Parker - Ken Burn's Jazz

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The Definitive Charlie Parker
Ken Burn's Jazz Series

Charlie Parker plays alto saxophone on all tracks, accompanied by:

01. SEPIAN BOUNCE (3:07)
- A. Hall - J. McShann -

Jay McShann and His Orchestra:

Buddy Anderson, Bob Merrill, Orville Minor, trumpet;
Lawrence Anderson, Taswell Baird, trombone;
John Jackson, alto saxophone;
Fred Culliver, Bob Mabane, tenor saxophone;
McShann, piano;
Lucky Enois, guitar;
Gene Ramey, bass;
Doc West, drums;
Skipper Hall,
William J. Scott, arrangers

Recorded July 2, 1942
Available on CD: Jay McShann: The Original Decca Recordings: Blues From Kansas City (GRP GRD 614)

02. SALT PEANUTS (3:12)
- J. Gillespie - K. Clarke -

03. HOT HOUSE (3:09)
- T. Dameron -

Dizzy Gillespie and His All Star Quintet:

Gillespie, trumpet, vocal;
Al Haig, piano;
Curly Russell, bass;
Sid Catlett, drums

Recorded May 11, 1945
Available on CD: Dizzy Gillespie: ‘Shaw 'Nuff (Musicraft/Discovery MVSCD 53)

04. KO-KO (2:53)
- C. Parker -

Charlie Parker's Reboppers:

Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet, piano;
Curly Russell, bass;
Max Roach, drums

Recorded November 26, 1945
Available on CD: The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Sessions (Savoy 92911)

05. ANTHROPOLOGY (ISSUED AS "THRIVING FROM A RIFF") (2:54)
- C. Parker – D. Gillespie -

Charlie Parker's Reboppers:

Miles Davis, trumpet;
Dizzy Gillespie, piano;
Curly Russell, bass;
Max Roach, drums

Recorded November 26,1945
Available on CD: The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Sessions (Savoy 92911)

06. NOW'S THE TIME (3:14)
- C. Parker -

Charlie Parker's Reboppers:

Miles Davis, trumpet;
Sadik Hakim, piano;
Curly Russell, bass;
Max Roach, drums

Recorded November 26,1945
Available on CD: The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Sessions (Savoy 92911)

07. ORNITHOLOGY (2:57)
- C. Parker - B. Harris -

08. YARDBIRD SUITE (2:53)
- C. Parker -

Charlie Parker Septet:

Miles Davis, trumpet;
Lucky Thompson, tenor saxophone;
Dodo Marmarosa, piano;
Arvin Garrison, electric guitar;
Victor McMillan, bass;
Roy Porter, drums

Recorded March 28, 1946

09. LOVER MAN (3:17)
- R. Ramirez - J. Davis - J. Sherman -

Charlie Parker Quintet:

Howard McGhee, trumpet;
Jimmy Bunn, piano;
Bob Kesterson, bass;
Roy Porter, drums

Recorded July 29, 1946

10. RELAXIN' AT CAMARILLO (2:59)
- C. Parker -

Charlie Parker's New Stars:

Howard McGhee, trumpet;
Wardell Gray, tenor saxophone;
Dodo Marmarosa, piano;
Barney Kessel, guitar;
Red Callender, bass;
Don Lamond, drums

Recorded February 26, 1947

11. EMBRACEABLE YOU (3:43)
- G. & I. Gershwin -

Charlie Parker Quintet:

Miles Davis, trumpet;
Duke Jordan, piano;
Tommy Potter, bass;
Max Roach, drums

Recorded October 28, 1947

12. SCRAPPLE FROM THE APPLE (2:54)
- C. Parker -

Charlie Parker Quintet:

Miles Davis, trumpet;
Duke Jordan, piano;
Tommy Potter, bass;
Max Roach, drums

Recorded November 4, 1947

13. PARKER'S MOOD (3:01)
- C. Parker -

Charlie Parker All Stars:

John Lewis, piano;
Curly Russell, bass;
Max Roach, drums

Recorded September 18, 1948
Available on CD: The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Sessions (Savoy 92911)

14. JUST FRIENDS (3:30)
- S. Lewis - J. Klenner -

Mitch Miller, oboe;
Bronislaw Gimpel, Max Hollander, Milt Lomask, violin;
Frank Brieff, viola; Frank Miller, cello;
Myor Rosen, harp;
Stan Freeman, piano;
Ray Brown, bass;
Buddy Rich, drums;
Jimmy Carroll, arranger, conductor

Recorded November 30, 1949
Available on CD: Charlie Parker With Strings: The Master Takes (Verve 314 523 984-2)

15. STAR EYES (334)
- G. DePaul - D. Raye -

Charlie Parker and His Orchestra:

Miles Davis, trumpet;
Walter Bishop, Jr., piano;
Teddy Kotick, bass;
Max Roach, drums

Recorded January 17, 1951
Available on CD: The Best of the Verve Years (Verve 314 527 815-2)

16. CONFIRMATION (2:51)
- C. Parker -

Al Haig, piano;
Percy Heath, bass;
Max Roach, drums

Recorded July 30,1953
Available on CD: Charlie Parker (Verve 314 539 757-2)

Most of these tracks were transferred from disc sources. Surface noise is audible.
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Charlie Parker (1920-55) was one of the most innovative and influential musicians in jazz history. He has been compared many times to Louis Armstrong, in that both artists' influences extended far beyond their own instruments. Because of Parker's rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic contributions, most developing jazz players and composers felt compelled to re-evaluate their approaches to music. Parker's recording career was all too short, but his influence is still felt in musicians young and old.

Parker grew up in Kansas City (first in Kansas, then on the Missouri side), a good place for an enterprising young jazz musician to be coming of age in the 1930s. Excellent bands and fine instrumentalists were working regularly and provided role models for the young Parker. In his mid-teens, he was inspired to practice long and hard, as he recalled in a 1954 radio interview conducted by his fellow saxophonist Paul Desmond: "I put quite a bit of study into the horn, that's true .... I used to put in at least eleven, eleven to fifteen hours a day.” After several disastrous jam-session experiences, Parker gradually learned his craft, and by the time he joined pianist Jay McShann's band in the late 1930s, he was one of the best musicians in Kansas City. Two who would become his strongest saxophone influences were based there: alto saxophonist Henry "Buster" Smith and tenor saxophonist Lester Young. The influence of Smith's tone quality and Young's melodic lines can be heard in Parker's solos on the first track of this CD, "Sepian Bounce.”

In the early 1940s, Parker met and became musical partners with trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, whose appetite for musical exploration complemented Parker's. The recordings they made together in New York in 1945 (such as "Salt Peanuts" and "Hot House" on this collection) were cornerstones of a new style called at times rebop, bebop, bop, and modern jazz. This style has often been called revolutionary by jazz historians and fans, and it was certainly distinct from the jazz of five or ten years earlier. But in most ways, it evolved demonstrably from earlier styles.

For his own gigs away from Gillespie, Parker in late 1945 began hiring Miles Davis, a 19-year-old trumpeter whose modest style and technical skills were quite the opposite of Gillespie's dramatic style and virtuosity. Parker heard potential in the young musician, and Davis gained immeasurably from working with Parker, as shown on many tracks here. But at first, Davis could not always handle the technical demands of Parker's music as well as Gillespie could. A good example is heard here on "Ko-Ko.” Davis was hired to play trumpet on the recording session, but Gillespie was chosen to play the difficult written passages at the beginning and end of the piece. In between those passages is a two-chorus Parker solo of breathtaking invention and stunning execution.

In December 1945, Gillespie hired Parker for a nightclub engagement in Los Angeles. It was during Parker's extended stay in California that his heroin addiction reached a crisis point. While recording the song "Lover Man” Parker was suffering from withdrawal symptoms; the sad results are heard on this collection. A total breakdown was in progress, and that evening Parker was arrested after a fire broke out in his hotel room. He was eventually committed to Camarillo State Hospital, where he gradually convalesced.

Parker was released in 1947 and soon returned to New York, where he formed his most famous group, a quintet with Davis sharing the front line. Although the group played a varied repertoire, one of its greatest recorded accomplishments was a series of American popular songs played at ballad tempos. Probably the most famous moment from these recordings is Parker's solo on the first take of George Gershwin's "Embraceable You.” In fact, Parker never states the original melody, preferring to open with an unrelated six-note motif (which, as critic Gary Giddins has pointed out, is a quotation from the 1939 pop song "A Table in a Corner"). For approximately the first twenty-five seconds of his solo, Parker creatively develops that six-note motif, embellishing it, transposing it, departing from it, and returning to it.

Parker's mastery was not limited to up-tempo and ballad performances; he was also one of the deepest blues players of jazz, as "Parker's Mood" shows. His solo is by turns earthy and abstract, plain and fanciful.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Parker gradually became dissatisfied with his music and thirsted for new settings in which to play. He admired twentieth-century European classical music, and as a first step, his record company had a group of American popular songs arranged for strings and a jazz rhythm section. The best of these recordings was "Just Friends", on which Parker improvises brilliantly from start to finish over a string arrangement that resembles a Hollywood movie score more than the modern music Parker loved. Parker's more ambitious desires to study composition and saxophone in Europe and to have new classical works composed for him were never realized.

Whether this study would have helped Parker transcend his artistic plateau is unknowable; he was in essence more of an improviser than a composer. In any case, Parker's bad habits forced a gradual decline in his health, and that as much as anything limited his ability to evolve artistically. In a 1953 radio interview with John McLellan, Parker spoke of the future: "See, like, your ideas change as you grow older. Most people fail to realize that most of the things that they hear, either coming out of a man's horn ad-lib, or else things that are written, you know, say, original things, I mean, they're just experiences. The way you feel, the beauty of the weather, the nice look of a mountain, maybe a nice fresh cool breath of air. I mean, all those things - you can never tell what you'll be thinking tomorrow, but I definitely can say that music won't stop. It'll keep going forward.”

Carl Woideck
MAY 2000

Carl Woideck teaches jazz and popular music studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (University of Michigan Press) and the editor of The Charlie Parker Companion (Schirmer Books).
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Compilation Produced by Richard Seidel and Ben Young
A&R: Steve Berkowitz:, Sarah Botstein, Michael Brooks, Ken Burns, Michael Cuscuna, Peter Miller, Seth Rothstein, Lynn Novick, Richard Seidel, and Ben Young
Mastered by Kevin "Susquehanna 028" Reeves at Universal Mastering-East
Discographical information: Didier Deutsch, Carlos Kase, and Ben Young
Liner notes edited by Peter Keepnews

Archival sources provided by Scott Currie and the Institute of Jazz Studies Photo credits: Frank Driggs Collection: p.6, p.8; William P. Gottlieb from the Library of Congress Collection: front cover of booklet, inside tray card; Harry Ransom, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin: back cover of booklet, outside tray card, p.5

Courtesy credits: "Salt Peanuts," "Hot House" produced under license from London-Sire Records, Inc.; "Ko-Ko," "Anthropology," "Parker's Mood" courtesy Savoy Entertainment Group, Inc. on behalf of Savoy Records, owned by Denon Corporation (USA); "Ornithology," “Yardbird Suite,” "Lover Man," "Relaxin' at Camarillo," "Embraceable You,” "Scrapple from the Apple,” "Now's the Time" courtesy of Dial Records, owned by Spotlite Records (UK)