Jazz at Massey Hall

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Jazz at Massey Hall
Live album by The Quintet

Publication
(s)

1953

Label (s) Debut Records / Fantasy Records

Format (s)

CD, LP

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

6th

running time

36:54

occupation

Studio (s)

Massey Hall, Toronto

Jazz at Massey Hall is a jazz - album . It contains the live performance of an all-star formation ("The Quintet") on May 15, 1953 at Massey Hall in Toronto .

The concert

At the beginning of 1953 the members of the "New Jazz Society" of Toronto intended to determine the ideal bebop formation. They selected the appropriate musicians and asked if they would come to a concert in the city's concert hall. After all, the musicians were five of the biggest names in the modern jazz scene at the time : Dizzy Gillespie , Charlie Parker , Bud Powell , Charles Mingus and Max Roach , although Oscar Pettiford was originally planned as bassist, but for whom Mingus stepped in after Pettiford had previously joined Broken arm. The line-up with Pettiford was also the dream cast of Gillespies, which he - without success - had wanted to bring together a decade earlier. It was the only time the five of them recorded together, and it was also the last time they would have recorded Parker and Gillespie. Parker played on a plastic alto saxophone that he had to borrow from a local music store.

The concert went down in the annals of jazz history as The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever . First the Bud Powell Trio played, then the "Quintet of the Year" with Parker and Gillespie, and later a big band made up of local musicians. The conditions for the concert were not favorable: pianist Bud Powell had only recently been released from a sanatorium after a long electroshock treatment and was already drunk before the concert. At the same time as the concert, the boxing world championship match between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott ran ; and the ticket sales were correspondingly slow. Charles Mingus had made sure that the concert (by the "New Jazz Society") was recorded; But since the bass lines of the original recording could hardly be heard, Mingus later re-recorded them using the overdubbing process. The original plan was that the "New Jazz Society" and the musicians would share the profit from the concert. However, the audience was so small that the Society was unable to pay any fees. The result was that only Mingus and Max Roach could make some profits (from record sales). Bud Powell, Bird and Dizzy Gillespie may have missed out.

The music

Despite his poor health, Parker was in good shape at this concert. Already in the first piece, Perdido , Parker plays a completely relaxed solo based on the theme presented in Latin rhythms , which despite the borrowed instrument does not have any intonation problems ; there was - especially in All the Things You Are - a wonderful exchange of ideas between Parker and Bud Powell, who follows the alto saxophonist with little finger points, traces and wide paths on his meandering paths. In the trumpet solo that follows , Gillespie answers ironically with quotations from Ferde Grofé's Gran Canyon Suite. The highlight of the concert is "Wee", a real bebop explosion. The contrasts in the style of play couldn't be greater; Parker wild, seemingly uncontrolled, unfathomable. Gillespie, on the other hand, is precise, invulnerable, extremely precise .

Despite the unfavorable starting conditions, the participating musicians played so quickly that during the second half of the concert you got the feeling of experiencing a concentrate of the bebop era.

Entrance to the Massey Hall

Edition history

Because of the extraordinary quality of the recorded music, she initially wanted to publish Norman Granz ; The deal failed, however, because of Parker's utopian fee demands. The recordings then appeared in 1955 on two 10-inch records by the short-lived jazz label Debut , which belonged to Mingus and Roach (DLP 2 and DLP 4, respectively, in 1956 as Deb-124 in 12-inch format). After the end of the debut label, the recordings were released as LP by Fantasy Records in 1963 (Fantasy 0902083 (6003); in Europe they were available through Musidisc / America (AM 6053)). In 1973 they also appeared as a double album, coupled with the recordings of the Bud Powell trio as The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever (Prestige 24024 and 81103-2). 1983 "Jazz at Massey Hall" was released again as a fantasy LP.

Meanwhile is Jazz at Massey Hall in front as a single CD (OJC 044), as well as the recordings of Bud Powell Trio (OJC-111 (Debut DLP 9)) as Jazz at Massey Hall, Vol. 2 . The work edition of the Mingus years on Debut, The Complete Debut Recordings 1951-58 , contains both the recording of the concert ( Bud Powell Trio / The Quintet ) as originally recorded and with the reworked bass lines by Mingus. It also includes the 52nd Street Theme , with which the group ended the first part of the concert.

Those who bought the original debut records at the time will have wondered who the plump man on the cover was, holding a white alto sax in his hands as if it were a toy. On the cover and in the liner notes at the time , Charlie Parker was listed as " Charlie Chan " with the ulterior motive to avoid legal involvement with the Mercury label, to which Parker was under contract at the time of recording.

Honors

Jazz at Massey Hall was inducted into the list of Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients in 1995

Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis, Cecil Payne, and others. a., around 1947, photograph by William p. Gottlieb

The titles

  1. Perdido ( Tizol ) 7:06
  2. Salt Peanuts (Gillespie / Clarke ) 7:20
  3. All the Things You Are ( Hammerstein / Kern ) 7:39
  4. 52nd Street Theme ( Monk ) (0:58)
  5. Wee (Allen's Alley) ( Denzil ) 6:34
  6. Hot House ( Dameron ) 8:53
  7. A Night in Tunisia (Gillespie / Paparelli) 7:15

[4] is not included on any single issue.

literature

  • Richard Cook , Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD . 6th edition. Penguin, London 2002, ISBN 0-14-051521-6 .
  • Stephen Davis: liner notes for The Quintet: The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever (Prestige / Metronome, 1973)
  • Geoffrey Haydon: Quintet of the Year , Aurum Press, London, 2002.
  • Ed Michel : liner notes to Charles Mingus : The Complete Debut Recordings (Fantasy, 1951–57)
  • Mark Miller. Cool Blues: Charlie Parker in Canada 1953 . London, Ontario: Nightwood Editions, 1989.
  • Ross Russell: Charlie Parker . Munich, Knaur, 1991
  • Peter Niklas Wilson and Ulfert Goeman: Charlie Parker _ His life, his music, his records . Oreos, Schaftlach, 1988

Remarks

  1. ↑ Dizzy Gillespie To be or not to bop (autobiography)
  2. ↑ Ross Russell reports in his Parker biography that the old feud between the two musicians broke out again : Charlie acted as Master of Ceremonies , spoke in a fake British accent and introduced Dizzy as "my better half". Dizzy lived up to his nickname during the concert, fooling around and leaving the stage every now and then to inquire about the progress of the boxing match, which Marciano won by knocking out in the first round, much to Gillespie's delight.
  3. ↑ So the subtitle of the edition distributed on the America label, which then even became the title of the prestige double LP from 1973
  4. ↑ cit. according to Russell, p. 294. He also reports that fans and musicians went to a bar opposite during the break and the musicians had to be driven back onto the stage by the worried manager.
  5. ↑ In "All the Things You Are" he also changed his solo
  6. ↑ Of the 2500 seats in Massey Hall , only 700 were occupied; see. Russell, p. 293
  7. ↑ Horst Weber / Gerd Filtgen, Mingus. His life. His music. His records. Oreos, Gauting o. J., pp. 84ff.
  8. ↑ cit. after Peter Niklas Wilson and Ulfert Goeman, p. 168 f.
  9. ↑ Ralf Dombrowski : Basis-Diskothek Jazz (= Reclams Universal-Bibliothek. No. 18372). Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-018372-3 , p. 170.
  10. ↑ Russell reports that Parker requested a $ 100,000 royalty advance
  11. ↑ cit. after Stephen Davis
  12. ↑ "Charlie Chan", the Chinese detective character Charlie Chan is meant , was popular in the film at the time and is at the same time an allusion to Chan , Parker's wife. In addition, in Toronto bebop was judged to be the preferred music of the "New Jazz Society" rather than Chinese music ; see. the note from Stephen Davis about the music scene around the "New Jazz Society" in Toronto. Charlie Parker's name also appeared on the Miles Davis session on January 30, 1953 ( The Serpent's Tooth session, the title of which later appeared on the Prestige LP Collector's Items (PRLP 7044)) as "Charlie Chan".
  13. ^ Grammy Hall of Fame Database