Bird at St. Nick's

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Bird at St. Nick's
Live album by Charlie Parker

Publication
(s)

1958

Label (s) Debut , Jazz Workshop , Fantasy , America, OJC , Concord

Format (s)

LP / CD

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

12/27

running time

33:53 (LP), 78:51 (CD)

occupation

Studio (s)

St. Nicholas Arena, New York City

Charlie Parker and Red Rodney around 1947. Photograph by William P. Gottlieb

Bird at St. Nick’s is a jazz album by Charlie Parker , recorded in New York's St. Nicholas Ballroom on February 18, 1950. The recordings were first released on the Debut and Jazz Workshop labels by Charles Mingus and were released in 1972 by Fantasy Records as Double album Charlie Parker , coupled with the album Bird on 52nd St. from 1948.

The album

After playing at Birdland in New York four days earlier, Charlie Parker introduced his new quintet at St. Nicholas Arena, otherwise a boxing match venue located at 69 West 66th Street, 66th Street and Columbus Avenue . His quintet consisted of Red Rodney , Al Haig , Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes . Parker played well-known standards such as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Star Eyes , bebop classics such as Thelonious Monks 52nd Street Theme and Tadd Dameron's Hot House, as well as his own titles such as Confirmation, Now's the Time and Ornithology ; in his composition Visa he quoted Louis Armstrong's West End Blues .

The performance was recorded by two young musicians from the west coast, Joe Maini and Don Lanphere . The tapes came to Charles Mingus through Maini's friend Jimmy Knepper , who decided to have them appear on his Debut Records label . After the financial end of Debut Records, however, they did not appear on the Danish branch of Debut until 1957. They were Charlie Parker's first live recordings, released after his death in March 1955.

During the restoration of the tapes for the re-release by Fantasy Records (1972), sound engineer Bob Guy spent a lot of time cleaning the tapes from annoying background noises. In doing so, individual parts of the recordings were put together like a puzzle to form a fluid whole.

List of titles

  • Charlie Parker: Bird at St. Nick's (JWS 500, Fantasy / Debut 6012, OJCCD-041-25)
  1. I Didn't Know What Time It Was ( Richard Rodgers / Lorenz Hart ) - 2:37
  2. Ornithology - 3:28
  3. Embraceable You ( George Gershwin / Ira Gershwin ) - 2:19
  4. Visa - 2:59
  5. I Cover the Waterfront ( Johnny Green / Edward Heyman ) - 1:46
  6. Scrapple from the Apple - 4:38
  7. Medley: Star Eyes ( Gene De Paul / Don Raye ) / 52nd Street Theme ( Thelonious Monk ) - 3:08
  8. Confirmation 3:16
  9. Out of Nowhere - (Green / Heyman) - 2:19
  10. Hot House ( Tadd Dameron ) - 3:48
  11. What's new? ( Bob Haggart / Johnny Burke ) - 2:45
  12. Now's the Time - 4:18
  13. Medley: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes ( Jerome Kern / Otto Harbach ) / 52nd Street Theme (Monk) - 4:50
  • All other titles are from Charlie Parker.

Editorial notes

The recordings were first released on the Danish label Debut Records on three EPs , Charlie Parker - Bird At St. Nick's, Vol. 1 (DEP 35), Vol. 2 (DEP 36) and Vol. 3 (DEP 37). The LP edition was reportedly released in 1958 by Jazz Workshop (JWS 500), later by Fantasy (LP 6012, LP 86012), Original Jazz Classics (OJC 041, OJCCD 041-2), America (France, 30 AM 6062). Fantasy Records released Bird at St. Nick's under the title Charlie Parker in 1972, coupled with the album Bird on 52nd St. (PR 24009) recorded in 1948 , as a remastered CD in 2007 . Currently (2012) the album is distributed by the Concord Music Group .

review

Tommy Potter, Charlie Parker and Max Roach (hidden), appearance at the New York jazz club Three Deuces, approx. November 1946. Photo Gottlieb .

Richard Cook and Brian Morton , who, along with Charlie Parker at Storyville and the Jazz at Massey Hall album from 1953, are among the essential live documentaries of the late Charlie Parker, awarded the album the second highest rating of 3½ stars in The Penguin Guide to Jazz and initially called it “an appealingly varied pack of material from a tight and professional [playing] band that sounds like they've been together for a while.” The recordings are much more convincing than the cobbled together material from Bird's Eyes: Volume 1 .

Even Jazz Times highlighted the importance of recordings of Bird at St. Nick's (and Bird on 52nd St. ) produced; despite the inferior sound quality, they are valuable documents of Parker's great solo excursions.

According to Lawrence O. Koch, the recording documents that Charlie Parker's music could go to extremes, as heard in the late DIAL recordings and in the chaotic atmosphere of Bird at St. Nick’s and its performance at Festival International 1949 de Jazz in Paris.

Peter Niklas Wilson and Ulf Goeman emphasized that one had ample opportunity to follow Parker's extensive live improvisations apart from the poor recording conditions and the fading out of the solos. Rodney can only be heard in a few dialogues with Parker: “The pianist Al Haig comes off even worse; he can only be heard with a few accompanying chords, while Tommy Potter and especially Roy Haynes - albeit poorly received - are constantly present ”; Haynes also appears as a soloist in some passages, for example in Scrapple from the Apple . "The live program itself is balanced in the alternation of faster pieces - for the most part own compositions - and ballads , whose melodic beauty Parker savored in all shades." The authors emphasize that in Parker's play on Bird at St. Nick’s free passages stand out , the can be related to the activities of later innovators such as John Coltrane , Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy . You also quote the Parker biographer Ross Russell, who points to Parker's influence on the phrasing of the trumpeters Clifford Brown and Miles Davis and also mentions the influence of modern saxophonists such as Albert Ayler , Archie Shepp or Sonny Simmons .

Scott Yanow only gave the album 1½ (out of five) stars in Allmusic and, despite the good performance by Parker (his interpretation of Confirmation was wonderful), complained about the terrible sound quality; one could only guess what the music of Parker, Rodney, Haig, Potter and Haynes might have sounded like.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Charlie Parker discography at jazzdisco.org /
  2. ^ Paul Roth: A New Look at Jazz at Lincoln Center: Sex, Race, Violence, and Hierarchy , p. 10
  3. ↑ Ira Gitler : The Masters of Bebop: A Listener's Guide , p. 16
  4. ↑ According to Brian Priestley in his Mingus biography, the concert was recorded by Jimmy Knepper himself. See Brian Priestley: Mingus. A Critical Biography. Quartet Books, London, Melbourne, New York City ISBN 0704322757 , p. 81.
  5. ↑ a b Bird at St. Nick's at Concord Music
  6. ^ Brian Priestley, Chasin 'the Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker , 79
  7. ^ A b Peter Niklas Wilson & Ulfert Goeman: Charlie Parker , Waakirchen, Oreos Verlag 1988, 131 f.
  8. ↑ Debut Records / Catalog: LP / EP Series at jazzdisco.org
  9. ↑ Bird at St. Nick's at Discogs
  10. ^ Billboard March 18, 1972, p. 66
  11. ↑ Cook / Morton, p. 1052 (6th edition, 2003).
  12. ↑ JazzTimes Sept. 1995, D. 54
  13. ↑ Lawrence O. Koch: Yardbird Suite: A Compendium of the Music and Life of Charlie Parker , p. 4.
  14. ↑ In the original: Veteran Charlie Parker collectors generally know that they should avoid all but his most famous live sessions. It is not that Parker plays badly on this CD reissue (in fact his solo on "Confirmation" is quite miraculous) but, as is often the case with these privately recorded sets, the recording quality is horrible. Bird (with trumpeter Red Rodney, pianist Al Haig, bassist Tommy Potter, and drummer Roy Haynes) plays quite well but these versions only hint at what the music must have sounded like.
  15. ↑ Review of the album Bird at St. Nick's by Scott Yanow at Allmusic (English)