Remembering the Bird

[Motorboat Cruiser]

Long Live Yardbird! I actually became a fan of Parker after seeing the film, "Bird" and falling in love with the soundtrack. Later, I read Miles' autobiography and became more interested in bebop in general. Man, that was real music. The absolute peak of improvisation. Some of my favorite Parker tunes are "Night in Tunisia", "Confirmation", and "Lestor Leaps In". Great stuff and I think it is time to put some on.

I've never been able to find it but apparently there is a record of a performance with Parker playing a plastic horn. He had pawned his sax for drugs and couldn't get it back. The plastic horn is all he could come up with for the gig. Those that have heard the recording say it is some of Parker's finest work.

Concerning "Bird", I thought Clint Eastwood (who is a serious scholar of bebob) did a wonderful tribute with it. Sure, it is a very sad movie but really, so was the life of Parker. Being that his wife Chan was an advisor, I assume it was pretty accurate. Anyway, that's just my take on it. My love of it could solely be based on the phenomenal soundtrack.

Interesting to note in the movie that every sax note is actually played by Parker. They took the old tracks, removed all of the surrounding instruments except the sax, cleaned it up, and recut the accompaniment. If you can imagine the difficulty of cutting an entire rythmn section to nothing but a sax track, you can appreciate how difficult an undertaking that was. Clint said there was nobody that could play the sax in his movie but Bird. It's just that the tracks weren't clean enough to use. Hence this laborious workaround.

Edited to add: If you haven't, read the link in the OP. It is such a beautiful description of what was special about Charlie Parker.