There is some doubt over the actual dates of the quartet session which produced four more eminently worthy contributions to the Parker discography in either December 1952 or the following month. The sparkling ‘Kim’ and more relaxed ‘Laird Baird’ are both dedications to his children (Chan’s daughter Kim, and his son with her, Baird), while ‘Cosmic Rays’ is another blistering blues performance and ‘The Song is You’ a fine medium tempo treatment of that ballad. Whatever his personal state – and the decline was now well underway – the saxophonist could still rise to the occasion in the studio, and with a remarkable consistency of invention which belies his problems outside. Time, though, was starting to run short on one of jazz’s most spectacular flights.
The only other small-group session of 1953 saw Bird eventually turn up with only 45 minutes of the scheduled three-hour session left. The quartet – old hands Al Haig (piano) and Max Roach (drums), plus a slightly bemused Percy Heath on bass getting his first taste of Bird’s methods in the studio – brought the session in on schedule in the remaining time, with six full or partial takes of ‘Chi-Chi’, first time hits on ‘I Remember You’ and ‘Now’s the Time’, and, after two false starts, a rampant ‘Confirmation’. Max Roach had already recorded ‘Chi-Chi’, and recalls Parker sitting at the table in his basement apartment in the middle of the night writing the tune straight off ‘like a letter’ as a gift for the drummer’s debut recording session as a leader, which he was scheduled to make the next morning.
Bird’s last two small-group sessions were both for quintet, although it seems likely that he added guitarist Jerome Darr to a planned quartet date on one of his infamous last-minute whims for the session on 31 March 1954, and maintained that instrumentation on the 10 December date, but with Billy Bauer on guitar. The material was all from the Cole Porter book and the project was intended to be the first of what became a Verve trademark, the Songbook project. He also took part in the first of Granz’s JATP-style studio jam sessions in June 1952, and there were also studio ventures with a swinging big band (four sides recorded on 25 March 1952, with Joe Lipman as arranger and conductor) and a more experimental orchestra session under Gil Evans on 25 May 1953, which included a ‘Birth of the Cool’-style instrumental line-up with French horn, clarinet, oboe and bassoon alongside a jazz rhythm section and a sugary mixed vocal chorus led by Dave Lambert. Parker had spoken in Down Beat in January about his desire to make such a session, this time citing Hindemith as a precedent, but the attempt proved unsatisfactory. Both Evans and Bird blamed faulty engineering balances and offered to do it again but Granz, who disliked it intensely, refused the offer and the Parker – Evans combination remained one of unrealised potential.
By 1955, Bird’s health was in serious decline, and a number of musicians have reported him making portentous remarks about not being around much longer, including Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt and Charles Mingus (on the night of the Birdland debacle on 5 March). His gloomy predictions proved all too accurate. By the time he dropped into Nica’s apartment, he was very ill indeed, and the Baroness’s doctor would not allow him to travel to Boston, where he was booked as a soloist with a local rhythm section at the Storyville club. His death briefly stirred a mainstream press scenting a possible scandal, as the ‘bop king dies in heiress’s flat’ headlines in the popular sheets confirm, but they quickly lost interest again. His funeral arrangements became another source of dissension, as Chan, his final partner but never his wife (Bird had never gotten round to divorcing his third wife), and his first wife, Rebecca, disputed the right to bury him. Rebecca won out and he was interred in Kansas City, with a service which seemed totally inappropriate.
By the time of Bird’s death, there were those in jazz who already saw him as a kind of historical figure no longer in tune with the changing face of the music, and there is some truth in that perception. If he made no real technical or conceptual advances beyond the awesome discoveries of the late 1940s, the saxophonist had already made an indelible impression on jazz history by then and, as Cootie Williams among many have pointed out, the music could never be the same again, not simply for saxophone players but for players on any instrument. The distinctive tone which he developed – astringent and penetrating, with little vibrato, in sharp contrast to the more lustrous richness and wide vibrato of his greatest swing era predecessors, Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter – became the prevailing model. The immensely complex but clearly defined use of minute variations of pitch and rhythmic accent which gave his hugely energised improvisations their unique character exerted a mesmeric fascination on jazz players all over the world. Improvisers everywhere studied and practised every nuance of the constantly ingenious routes he discovered through the familiar blues and song forms which continued to make up his repertory, just as he had pored over Lester Young’s recordings in the late 1930s. Several of his tunes – ‘Anthropology’, ‘Ornithology’, ‘Now’s the Time’, ‘Scrapple from the Apple’ – became standards in their own right, but he was seldom very concerned with composed material. Improvisation was the lifeblood of his art, and the extended possibilities thrown up by the harmonic structure of a given tune the veins through which it coursed. As an improviser, he was the supreme creative figure of his era, and his example remained the major influence on a generation of jazz playing, a stylistic pre-eminence which would only really be challenged with the emergence of modal and free jazz in the late 1950s.
Fats Navarro
Fats Navarro was dead before the LP era began, officially as a result of latent tuberculosis, although the disease was abetted by heroin addiction, the real cause of his decline. His recorded legacy came entirely from the days of 78 rpm releases, and from a variety of preserved broadcasts which make up around a third of the surviving recordings on which he is heard. Even from that limited source, however, there has emerged a general consensus among musicians, critics and listeners that the trumpeter stood alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis as the most significant performer on that instrument in early bebop.
Born Theodore Navarro of mixed black, Chinese and Cuban descent in Key West, Florida, on 24 September 1923, he played both piano and tenor saxophone as a youth but by the age of seventeen he was already touring in dance bands as a trumpeter. One such band dropped him off in Ohio in 1941, where he studied briefly before hooking up with the respected Indianapolis-based territory band led by Snookum Russell. In 1943, he joined Andy Kirk’s nationally-known outfit, where he partnered Howard McGhee in the trumpet section, but his big breakthrough to prominence came in 1945, when singer Billy Eckstine brought him into his historically crucial bebop-inspired big band as principal trumpet, replacing Dizzy Gillespie, who left to form his own unit.
Dizzy took Eckstine along to hear Navarro (who was variously known as Fats, Fat Boy or Fat Girl, from his high voice and effeminate manner as well as his girth) play with Kirk’s band, and it didn’t take long for the singer to make up his mind. As he recalled later for Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff’s oral history of jazz, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, he went with Dizzy to the club where the band were playing,
and the only thing Fats had to blow (because Howard McGhee was the featured trumpet player) was behind a chorus number. But he was wailing behind this number, and I said to myself, ‘This is good enough; this’ll fit.’
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