Passport: Going Places with the Charlie Parker Orchestra
(4 downloads)Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008
Flipside to “Visa”, Charlie Parker’s “Passport” presents a nice follow-up B-side. The personnel on this one is reduced from the septet on side A. Returning to action behind Bird are Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Al Haig, piano; Tommy Potter, bass; and Max Roach on the drums. The trombone and bongos (Tommy Turk and Vidal Belado respectively) don’t make it to the reverse.
These recordings represent samples from the heyday of an immensely important collaboration in jazz music. Parker’s relationship with Dizzy Gillespie was essentially the catalyst that established Bebop as the dominant jazz form. However, it was Parker’s work in collaboration with producer Norman Granz that created the recordings and ‘sound’ for which Parker is widely recognized. 1949, the year of this recording, is probably the high point of their work together and the year in which we see Parker step into the spotlight of the jazz vanguard, and he’s arguably still there now.
Also from the 1949 vintage are the sessions where we find Parker backed by a rhythm section (Stan Freeman, piano; Ray Brown, bass; and Buddy Rich, drums) and a Haydn era styled chamber orchestra which included Mitch Miller on the oboe. These sessions can be looked upon as the first artifacts of the Third Stream movement where we find a fusion of classical forms and performance sensibilities into the jazz idiom. These sessions are both typical and exemplary of the innovative arrangement and orchestration ideas that we find in Parker’s work with Granz.
Norman Granz would later found the Verve and Pablo record labels. He was of East European Jewish descent and an extremely outspoken advocate of civil rights for blacks in the United States. Among many anecdotal incidents involving Granz, we find him in 1955, getting in trouble with the law for personally removing the 'Negro' and 'White' placards which demarcated the segregated theater where he was promoting a concert. He was also known for paying equal salary to white and black musicians, not to mention paying wages above the industry standard.
http://www.jazzhouse.org/gone/lastpost2.php3?edit=1006801514