Jazz

of Historic Places, and the facing street renamed as Charlie Parker Place. An attractive piece tying together Bird’s professional prominence and the domestic stability he was enjoying at the time. Carbon copy typescript on single sheet of thin wove paper, signed by Evan Simmons for Berg Larsen and by Parker who has also dated it and filled out his address. Lightly toned, browned at the right- hand margin where it is also faintly crumpled with a few associated light chips and splits but no loss, light creases from old folds, small pin-hole at top left-hand corner, overall very good. ¶ Landmarks Preservation Commission 18 May, 1999, Designation List 304 LP–2032; Ross Russell, Bird Lives! , 1980. £8,500 [148417] 39 PARKER, Charlie, & Dizzy Gillespie. Savoy test pressings of the September 1947 Carnegie Hall concert. New York: Savoy Records, 1947 “it was one of his fire-eating nights, a display of astonishing musical powers” – the source for the illicit black deuce recordings The original Savoy test pressings from which the renowned Black Deuce bootlegs were made, and originally owned, by the label’s artistic director, Teddy Rieg, capturing excerpts from “bop’s first large promotional venture” (Koch, p. 121), the Carnegie Hall concert of 29 September 1947 – in which Bird plays magnificently and incisively, delivering a tumbling effusion of rich ideas. The concert was the brainchild of Diz and critic Leonard Feather, and showcased the Gillespie big band with Ella Fitzgerald – Bird appearing as a guest artist. This “guest” status irked the altoist, so that the gig is unusually tense, the edgy sparring between the two prime progenitors of bop making the sparks fly. Ross Russell gives an unforgettable picture of that night: “Charlie might have received better billing had the sponsors been more confident of his reliability. He was programmed to appear only briefly, in a short set alone with Dizzy and a rhythm section drawn from the big band. A large claque of hipsters and musicians had taken over a front section of Carnegie Hall for what they expected to be a classic confrontation – the publicized Mister Bebop versus the real genius of the movement. It would be the first time Bird and Diz had played together since the Billy Berg engagement [in December 1945]. Charlie did not appear until after the intermission. He walked onstage casually, almost indifferently, his eyes heavy- lidded, a sly smile on his face, badly dressed in an unpressed suit, his necktie twisted into one of its hard

38 PARKER, Charlie. Signed contract for endorsement of Berg Larsen mouthpieces. New York: Berg Larsen Precision Reed Co., 1950 “the finest mouthpiece i have ever played” – bird endorses berg larsen Attractive and unusual endorsement document granting the company the right to use Parker’s “name and photographs in the publicity for the Berg Larsen mouthpiece which I endorse. I endorse this mouthpiece and no other for a period of two years”. Many of their ads from the period use Parker’s image alongside various glowing and uncharacteristic encomia. Bird has signed on the line and added the date 6 April 1950 together with his address on E 11th St. Various online sax forums have debated Parker’s set-up at enormous length, with accompanying painstaking photo-analysis, to the overall conclusion that a man who pawned his horn on a day-by-day basis was unlikely to be fussy about what he played.

Contemporary comment focussed on the challenge of extracting anything like Bird’s fluency from the ultra- stiff Rico 5 reeds he legendarily preferred, and the overall disreputable state of his instrument. He had recently relocated to the Lower East Side away from “the nightclubs and recording studios that fueled his career, as well as the drug dealers in Spanish Harlem that profited from his heroin addiction. In May 1950, Richardson and her daughter Kim moved into his apartment at No. 422 East 11th Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A” (Landmarks Preservation Commission). There he settled into a rare period of domesticity. The house was “in what was then a Polish-Jewish neighbourhood and has since become the East Village. The apartment was comfortably furnished with odd pieces … Charlie bought a phonograph and shelves for their combined record collections. For the first time since he left the Olive Street house in Kansas City, Charlie had a real home of his own. It never became a crash pad” (Russell, pp. 301–2). The E 11th St house has been demolished but the building they moved to later in the year, 151 Avenue B, has been placed on the National Register

hipster claque reacted noisily as the spirit of Minton’s came to Carnegie Hall. The public was bewildered. Despite the bristling hostility that surrounded the performers, Parker’s solos retained that continuity and completeness of form that marked his best work. No matter what chances he took, how fragmentary or allusive the improvisation, he was always able to resolve the line. It was one of his fire-eating nights, a display of astonishing musical powers”. Russell

came back with a chorus of equal quality, lustrous, chiseled, accurately articulated. The duel waxed its hottest on ‘Dizzy Atmosphere’, taken at an incredible tempo that left drummer Joe Harris and pianist John Lewis scrambling frantically. There were feints, sorties, lines paraphrased half a tone off pitch, tricky gambits, musical shorthand, stopped time, lightning excursions into strange scales and keys. Parker was the aggressor, Dizzy the counter puncher. The

knots. The Parker-Gillespie set at once exploded into a duel … on the ensemble part of ‘Tunisia’ Charlie played a fantastic counterpoint to the theme that would have routed a lesser musician than Gillespie. Off and running, Charlie plunged recklessly and breathtakingly into the alto break while Dizzy, no longer in his jolly mood, retired to gather his forces. After the break the saxophone chorus was played with a fierce, hard, professional brilliance. Dizzy

JAZZ

All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk

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