That was certainly not true by the time he re-entered the studio at Dial’s behest for the ill-fated session of 29 July which precipitated the disastrous sequence of events which saw him committed to the federal hospital at Camarillo. Parker had been off heroin since the arrest of Moose the Mooche, but was drinking heavily, and both his behaviour and playing had become increasingly unpredictable. Trumpeter Howard McGhee had re-opened the Finale and taken Bird into his home, and it was he who organised the band for the session, despite both his and Russell’s fears regarding the outcome.
Parker was in a bad way, and the results have become notorious, notably his pained reading of Ram Ramirez’s ‘Loverman’, on which the saxophonist already seems on the verge of collapse. The recording has an awful fascination even now, and it is symptomatic of the veneration in which Bird was held by his followers that saxophonists actually learned and replicated the faltering, tortured chorus which he manages to squeeze from his horn, alongside his masterpieces. Bird never forgave Russell for releasing the four tracks cut that day, but they provide an all-too-vivid aural portrait of a man on the verge of complete breakdown.
The inevitable followed quickly. Parker was arrested that night after a fire in his hotel bedroom and some string-pulling by his admirers saw him committed to the best of the three state mental hospitals. It probably saved his life at that time, and while at Camarillo he was restored to the best health he had enjoyed in years. The resident physician assigned to the case suspected he might be schizophrenic, but Ross Russell reports that Richard Freeman (the brother of the co-owner of Dial, Marvin Freeman), a psychiatrist who had taken a particular interest in Bird before his incarceration, believed that the saxophonist exhibited a classic psychopathic personality.
A man living from moment to moment. A man living for the pleasure principle, music, food, sex, drugs, kicks, his personality arrested at an infantile level. A man with almost no feeling of guilt and only the smallest most atrophied nub of conscience. One of the army of psychopaths supplying the populations of prisons and mental institutions. Except for his music, a potential member of that population. But with Charlie Parker it is the music factor that makes all the difference.
Parker was also a master of the put-on, a trait observed by many, and was expert in disguising his feelings – as Miles Davis put it, ‘Bird always wore a mask over his feelings, one of the best masks that I have ever seen’. That almost schizophrenic change of face was noted by others, but as a symptom of lifestyle rather than basic personality. In his autobiography, Unfinished Dream: The Musical World of Red Callender, bass player Red Callender recalled working with the saxophonist on the coast during this period.
To most people Parker would have seemed a trifle remote because he was always preoccupied with his thing, music. He could sit and write out a chart in a matter of a few minutes. Anything he played he could put on manuscript. Charlie Parker was actually a brilliant man who was unfortunate enough to be into drugs. When he was straight, he was a beautiful person to talk to, he was well-versed, even erudite on many topics. Bird would talk Stravinsky or Bartók, he’d talk politics too. Often he’d discuss what was happening with President Truman, who was from his home state, Missouri. He was very articulate, had opinions on everything, especially the structure of the capitalist system and racism in America. Bird wasn’t at a loss on any subject, particularly when his head was together. When he was strung out he became another person.
He was released into the custody of Ross Russell early in 1947, and claimed much later that the record producer had made him sign a contract as a condition of release, a claim denied by Russell. The deal was struck, however, and it was a very different Parker who went back into the studio on 19 February with a band which also featured pianist Erroll Garner’s working trio, with Red Callender on bass and drummer Doc West, as well as Earl Coleman, an unpretentious Eckstine-style singer the saxophonist had discovered in an LA club. It was not the session that Russell had in mind, but it did produce two dazzling, impromptu instrumentals in ‘Bird’s Nest’ and ‘Cool Blues’, which not only provide a taster for the relaxed feel evident on Parker’s final Hollywood session for the label a week later, but benefit from the more spacious ensemble textures provided by Garner’s fine trio. ‘Cool Blues’ is especially good, and if you have the Spotlite issues of the complete Dial sessions on either LP or CD, it is intriguing to trace the evolution of the final master through the three alternate takes which preceded it, with a particularly overt reconsideration of tempo, which is clearly much to Garner’s liking.
While the septet featured in the second session looks a more homogeneous bebop unit than the trio, with Howard McGhee and Wardell Gray on their respective horns, and Marmarosa joined by guitarist Barney Kessell, Callender, and Don Lamond on drums, in practice the procession of soloists tends to get a little congested. In both sessions, though, Parker could hardly sound more different than he did on the fraught ‘Loverman’ date, and the benefits of rest and rehabilitation are obvious on his informal blues creation ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’, said to have been cooked up in a taxi on the way to the studio, and on three tunes wisely provided by McGhee on the assumption that the saxophonist was unlikely to show up with the four commissioned new pieces. They announced that Bird was back, and ready to resume the flight so rudely interrupted the previous summer. That resumption, though, was not to be consummated on Central Avenue, but back in the cradle of bebop, 52nd Street.
Before he left for New York, however, Dean Benedetti, already a devoted acolyte of the master, began to make the celebrated series of recordings which achieved an almost legendary status for over four decades. Benedetti was an alto saxophonist who experienced a conversion of almost religious intensity when he first heard Bird play. Between 1 March 1947 at the Hi-De-Ho club in LA, and 11 July 1948 at The Onyx on 52nd Street, he set up his recording devices in a number of clubs in the hope of preserving Bird’s gorgeous flights for posterity. And he did mean Bird. For the most part, he was interested only in recording the saxophonist, and either omitted or quickly cut off the other musicians on the stand, however distinguished or unique the occasion. The results constitute an astonishing, fragmentary, and in truth at times barely listenable record of obsession: Benedetti had the right idea in wanting to catch Bird’s evanescent creations on the wing, free of the artificial environment of the recording studio, but lacked the technical means to achieve it. Most of the fragments are in poor sound quality, but what they have to reveal about Parker’s methods as a creative improviser has helped flesh out the picture already available from the canonic sets of recordings on Dial, Savoy and Verve, as well as a whole range of broadcasts and other unofficial sources.
For a long time, though, it seemed as if the Benedetti recordings would remain firmly part of the Parker myth. A smattering of the material had been commercially released, but the huge majority of this remarkable archive was thought lost. In fact, they were in the possession of his brother, and were finally unearthed and lovingly assembled by Mosaic Records in 1990, as The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings, a seven-CD set which, unlike all other Mosaic limited edition sets, will remain permanently available, since they own rather than lease the rights to the material. They are, however, likely to prove compelling only to the devoted and the scholarly.
Bird returned to New York early in April 1947, by way of a stop-over in Chicago to play a gig with Howard McGhee. He settled in the Dewey Square Hotel (commemorated in his tune ‘Dewey Square’), and put together a famous quintet for an engagement at The Three Deuces, playing opposite Lennie Tristano. The band featured Miles Davis (trumpet), Duke Jordan (piano), Tommy Potter (bass) and Max Roach (drums). There is some debate about the dates of this engagement, but in his autobiography Miles Davis puts the opening as April. Bird ‘seemed happy and ready to go’, Miles recalls, and the band had their work cut out in adjusting to his radical rhythmic experiments.
I was really happy to be playing with Bird again, because playing with him brought out the best in me at that time. He could play so many different styles and never repeat the same musical idea. His creativity and musical ideas were endless. He used to turn the rhythm section