Portrait of Charlie Parker, Red Rodney, Dizzy Gillespie, Margie Hyams, and Chuck Wayne, New York City, c. 1947. Photo by William Gottlieb, courtesy of Library of Congress.
By Matt Silver
There’s a famous quote attributed to Miles Davis. It goes, “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.” Whether that statement is fair or not — whether it does justice to anyone not named Armstrong or Parker — is beside the point. By most credible accounts, Davis, setting all the musical genius aside, was a brilliant provocateur, a hot-take pioneer whose aloof, disagreeable, superior demeanor was carefully and consciously constructed. Whatever Miles Davis played was what he genuinely believed; everything else was in service of a different department of the corporation.
Nevertheless, Davis's declaration — glib, reductive, and disingenuous though it may have been — resonates.
Once you’ve decided that Davis’s words hit true enough to be given the benefit of the doubt, here’s one possible reading of them that could follow: Armstrong and Parker may not be sufficient to tell the complete history of jazz, but they’re the only two who’d have to be included in any minimally credible version of that history.
After Parker’s death, despite all physical evidence to the contrary, the declaration “Bird Lives!” was everywhere—on biographies, tribute records, and graffitied sidewalks. It was a promise: as long as the music lived, and continued to evolve, with new musicians playing new lines of ever-increasing complexity over the same old tried-and-true chord changes, Bird would live forever. And he has. Or, at least, he’s very much still in the game; forever remains a long way away.
If the metaphysical Bird is to continue making progress toward that horizon, he’ll need assistance from the de-facto executors of his musical estate, those custodians sometimes referred to as “keepers of the flame.” Over the last quarter century, the five records listed below constitute, to me, the most compelling, frisson-inducing endeavors in torchbearing.
Along with Charles McPherson and Kenny Garrett, there’s little doubt Herring, Watson, and Bartz are the most accomplished lead altos alive.
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Vincent Herring, Bobby Watson, and Gary Bartz: Bird at 100 (2019, Smoke Sessions)
On Bird at 100, instead of presenting new arrangements of Bird’s compositions; instead of revisiting the standards Parker transformed from anodyne show tunes to the blazing bebop numbers that are still the proving ground for young instrumentalists; and instead of making a concept album comprising new compositions written with Parker’s legacy in mind, Herring, Watson, and Bartz give us all three.
Backed by an A-list rhythm section consisting of Dave Kikoski (piano), Carl Allen (drums), and Yasushi Nakamura (bass), Herring, Watson, and Bartz — along with Charles McPherson and Kenny Garrett, probably the most accomplished lead altos alive — strike a balance alternating between sharply arranged three-part harmonies and solo turns out front. All run lines that are complex yet melodic and played at tempo but squarely within the changes; none lose track of space or time in the process, no doubt pleasing Allen. He wouldn’t want to have to pull a Jo Jones and hurl a cymbal at anyone’s feet.
“Bird-ish,” Watson’s bouncy contrafact of Parker’s “Confirmation,” and a high-octane take on Jackie McClean’s “Bird Lives” swing the hardest and most closely approximate Parker’s trademark “Kansas City lightning.” But Parker was not merely a speed merchant; few communicated more depth of feeling playing ballads. And to honor that here, each saxophonist gets a Bird-inspired ballad all to himself.
Herring’s “Lover Man” is clean and smooth and contains plenty of athleticism, even if it doesn’t (how could it?!) match the raw emotionality of Bird’s infamous 1946 take for Dial Records—you know the one. Meanwhile, Watson’s turn on “These Foolish Things” offers a master class in phrasing and articulation, and Bartz, the group’s elder statesman who thinks of Parker as “the modern-day Bach,” delivers a meandering, labyrinthine “April in Paris” reminiscent of Bird’s take from Charlie Parker with Strings.
”Birdsong” is the album Champian Fulton was, almost literally, born to make.
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Champian Fulton: Birdsong (2020, Champian Records)
For pianist and vocalist Champian Fulton, Parker is personal; his music has been hardwired into her musical mainframe from the moment her life began. Fulton’s father, Stephen — a professional trumpeter who’s now played for years in his daughter’s quartet and appears here on flugelhorn — wanted to make sure his newborn came into the world accompanied by the “most beautiful music there ever was.”
For Stephen Fulton, that was the Norman Granz-produced Charlie Parker with Strings. A cassette of that legendary recording played throughout Fulton’s mother’s pregnancy and accompanied mother and newborn into the delivery room, where Bird — or, at least, his music — literally played the future jazz musician’s introduction to existence. Here, Fulton gets to return the favor, singing and playing new life into her favorite slice of the Charlie Parker songbook.
Each selection here was either written or otherwise made famous by Parker, including three from the seminal With Strings outings. But Birdsong deftly avoids the trap that ensnares so many Parker tributes; it doesn’t thoughtlessly trot out near note-for-note takes of the tunes most celebrated or re-recorded. The record feels more substantial than just a note-playing proving ground or something to tick off a jazz instrumentalist’s to-do list — like a Christmas album.
The privilege — and pressure — of playing saxophone on this particular tribute to modern jazz saxophone’s foundational innovator falls to Scott Hamilton. What’s striking is how different Hamilton and Parker are as saxophonists. Underlying Bird’s playing, one so often intuits a sense of compulsive urgency, a feeling that he absolutely had to get his ideas out or else they would die…or he would. It’s totally different with Hamilton, who is the epitome of cool equanimity. There are so many tribute albums where saxophonists try to be Bird that it’s refreshing to hear an instrumentalist approach Bird’s compositions with such a marked distinction in temperament.
Di Battista recreates Parker’s “Kansas City lightning” at an even higher voltage.
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Stefano di Battista: Parker’s Mood (2004, Blue Note)
Fast and clean; fast and clean; fast and clean. Take all the extant Charlie Parker recordings, and now imagine none of them sounding out-of-date, able to avail themselves of a modern recording environment.
Much more of a re-creation than a re-interpretation, what di Battista’s showing here lacks in original ideas, it makes up for with flawless facility. When the album was released, some holier-than-thou reviewers criticized di Battista for his nearly verbatim appropriation of Parker’s improvisations. The criticism is valid on its face; he really does reproduce Parker’s lines almost note for note. But it only really has validity if you presume that only a never-heard-before conception can, or should, contribute to the canon.
The playing is technically superior but, more importantly, it’s not cold, as many of the reviews seem to imply. Quite the opposite; the tone is warm and nothing about the conception or the execution is stiff. Too many critics seem to be of the opinion that in order to play Parker in any way that’s culturally relevant today, the artist must pretend as though he or she is the Charlie Parker of this generation, the great innovator of a new language.
My two cents: One, when you find the next Charlie Parker, let me know; I won’t hold my breath. Two, at no point has di Batista ever professed to have embodied Charlie Parker’s spirit in making this record. He wanted to perfect — and then present perfectly — Parker’s tunes as written and played.
And he did it.
Di Battista’s approach to and execution of “Donna Lee” microcosmically speaks to the album as a whole. No one — not even Parker — has played it faster or cleaner than the Italian alto saxophonist here, with the only possible exception being the guitar-bass combo of Joe Pass and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. The ability to play “Donna Lee” at tempo — kind of like how working knowledge of the Real Book is still a prerequisite for getting work — is still a proving ground for jazz instrumentalists, and with Kenny Barron on piano and Herlin Riley on drums, this is as flawless a technical presentation of it as you’ll find.
I first heard Grasso’s playing on Samara Joy’s self-titled debut; I’ve been hooked since.
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Pasquale Grasso: Solo Bird (2020, Sony Masterworks)
In 2016, Pat Metheny told Vintage Guitar magazine that Pasquale Grasso was, “the best guitar player I’ve heard in maybe my entire life.” Metheny doubled down in 2021, explaining to Ted Panken in a story for JazzTimes that the reason Grasso’s guitar sound was so singular was due to its inherent pianism. “Pasquale’s connection with…[an] area of the music that had been largely defined by piano players,” he tells Panken, “is notable for the diligence…required to achieve [that] level of fluency. [It’s] difficult on any instrument, but especially on guitar.”
Grasso’s a classically trained guitarist whose musical idols are jazz piano players and who developed his musicality by transcribing Art Tatum and Bud Powell solos. “I always loved piano players,” he told Panken. “My ears wanted that sound.” Meanwhile, his older brother Luigi is an alto saxophonist who grew up idolizing Charlie Parker. The two grew up on a farm in the Campania region of Italy, three hours from Naples and four from Rome, where, according to Panken, their grandmother “made olive oil and raised pigs and chickens and lambs.” You do the math.
I say all that to say this: when your first impression is that Grasso plays Parker with a combination of facility and warmth reminiscent of Joe Pass, keep listening; it’s more like his sound is reminiscent of two Joe Passes playing in conversation with each other — and, by extension, with Powell and Parker and Barry Harris. Which is all by design, and the reason behind his classical studies.
“Jazz guitarists play chords or play melody,” he told Panken. “But the classical guys play chords and melody together—like a piano, like a small orchestra. I thought, ‘That’s exactly what I want to do with jazz.’”
Rudresh is one of those rare mad scientists who also happen to have a lot of soul.
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Rudresh Mahanthappa: Bird Calls (2015, ACT Music)
In calling Rudresh Mahanthappa the godfather of 21st century power alto saxophonists, I stand prepared for prosecution by the hyperbole police, but I doubt they’ll be able to make their case. Mahanthappa is the progenitor-type figure of a relatively new (as measured by the jazz geologic time scale), relatively young cohort of artistically ambitious lead altos — Immanuel Wilkins probably being the most prominent right now — who seek to reconcile the hyperintellectual sudoku of the avant-garde with an Old Testament brand of primeval fury and grandiosity that speaks to impulses and curiosities more primitive and fundamental.
Mahanthappa’s Bird Calls don’t call to mind Parker’s melodies, harmonies, and rhythms so much as much as they call them to the listener’s subconscious mind; the Parker references and quotes take place at an almost subatomic level, the place of dreams within dreams and codes within codes. But if you know where to look and listen, you can detect the trace genetic elements of Parker’s music—not as those elements existed in Parker’s mind or came to be expressed through his “axe” (as Bird and his contemporaries liked to call their horns) but deconstructed, reconstituted, and retrofit for Mahanthappa’s neural pathways.
Think of it as akin to experimental fine dining, where the chef takes a recognizable dish and doesn’t necessarily change the ingredients but alters them in some fundamental way — texture, temperature, material state. What was once solid and tangible could now be a quickly evaporating vapor, but its “true essence” is unchanged and perceptible, if only for the briefest moment.
Part musician, part conjurer, Mahanthappa, as Ben Ratliff astutely noted in his review for the New York Times in 2015, divests passages of Parker melodies from their rhythmic contexts and divorces otherwise identifiable rhythms from the melodic marriages that made them so. It’s disorienting in the way of elementary schoolers being forced to grapple with the paradox that their teachers don’t live at school.
Still, while heady, Bird Calls isn’t an exclusively above-the-shoulders affair; Rahanthappa blows with far too much diaphragmatic intensity for that. Between selections reconfiguring the molecular structure of Parker standbys like “Donna Lee,” “Steeplechase,” “Anthropology,” “Confirmation,” and “Parker’s Mood,” Mahanthappa provides several visceral intermezzi, moody sketches he names his “Bird Calls.”
My favorite of these is “Bird Calls #1,” the album’s arresting opening prologue that puts the listener squarely on notice: something of epic proportions is coming. Epic not in the theatrical, Bernsteinian “Something’s Coming” sense but more in the Ahmad Jamal “Swahililand” sense. The sonic motifs and themes — even as purposely underdeveloped as they are — bear more than just passing resemblance to Jamal’s epic. And the plaintive quality of Mahanthappa’s playing hits the ear much as Slovak alto Radovan Tariska’s does on guitarist Andreas Varady’s “Her Dream,” though with more brute strength.
It all underscores what makes Bird Calls accessible despite its complexity; like all of Mahanthappa’s work, it promotes dialogue that is multicultural, multilingual, and multi-generational.
