Charlie Parker: Unheard Bird – The Unissued Takes

Before there were Deadheads taping every show and trading the tapes, cataloguing them, obsessing over every note of their favorite band, there was Dean Benedetti. Benedetti was a sax player from California who was blown away by Charlie Parker and famously recorded him extensively on a relatively primitive recorder in 1947 and 1948, producing many hours of prime Bird — some consisting only of the Parker improvisations rather than whole performances. The tapes were a holy grail in jazz for decades, written about in the 1973 Ross Russell Parker biography Bird Lives, and eventually released by Mosaic on seven CDs as The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings.

Charlie Parker lends himself to this kind of obsession. He had a short creative life, and a good chunk of it went around the dark side of the moon, unrecorded, because of the recording ban of the early 1940s. Benedetti’s obsession with Bird lives on in various forms today, most happily and productively in the work of jazz historian Phil Schaap, whose WKCR broadcast, Bird Flight picks over Parker’s oeuvre and art with thoughtful joy.

Unheard Bird: The Unissued Takes is another burst of Parker joy — and one featuring liner notes by Schaap — in the form of 58 previously unreleased takes, many of them partial, of tunes that are already well-known. So, while the improvisations and spoken studio chatter are new, this is not an uncovered set of music in the purest sense.

This recording offers a peek into the creative process behind Parker’s extraordinary playing and, more interestingly I think, behind the somewhat counterintuitive notion of making a permanent record of an art form that is designed to be quicksilver and in the moment.

Parker was a great jazz musician and a revolutionary who was central to reinventing the vocabulary of American music. His improvisations were simultaneously grounded in the basic musical language of blues and in complex extensions of the harmonic language of earlier jazz. By extending the harmonic language of jazz to include altered chords that included more intricate intervals, Parker raised the bar on creativity and made sure that jazz solos could never again lean back on just a few standard licks.

Hearing him (and his comrades) play take after take on the same tunes, then, lets the listener in on the breadth of creativity that Parker had mastered using the new harmonic vocabulary. On any one tune or set of chord changes, Parker had a newly expanded set of options, and hearing him play in this amazing world is exciting.

Take, for example, the blues “Mohawk”, from Bird and Diz, the last of Parker’s collaborations with his friend and musical collaborator Dizzy Gillespie and also featuring Thelonious Monk on piano. Listening to the many “false” starts may sound dull, but these aborted takes feature radically different four-bar piano intros by Monk, each of which is a tiny masterpiece in its own right. The last of the “false starts” is magnificent and long, with Monk launching things with a blend of intrigue and drama, a fine unison reading of the melody by Bird and muted Diz, and then two choruses of Parker improvising.

These takes are framed on the recording by the released takes (both original and alternate), on which we hear the complete performances that the musicians did not cut off for one reason or another. As a result, we learn that these takes are invariably better, but we also realize that the high-wire act of playing this kind of improvised music runs up against a normal human impulse. When “recording” for posterity, professionals want to get it right. This makes sense and, given the degree to which jazz prizes a sense of spontaneity, can be frustrating.

The incomplete version of “Star Eyes” that we get here is utterly delightful. On the reading of the melody, Bird is playful and rhythmically creative, lagging sumptuously behind the beat at one point and teasing our ears. He launches his solo with glee on the first chorus and then, on the second, seems to be trying something different. It intrigues, but you almost get the sense that the master improvisor has not gotten lost but rather headed in a direction that he no longer finds promising. And, rather than work his way out of it was he would have to in a live performance, he cuts it off. I wish he hadn’t. I wish we heard the genius solve this problem. In person, that must have happened often, but in the recording studio, Bird was searching for something more designed, more “correct”.

“Blues Fast” is represented here by a bevy of takes, most of which start with a repeated figure that Parker disposes once he dives into his improvisation. The figure is low in the register and sounds flat, but Bird sticks with it, take after take. Fans will be wondering, What is this tune? The “melody” is unfamiliar and perhaps uninspired by Parker standards. And when we get to the master take that was actually released, sure enough, that opening melody is gone — and Parker simply jumps right into improvising. No “head arrangement” is necessary if you are one of the great blues players in history. “Blues Fast” had a melody once, but it was wisely excised.

Several of the tunes here are Latin arrangements from a 1951 date with a larger group. It’s not one of Bird’s greatest moments on record, and it is interesting to hear how fine he still sounds, take after take, even when the concept may have been getting in the way. You hear him digging into “Tico, Tico” with Roy Haynes, Teddy Kotick, and Walter Bishop, Jr. goosing him along and it’s quite wonderful. Parker articulates the melody with bopish glee on one take and just flubs it. Man, it happens to the best of us. And by the best, I mean, yeah — really the best.

Not that we come to a set like this to hear great ones come down to earth, but it helps to remind us how “in the moment” records used to be. These musicians — even on the big band tracks like “Almost Like Being in Love” — were recording at the exact same moment, no overdubs, in the same room together. An error by one musician or in one section would ruin the whole take.

We hear the engineer over the mic saying to Charlie Parker: “Try it again.” Good call, because when the band got it right, it was magic.

But there’s also something to be said for wanting the warts and flubs to be in the mix a bit. Here, even as we hear the musicians and engineers honing in on “perfection”, we know that tape and studio time were expensive and the options for cleaning things up were limited. Today, even for jazz musicians, the chance to polish the product is tempting. Charlie Parker, relatively speaking, was still soaring without a net. And listening in on the process just deepens your respect for his talent and daring.