I remember one night before Monroe’s I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December 1939. Now I had been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used at the time, and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night I was working over ‘Cherokee’, and as I did I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing.
What Parker had discovered was that a new and radically different-sounding melody line could be conjured up through moving away from the obvious melody notes within a given chord sequence, and instead using less familiar notes made up from intervals further away from the chord root. He began to extend his use of the upper intervals, the ninths, elevenths and thirteenths beyond the octave (intervals falling within a given octave are known as simple, and those beyond it as compound), and concentrated on the challenge of not simply using those notes to create a new melody line, which was difficult enough in itself, especially given his highly original rhythmic accentuation and increasingly fit-to-bust tempos, but of making their natural tendency toward dissonant effects (the ‘wrong’ notes which so many musicians of the older school heard in bebop harmony) reach an appropriate resolution within the harmonic fabric of the tune. There are strong hints of that direction in his first studio recordings, made with the Jay McShann Band in 1941, notably in ‘Swingmatism’ and his solo on ‘Hootie’s Blues’, which Russell suggests was ‘a Pandora’s box of things to come’. In his fine study Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, Gary Giddins encapsulates those developments at this point in his career.
Parker was achieving the kind of fluency that only the greats can claim: complete authority from the first lick, and the ability to sustain the initial inspiration throughout a solo, so that it has dramatic coherence. His tone became increasingly sure, waxing in volume despite the deliberate lack of vibrato. It was candid and unswerving, and it had a cold blues edge unlike that of any of his predecessors. The musicians in New York had tried to intimidate him into aping the clean, pear-shaped sound of Benny Carter or the rhapsodic richness of Johnny Hodges. His contemporaries in McShann’s band knew what he was after. They were amused, too, by how fast his mind worked, as he imitated sounds echoing in from the streets – engines backfiring, tires, auto horns – and worked them into musical phrases. He not only mastered Tatum’s trick of juxtaposing discursive melodies in such a way that they fit right into the harmonic structure of the song he was playing, but took it another step: he quoted melodies that had lyrical relevance to the moment. He might nod to a woman in blue with a snippet of ‘Alice Blue Gown’, or a woman in red with ‘The Lady In Red’, or comment on a woman headed for the ladies’ room with ‘I Know Where You’re Going’. He had a ripe eye for women.
The full fruition of those ideas was still some way off, however. He remained with McShann until 1942, but chose to stay in New York rather than swing back on another southern tour with the band. He continued to develop both his ideas and his facility in executing them in a way that was entirely new to jazz, playing in the jam sessions at Minton’s and Monroe’s, and in the seminal swing-into-bop transitional big bands of Billy Eckstine and Earl Hines (where he occupied the tenor saxophone chair and is said to have perfected the art of sleeping on stage with his horn in playing position to fool his leader).
A 1944 session with guitarist Tiny Grimes is usually seen as the first of his mature recordings, but it is also something of a preface to the major achievements which were now just around the corner. The session’s two instrumentals, ‘Tiny’s Tempo’ and ‘Red Cross’, both feature cogent contributions from the altoist, and he was back in the studio on several occasions as a sideman in 1945, with pianist Clyde Hart (featuring very odd vocals by the singer Rubberlegs Williams, allegedly under the influence of coffee which Parker had spiked with Benzedrine to liven up a miserable session), the self-styled Sir Charles Thompson on piano, vibraphonist Red Norvo and, most significantly, with Dizzy Gillespie on the crucial sessions of February and May, which produced bebop classics like ‘Groovin’ High’ and ‘Salt Peanuts’. His playing is striking at this stage, but is still a step away from the full unfettered flow of musical discoveries which he would unleash as his phrasing and rhythmic style reached maturity in the exhilarating ferment of the quintet music he was creating with Gillespie at The Three Deuces on 52nd Street. It all came together in the recording studio on 26 November 1945, when Bird cut a session with a quintet which featured both Miles Davis, sounding rather out of his depth, and Dizzy, who played piano as a late stand-in (depending on which source you consult, the scheduled pianist was either Thelonious Monk or Bud Powell). To complicate matters, another pianist, Argonne Thornton (also known as Sadik Hakim) was pulled in to contribute to the session and is heard on ‘Thriving On A Riff’.
Curly Russell and Max Roach provided a real bebop rhythm section for the band, who cut five tracks as well as Parker’s alto exploration on the literal ‘Warming Up a Riff’, which he did not know was being recorded – his outrageous interpolations have Gillespie shouting with laughter towards the end. They included two very different blues tunes in F, ‘Billie’s Bounce’ and ‘Now’s The Time’ (which later became a rhythm and blues dance hit as ‘The Hucklebuck’, although Bird received nothing as composer, which may have been a form of poetic justice since the tune may not have been entirely original with him in the first place – one theory credits it to saxman Rocky Boyd), as well as the riff tune mentioned above and an informally recorded, abruptly terminated ballad based on ‘Embraceable You’ which was given the non-committal title ‘Meandering’ but no matrix number.
The final tune laid down that day is one of the most incendiary slices of jazz ever committed to record. Even now, ‘Koko’ remains an astonishing piece. It is a contrafact of one of his favourites, ‘Cherokee’, and the band actually start into the theme of the tune following the complex introduction in the first, aborted take (Hakim plays piano in the intro here, and it may be he who is heard behind the alto solo on the completed master take). That is quickly dropped, though, probably to extend the alto solo, in the master take, which sizzles along at a ferocious pace (about quarter note = 300). It begins with a highly unusual 32-bar introduction: eight bars of unison chorus, followed by eight bars each of trumpet (played by Gillespie rather than Davis) and then alto, then a final 8-bar section which begins by repeating the unison theme of the opening, then abruptly executes a sharp-angled turn leading into the first solo chorus. The effect is immediately arresting, and a portent of things to come.
Parker then soars into a two chorus, sixty-four-bar solo which quickly became an icon for saxophonists. It is a tremendous outpouring of rhythmic and harmonic ingenuity, and if it was not intended as a clarion call for the new music, it certainly served as one. Parker’s steely tone and the calculating complexity of his invention can seem daunting, but the sheer explosive exuberance of the music remains breathtaking. Max Roach follows his leader with a drum break which maintains the high-strung tension of the piece, and the ensemble fall back into the final flourish of that complex introduction, this time repeated as a triumphant coda. The whole piece has the air of a defiant ultimatum: this is our music, take it or leave it.
Parker always complained about the use of what he saw as the demeaning word ‘bebop’ to describe his music, preferring the naïve option of just calling it music. When it came to naming the works that posterity would view as masterpieces of a serious art form, however, he was as cavalier and careless as any of his contemporaries, and just as guilty of leaving us with a legacy of tune titles which belong in the playroom rather than the conservatory, in direct opposition to the musical polarities they represent.
In the case of ‘Koko’, the designation of this immortal slice of recorded history was left to producer Teddy Reig, who came up with the title (possibly