# CD review: Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker – Live Revisited – 1947 – 1951 – 2023: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/07/12/cd-review-dizzy-gillespie-charlie-parker-live-revisited-1947-1951-2023-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2023-07-12T00:04:41+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**What we said: In a bit of hype worthy of Symphony Sid Torin, the New York Times
lauded this long-lost recording as “the Rosetta Stone of bebop.” It’s not. It is
a helluva find, though. Joining Diz and Bird are Max Roach on drums, Al Haig on 
piano and Curley Russell on bass. **

A fish-out-of-water Sid Catlett sits in for Roach on a couple of tracks, and the
underrated tenor saxophonist Don Byas replaces a late-arriving Bird on the opening“
Bebop.” This is basically the same band that, a month earlier, recorded four tracks
that helped define the bop movement. Here they recap some of that same material 
in concert. While the music on this disc isn’t wildly different from the well-known
recordings, it is, for the most part, terrific. The stylistic evolutionist in me
is most intrigued by Bird’s break on “A Night in Tunisia.” Similar to his 1946 Dial
studio version, it has a straighter 16th feel, lacking the rhythmic hiccup that 
made the ultimate take so mind-blowing. The performance is staid in places, but 
when it burns, as on “Salt Peanuts,” watch out. This has to be the record of the
year–unless someone uncovers those mythical Buddy Bolden cylinders.

What we say: Our Chris Kelsey was off just a notch with his prediction–and not because
those Buddy Bolden recordings popped up at the same antique store near Stamford,
Conn., where these acetates were found. We suspect more of our writers heard the
Monk and Coltrane CD, since Blue Note is a much larger operation than the one-man
Uptown, which is run in his spare time by Dr. Robert E. Sunenblick. Plus, the sound
quality of the Monk and Coltrane CD far surpasses this Gillespie and Parker find.
But there’s no denying that this CD and At Carnegie Hall provided a surprising one-
two punch in 2005. It’s like if Joe Lewis suddenly undied and came back still in
his prime, kicking ass.

Two years ago, a revelatory suite of Charlie Parker’s recordings, made between 1945
and 1952, was released as a two-CD set, titled “Bird in L.A.” Now this collection
of concert and radio performances has dropped online (on Spotify and elsewhere) 
and has also been reissued on vinyl. Parker is the crucial hero of modern jazz, 
and, in his brief life (he died at thirty-four, in 1955), he was recorded copiously
by record labels in the studio—and, more importantly, he was recorded fanatically
in concert, privately. It’s a sign of his preëminence that he was constantly followed
by bootlegging recordists; their activity, whatever its legality, has offered incomparable
treasures to the history of music and expanded Parker’s legacy.

Most of Parker’s official recordings were made in studios on 78-r.p.m. records, 
which maxed out at around three minutes (in the usual ten-inch series) or five (
in the premium twelve-inch recordings). His live recordings—whether at Birdland,
in 1950, or Rockland Palace, in 1952, or the Open Door, in 1953—are, to my mind,
the ones that show how far-reaching, audacious, and boundary-breakingly advanced
his music was and remains.

So it is with “Bird in L.A.” (Parker’s nickname likely came from his reputation 
for eating chicken, which was called “yardbird” where he was from. The prime New
York jazz venue Birdland opened in 1949, barely four years after Parker cut his 
first records as a leader—a hint of his importance.) The recordings feature Parker
in a wide range of settings and playing with a wide variety of musicians. These 
contexts both inflect the music itself and reveal the idiosyncratic conditions under
which some of the greatest musical minds of modern times produced their singular
art.

The earliest session, from December 17, 1945, is from the most classic setting: 
a jazz club, Billy Berg’s, where Parker, an alto saxophonist, was performing as 
a nominal sideman in a band led by the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, his prime cohort
in the creation of the style known as bebop. It was an advance as significant to
jazz as Abstract Expressionism was to painting. (Indeed, the two innovations developed
alongside each other, in New York, in the forties.) Bebop was marked by harmonic
and rhythmic complexity, defiantly difficult speeds, a tone of vehemence and fierce
concentration, and an uncompromising attitude. It was danceable—people indeed danced
to it, but far more often listened to it in the manner of concert music. Bebop shifted
the center of jazz gravity away from big bands to small groups that were led by 
soloists who improvised at length. Soloists pursued their highly individualized 
artistry wherever they could: in jam sessions, with pickup groups assembled for 
the purpose of a recording or a gig, or with those already on hand as the house 
band at a club where they were hired.

**Tracks 1-6 – rec. June 22, 1945 at Town Hall, New York:**
 **Dizzy Gillespie –
trumpet** **Charlie Parker- alto saxophone** **Don Byas – tenor saxophone (track
1)** **Al Haig – piano** **Curley Russell – double bass** **Max Roach drums (track
1–4)** **Sidney Catlett drums (track 5–6)**

**Tracks 7-11 – rec. September 29, 1947 at Carnegie Hall, New York:**
 **Dizzy Gillespie–
trumpet** **Charlie Parker – alto saxophone** **John Lewis – piano** **Al McKibbon–
double bass** **Joe Harris – drums**

**Tracks 12-15 – rec. March 31, 1951 at Birdland, New York:**
 **Dizzy Gillespie–
trumpet** **Charlie Parker – alto saxophone** **Bud Powell – piano** **Tommy Potter–
double bass** **Roy Haynes – drums**

All compositions by Dizzy Gillespie, except otherwise indicated.

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.birdland.com.au/assets/full/752156115625.jpg?resize=640%
2C576&ssl=1)

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