melodies in favor of some clever counterpoint. In the closing months of 1947, Parker returned to the studio once each month with his working band to record again for Russell’s Dial label, now relocated back East. The most ambitious piece from these three sessions, “The Hymn,” attempts to recreate the excitement of “Ko Ko” with a blistering tempo and a melody built, like “Cherokee,” mostly on whole and half notes. Parker obliges with a busy solo, impressive but without the edge of its famous predecessor. Parker also contributes several solid medium-tempo originals—“Scrapple from the Apple,” “Dewey Square,” “Dexterity”—on which he solos with aplomb.

In a surprising twist, however, Parker’s most memorable performances from these final Dial sessions are the slowest pieces. This too revealed an important side of the “new” Charlie Parker, more reflective and singularly rhapsodic. “Embraceable You,” perhaps Parker’s finest ballad recording, is a masterpiece of thematic development, which builds from a simple six-note motif (reminiscent of the “You must remember this” phrase from “As Time Goes By”). “My Old Flame” and “Don’t Blame Me,” also from this late Dial period, are only a notch below “Embraceable You” in quality. In their own way, these performances constituted a new step forward in the history of the jazz ballad as influential as Beiderbecke and Trumbauer’s work on “Singin’ the Blues,” Armstrong’s “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” Young’s collaborations with Billie Holiday, and Coleman Hawkins’s “One Hour” and “Body and Soul.” Here too the rest of the band falls short of Parker, offering a lugubrious four-to-the-bar accompaniment—in a few years, jazz rhythm sections would become much more relaxed in playing these very slow tempos—but Parker’s silky improvisations overcome this liability, pointing the way toward a new, more romantic dimension of the bebop idiom and delineating a noteworthy expansion of its musical territory.

For the final Dial session, Parker and Davis were joined in the front line by trombonist J. J. Johnson, who had already impressed listeners with his recordings as a leader for the Savoy label, as well as in sideman stints with Benny Carter, Count Basie, and others. To Johnson fell the unenviable responsibility of translating the advances of modern jazz into the language of the slide trombone. The speed and intricacy of bebop lines made them especially recalcitrant to this transformation, and it is a credit to Johnson’s virtuosity and tenacity that he succeeded so well at such a Herculean task. The Parker sides helped to boost an already promising career. They were followed by a series of Johnson collaborations with other leading modern jazz performers—including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, and Stan Getz. Despite the accolades of jazz insiders, Johnson’s career dipped for a time in the early 1950s and he was forced to take a day job as a blueprint inspector at a Long Island factory. But, in 1955, Johnson finally won the
Downbeat
poll on his instrument and began enjoying greater success as a leader, often in conjunction with fellow trombonist Kai Winding. In later years, however, Johnson often recoiled from the stresses and strains involved in a leading a jazz band, sometimes focusing instead on arranging and composition (with works ranging from the plaintive ballad “Lament” to highly ambitious pieces such as the six-movement
Perceptions
, recorded in 1961 by Gunther Schuller with Gillespie as featured soloist) and at other times taking on more commercial work in the music industry. After the late 1960s, Johnson’s public appearances became increasingly rare, and he retired from the stage in 1996, five years before his death from suicide in the midst of a long illness. Yet, despite the ups and downs of his career, Johnson’s legacy is secure and virtually all later jazz trombonists, except only the most traditional, owe a greater or lesser debt to his pioneering efforts.

Four days after his final Dial session, Parker returned to the studio with his working band, this time under the auspices of the Savoy label. Here the compositions are more perfunctory, mere excuses for a blowing date and, as with the late Dial work, the level of intensity is a notch lower than on Parker’s pre-Camarillo recordings. Parker’s two Savoy sessions from the following year are much stronger, featuring more probing compositions in new styles, such as the Latin-inflected “Barbados” and the counterpoint exercise “Ah-Leu-Cha.” But again, the most powerful performance comes on a slow number, this time the stunning blues “Parker’s Mood,” which marked a surprising return to Parker’s Kansas City roots. Renouncing the virtuosity, the arcane chord substitutions, the fast tempos—the very trademarks of the Bird sound—Parker created one of his most gut-wrenching performances, a quasivocal horn lament that, in its starkness, is almost the antithesis of the maximalist leanings of his mid-1940s work.

Of course, the more intense side of Parker’s music still flourished, but in this later stage of his career it was more evident outside the studio, in the many amateur recordings of his public performances and private jam sessions. This “underground” Parker is extensively documented. The Dean Benedetti tapes and discs alone, which came to light in the late 1980s, include more than four hundred previously unknown Parker solos. But this represents only a small part of the bootleg Bird. In addition, jazz fans are blessed with recorded performances from the Royal Roost, Onyx, the Three Deuces, Birdland, Rockland Palace, Carnegie Hall (with Ella Fitzgerald), the Renaissance Ballroom (with an unknown Latin band)—indeed, at almost every conceivable type of New York venue, from high to low—as well as on the road in Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Boston, even Sweden (from Parker’s celebrated 1950 visit), among other locales. Then there are even more unusual, more private recordings, the results of informal encounters in apartments, hotel rooms, and the like. The sound quality of this massive unofficial legacy ranges from adequate to nightmarish, but Parker’s playing rarely lags. Especially during the final six years of his life, much of Parker’s best work—and certainly his most impassioned— comes to us through the surface noise of these tinny-sounding amateur sessions. Such acoustical horrors remind me of a friend’s comment about his grandpa’s privately distilled whiskey: “If it were any worse, you couldn’t stand it; if it were any better, you couldn’t get enough.” For the most part, only devotees of bop will endure the labor of wading through the buzzes and scratches of this poorly recorded material, but those who are able to tune their ears to the glories of the music are rewarded with some of modern jazz’s most intoxicating moments.

In contrast to these uninhibited documents of bop on the fly, Parker’s late studio recordings for producer Norman Granz reflect a more homogenized Bird. Here snippets of intense improvisation coexist with overtly commercial attempts to package Parker for the mass market. There was some irony in this turn of events. After all, Granz was one of the best jazz record producers of the period, a stickler for using the finest musicians, both as leaders and sidemen, and putting them in settings where they could play unadulterated jazz. In fact, Granz had been responsible for the inspired 1946 pairing of Parker and Lester Young that produced a classic recording of “Oh, Lady Be Good.” But Parker’s 1949–54 sessions for Granz rarely approached the level of this one earlier work. Two Granz dates from 1950 are among the best of the lot, notably Parker’s June reunion with Gillespie, backed by the fascinating (if unconventional) combination of Buddy Rich and Thelonious Monk in the rhythm section. The low point of this period is the inept mixture of Parker and the Dave Lambert singers, with results that are almost unlistenable. Only slightly more successful are the recordings with a string orchestra, in which saccharine arrangements overwhelm Parker’s valiant attempts to make serious music. Parker was reportedly pleased with this effort—especially with his performance of “Just Friends”—and his playing was no doubt poised. Nonetheless, the music has not worn well with the passing years, and jazz fans justifiably lament the missed opportunity to record Parker with other star players associated with Granz (a session planned with Art Tatum never materialized—but what a gem it might have been) or in more sophisticated orchestral settings. Even the work with Latin musicians (marketed as “Charlie Parker Plays South of the Border”), which showed some promise, still failed to match the more exciting Gillespie projects in this vein.

In general, Gillespie’s work with Granz was more uniformly successful. This collaboration flourished in the 1950s and was renewed in the 1970s, when Granz formed his Pablo label. Granz tempered Dizzy’s tendency to take the easy way out with novelty songs, offbeat vocals, and crowd-pleasing antics, and instead consistently placed him in the midst of other world-class players. A close study of Gillespie’s recording career validates the wisdom of this move. With very few exceptions, Dizzy’s strongest solos came when he shared the front line with another leading horn player: Parker, Stitt, Eldridge, Getz, Rollins, and other peers. In these settings, Gillespie put aside his affable stage personality and played with fire. By comparison, when Gillespie operated his own record label, Dee Gee, for a time in the early 1950s, the results were uneven. Solid jazz records were interspersed with clumsy offerings such as “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac,” “Umbrella Man,” and “School Days.” With Granz, however, Gillespie needed to show up at the studio ready for battle. In his 1957 recording of “I Know That You Know,” Dizzy must follow a scintillating Sonny Rollins stop-time solo and obliges with a tour de force effort. A 1956 session finds the trumpeter in the middle of a heated saxophone duel between Stan Getz and Sonny Stitt; in song after song, each taken at a furious tempo, Gillespie feeds off the energy of the two combatants. Another successful project from the period matches Gillespie with his early role model Roy Eldridge. Granz, with his passion for the jam session, instinctively understood that Dizzy was at his best when an element of one-upmanship permeated the musical proceedings.