Bird lives, dies, flies

Coming up to the 70th anniversary of his death (on March 12, 1955), Charlie Parker can still stop you in your tracks. His sound may be as familiar as the head on a postage stamp, his style imitated with greater or lesser success by thousands of saxophone players, but that unquenchable inventiveness retains all its singular potency, particularly when caught on the wing.

By that I mean not in a recording studio. I revere the studio classics — the hurtling audacity of “Ko Ko”, the sombre perfection of “Parker’s Mood” — as much as anyone, but Bird really flew highest in more informal or spontaneous environments, when the natural assumption of its evanescence drove his improvising into an extra dimension. That’s what impelled the devoted fan Dean Benedetti to record him in jazz clubs night after night on concealed equipment, and what made the posthumous release of such quasi-bootlegs as Bird at St Nick’s and One Night at Birdland (with Fats Navarro and Bud Powell) so vital to a true appreciation of Parker’s genius.

And now there’s more evidence of the brilliance of the uncaged Parker: an album called Bird in Kansas City, an official release on the Verve label. It’s worthy of a place alongside any of Bird’s output thanks mostly to the seven tracks with which it begins, captured during informal sessions in July 1951 at the house of a friend.

Prevented by the loss of his cabaret card from working in New York after being busted for heroin earlier in the year, Parker was staying with his mother, Addie, in Kansas City, where he had grown up. He played a few gigs at a local nightspot, Tootie’s Mayfair Club, and earned $200 for a stunning guest appearance with the Woody Herman Orchestra at the Municipal Auditorium.

But at the invitation of his friend Phil Baxter, a barber who had a pleasant habit of hosting regular soirées at his house on Kensington Avenue in the city’s Eastside district, Bird could play without pressure of any kind. Accompanied by an unidentified but more than competent bassist and drummer, he displays on these seven pieces the genius that flowed through him even in the most relaxed circumstances.

The first three pieces, each without a formal title, draw on various familiar bebop themes and motifs. The fourth, “Cherokee”, is jet-propelled. “Body and Soul” is taken at its usual ballad pace, slipping gracefully in and out of a double-time section as it proceeds to an ending in which a coruscating single phrase is followed by a particularly arch version of his favourite whimsical coda: a quote from “In an English Country Garden”. “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Perdido” swing at a mellow tempo, just on the bright side of medium, with eye-watering semi-quaver runs in the former leavened by some amusing quotes (“Fascinating Rhythm”, “Cheek to Cheek”).

For 24 minutes on these seven tracks we’re allowed to hear Parker as we became used to hearing Ornette Coleman and sometimes Sonny Rollins: an improvising saxophonist without the support of a chording instrument. It’s not a revelation — nothing conceptually different is happening — but it does allow an unusually clear sight of what he could do.

There are another four tracks recorded seven years earlier at a transcription studio in Kansas City, with two friends: the guitarist Efferge Ware, a useful witness in the first volume of the late Stanley Crouch’s sadly never-to-be-completed Parker biography, and the drummer “Little Phil” Phillips. The songs are standards — “Cherokee”, “My Heart Tells Me”, “I Found a New Baby” and “Body and Soul” — and the difference is remarkable: this is pre-bop music, belonging to the swing era, with bags of composure and fluency, completely charming in its own right while conveying barely a hint of what is to come.

The album’s compilers, Chuck Haddix and Ken Druker, go back even further for the pair of tracks that complete the set. These are two pieces recorded by the Jay McShann Orchestra informally in Kansas City in January 1941, apparently in preparation for a Decca session in Dallas a week or two later. Parker has a rather diffident eight-bar solo to close a loose-limbed “Margie” (see comment below) and a much more expressive full chorus on a smoochy “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”, in which his tart sound and triple-time flurries must have pinned back the ears of the unwary. As they still do.