Smiling, Urging, Playing as He Comes, Chick Corea Rides the 7^th Galaxy on His Return to Forever

Syracuse New Times, October 21, 1973

By Alan Perlman

Sitting down and talking with Chick Corea is like watching him perform on stage. For Corea, communicating, especially communicating happiness, is a major force, influencing everything he says and does.

When he talks about his music he exhibits the same assurance that marks everything he plays. His eyes stare straight and deep and the pixyish smile disappears—yet he glows.

“The audience may applaud a lot or a little, but when the vibes are there I know,” he said after a particularly inspired set.

At 32, Corea has ascended the musical ranks, earning his stripes with Elvin Jones, Willie Bobo, Mongo Santamaria, Herbie Mann, Blue Mitchell, Stan Getz and, most importantly, Miles Davis, the George Patton of jazz. Now he is leading his own band and playing the music he wants to play.

The warmth Corea feels in communicating can be seen whenever Return to Forever perform. On stage he looks like a little boy banging on a piano for the first time. He bounces around, smiles perpetually—in short, he has a great time. Taking bassist Stanley Clarke, drummer Lenny White and guitarist Billy Connors with him, he seems to transcend this world, reaching a level of sublime spiritual happiness.

Corea’s Spiritualism

The audience cannot help but be uplifted, and those fortunate few able to become totally immersed in the music can travel with the group as they journey through the “Seventh Galaxy.” Return to Forever’s last album (due for release in a few weeks) is entitled Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy. Corea discussed the spiritual meaning of the album for him.

“First of all, let me clear the word ‘spiritual’ with you. I find a lot of misunderstanding about the word ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritualism.’ There isn’t anything which isn’t spiritual. The cause of environments and the cause of life are people—and what a person is, Is a spirit. He doesn’t own a spirit, a spirit isn’t off in the next heaven, it’s you and it’s me. That’s a basic fact—that’s the most basic fact—everything is spiritual.

“In that sense, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy of course is of a spiritual nature. It is the symbol for a dream that I find everybody shares—the dream to want to create a beautiful, beautiful space, to live and play and grow and create in. It definitely isn’t planet earth. But it’s a nice symbol for the kind of space we’d like to create and to be free in.”

Return to Forever, like Corea, is a conglomerate of influences. Lenny White prefers to call it “contemporary music.” Most artists resent it when someone tries to label their music, or categorically restrict it—but not Corea.

“Fortunately, I haven’t had the feeling of resentment about anything for about a year and a half now. I feel really good about things,” he explains. “The purpose of categorization is to verbally communicate something to someone—you need a word. There’s a differentiation I’d like to make clear, the difference between categorizing something in terms of its form and in terms of its intent. These are two different things that very often get buttered together.

“You can categorize music in terms of its form, which means the kind of sound that it produces—the way that rhythm, melody and harmony are used. If I really analyze our music objectively, as a musicologist, I would say form-wise it is rock, jazz, Latin, Avant-garde, pop, classical.

“It becomes very vague to categorize because there is no new nomenclature in the field of music. You’d call it the ‘new hybrid.’ As a culture develops you always get ‘new hybrids’ because you get people who have learned all the standard ways and they melt the influences together to get a hybrid form.

Beauty or Trash

“Intent is more important because you can take any form and use it in any way. You can take a rock form and you can communicate beauty through it or you can communicate trash through it.

“We have an intent with our music to bring something beautiful and understandable to people. Our intent is to make people feel good, and to get an agreement on the fact that creating something beautiful is a groovy thing to do—as opposed to creating a mystery or an awesome effect or a political opinion. Our intent is very simple, which is just to create games and lovely, beautiful, light things with people. We don’t intend to put audiences off, so they never don’t like it.

“This is how I feel all the time. It’s what my intent in life is. I don’t have to think about it, I just do it, ‘cause it’s what I feel like doing. I usually don’t think about anything. Thinking is a very slow way of coming to conclusions. I observe and then I very quickly make conclusions.

“I consider what I do to be the best I can, but the proof of it is what the people feel. It’s an ideal scene to be able to render one communication that communicates to everyone. That’s an absolute, an impossibility. There will be those form whom the communication goes over their heads, and there will be those who feel the communication isn’t sophisticated enough. My intention is to get that communication which is in the middle—that can satisfy those who like sophisticated music and those that like something simpler and coarser.

“Over the past four years my music has become simpler. I’d like to call it ‘more direct’ because in a lot of ways it’s more complex. Simplicity is the amount of directness in something—complexity is the amount of misunderstanding or confusion in something. We use very simple forms to create our music and within those forms we become very complex with our playing—but that’s the trip of it and that’s what people like about it. They grasp the basic of it and then the complexity becomes fun rather than vagueness.”

No one has more fun than Corea, unless it’s Clark of White. Connors fits in fine musically, but lacks the spirit and unusual empathy enjoyed by the others. They have a gas on stage, laughing, smiling, urging, cajoling—just being together.

After his first set Corea remarked that it was the worst he, personally, had ever played. Told that he didn’t look upset, he said, “I’m happy just digging what the others have to say, and they said some really beautiful things tonight.

“My own goal with the group,” he said later, “is for it to be a group, for everyone in the group to grow as an individual. I prefer to call it Return to Forever, not ‘Chick Corea and.’ Any group operates most sanely when there’s a singular direction and leadership.

“I started the group myself; it was my idea. I knew what I wanted and I got people who shared my goals. The others began to take more and more responsibility and began to originate more and more, involving their lives with the group. This group feels very, very good. I love it!

“In relation to the professional level of performance of musical groups, we’re at a very high level of development. But in terms of what our own ideas are, we’re definitely at a formulative stage.”

The present group was completed in June when White joined. White, 23, first played with Corea on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. “Lenny,” Corea said, “brings a spirit to the group that’s just great. He’s the best drummer I know of; a fantastic, fantastic musician.

Corea met Connors, also 23, in San Francisco last March. “I immediately recognized a very similar view and feeling about aesthetics that Billy and I shared. He’s very sensitive with his instrument and about music. He brings a very melodic feeling into the group.

Clarke, 21, and Corea have been together for a few years. “My relationship with Stanley is one of those rare kinds of relationships in life, where the first time we met we recognized one another to be ‘soulmates.’ We immediately started to plan a future together. Stanley’s as much a part of Return to Forever as I am. He’s grown incredibly as a player and as a composer, too. He gives the group a lot in terms of dedication and commitment to what we’re doing.”

According to Corea, the group will continue to expand, playing acoustically when conditions permit and “I’m gonna get a synthesizer and experiment with it.”

Art and Society

Chick Corea is a master, with a certainty not only in what he plays but what he says. Above all else he is an artist, an artist with a deep concern about the role of artists and art in today’s society.

“Art is the quality of communication. It summarizes communication. Instead of sitting down and rapping something out in everyday words, what you do in an art form is condense it into some organized sound or poetic words. In order to do that one has to know the basic principles of communication—and also have enough understanding of others to know how to communicate to them.

“Art is in degrees. To me, the value of it is communication. If you communicate to yourself, that’s art, but when you talk about the value of it, you talk about what’s the greatest help to the greatest number of people—how many people can you cause a beautiful effect on.

“If you look around and see who does the real influencing, you come up with an amazing thing, ‘cause it isn’t government leaders or education people or the usual ‘authorities’—it’s artists and celebrities. They are the people the influence the thinking of the masses—the Beatles, for instance.

“Artists have a very large responsibility. They can influence people because they’re doing something people want to do—which is to create. The value of an art form is how much truth and honesty an artist communicates, so that he helps people to become more self-determined.

“I don’t try to influence. What I do is continue to improve myself as a person and to help my own immediate environment. I continue to be true to my goals and ideals, and when I play for people all I really want to do is have fun. Life, to be sane, should be fun—it should be light, and airy, and not serious. It should be a very creative activity.”

Corea, an American artist, has not reached the level of acceptance in his own country as he has abroad. His new management, Forever Unlimited Productions, seems intent on rectifying that with a tremendous campaign that reeks of materialistic motives—but that’s okay, he deserves it. Je has done a number of TV specials in Europe and last year tied Elvis Presley as “artist of the year” in a Japanese magazine’s reader’s poll.

“The American people have a certain feeling and lifestyle. At first, the young people tend less towards aesthetic things, towards coarser communications. They like music that’s got a beat as thick as a mountain. In Europe, there’s more of a tendency towards fine arts—maybe because of the tradition of fine art. It was easier to gain an acceptance with experimental music, for when I first started to play there (1970) I was playing very experimental music, soft of ‘modern-classical.’

“I had a desire, after I spend some time in Europe, to communicate to Americans more. I knew that I couldn’t with the art form I had—‘cause it was kind of uncommunicative—so I wrote new music and re-arranged the form of my music. Now our music will probably be liked more by Americans than by Europeans or Japanese.

“I feel I’ve grown a lot. It’s a grown in awareness to be responsible for larger numbers of people. It’s diminishing an awareness to confine oneself to esotericism.”

In the fall of 1973, when I was 20 years old, I had the chutzpah to strut into the offices of the Syracuse New Times in Syracuse, NY, and inform them that I should be their new jazz critic. Although I was a journalism major at the Newhouse school, I had never published anything before in my life, not a word in my high school paper, not a syllable in my college newspaper. Not even an exclamation point anywhere! It was only by sheer luck that I was in the journalism school at all. My first two years in college were mostly a total waste. I didn’t get in to any of the schools to which I applied, so I had to go to Queens College, which was a couple of bus rides from my home in Bayside. I was still living with my parents for those two years, sharing a tiny room with my younger brother and sister, spending a lot more time at the race track and the poker table than in school, or anywhere else for that matter.

The luck was this: An English professor named Russ Fowler. I had him for one class in my freshman year and I liked him so much I signed up for a second class in my sophomore year. One day in year two he handed me back a paper and said this:

“You know, you’re a good writer.”

I was shocked. I looked at him as if he had just landed from Mars.

“What?” he said. “Nobody ever told you that before?”

I shook my head no.

“Well,” he said, “You are. Maybe you should do something with it.”

That was it. That was all the encouragement I needed to get out of the bad situation I was in. If Professor Fowler said I was a good writer, that was good enough for me. Within a week I had researched all of the journalism schools in the Eastern part of the U.S. and Canada and sent out a bunch of applications to transfer. Somehow, I was accepted in several schools and decided on Syracuse.

I started at Syracuse in the Fall of 1972, but my time there was interrupted because I broke an ankle slipping on some steps while cutting class in a snowstorm. Before I knew it I was back at Queens College, in a cast up to my waist, either hitchhiking to classes or taking the buses. No fun at all. In the fall of 1973 I returned to Syracuse and I pretty quickly made my fateful decision to strut into the offices of the Syracuse New Times and begin my career in journalism.

The New Times was an alternative weekly in the spirit of the Village Voice. It was pretty successful at the time and was read by most of the people on campus and just about everyone in the Newhouse school. I had no credentials at all, no clippings to look at when I approached the managing editor, Mike Greenstein. He looked me up and down. I was ready to be rejected outright. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Mike told me that they didn’t actually have anyone on staff who knew anything about jazz.

“What are you doing next weekend?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Okay,” he said. “Chick Corea is coming to play on campus with his band Return to Forever. You can cover the concert and we’ll set you up to do an interview with Chick.”

And that was it. My very first professional journalism assignment anywhere. Interview Chick Corea. Does it get any better than that?

Why am I telling you this story?

I’m clearing stuff out, as you know. I have 600 or so records on the current Carolina Soul eBay auction. I have another 3,000 or so records sitting in my living room committed to a local dealer. I’ve been poring through old files. For at least 20 years, since I started Jazz Collector, I’ve been looking for a copy of this Chick Corea profile. I had already found and posted two other articles from my early career, one on Charlie Parker and one on Charles Mingus. I have always wanted to post the Corea article, even if just to transform it in a digital format. But for all these years the article was nowhere to be found.

Until today. It was in a box with hundreds of other articles from my early career. Somehow it had gotten buried in there and I hadn’t seen it. I just finished reading it. Not too bad, especially considering it was my first article anywhere. I remember going to the club, Jabberwocky, and then meeting Corea in his room at a small motel near campus. He sat on his bed, I sat on a chair. Nothing very fancy at all. I remember taping the interview, and I can see that I used a lot of direct quotes in the article that I wrote. Do I still have a tape from the interview? It’s possible, maybe sitting somewhere in another box of memorabilia. Will it still be viable after 50 years? Who knows. If I ever find it, and it’s still viable, I’ll make sure to digitalize it and post it here  for posterity.

In the meantime, I’ll be sitting down at my computer this weekend copying the original article from 1973 and posting it on Jazz Collector. Stay tuned.

The post An Early Adventure in Jazz and Journalism first appeared on jazzcollector.com.]]> https://jazzcollector.com/features/an-early-adventure-in-jazz-and-journalism/feed/ 2 9166 https://jazzcollector.com/features/chick-corea/ https://jazzcollector.com/features/chick-corea/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:58:46 +0000 https://jazzcollector.com/?p=8666 When I was 20 in 1973 I had the balls to walk into the offices of the Syracuse New Times and tell them I should [...]

When I was 20 in 1973 I had the balls to walk into the offices of the Syracuse New Times and tell them I should be their jazz critic. The New Times was the alternative newspaper in Syracuse, the local version of the Village Voice, and I was a journalism student at the Newhouse School. I had never written anything professionally, nor had I even written anything for a school newspaper. But they didn’t have anybody to write about jazz at the time, so they gave me a shot. I reviewed a couple of albums and must have done OK because I walked into the office one day and the editor said Return to Forever was coming to the local nightclub on campus, called Jabberwocky, and they would like me to review the concert and interview Chick Corea. In fact, they had already set up a time and place for me to do the interview.

It’s hard to describe how excited and nervous I was, interviewing a genuine jazz superstar as my very first real journalism assignment, ever. When the time came, I met Corea in his room in a small motel near the campus. I sat in a chair, he sat on his bed. We talked for about an hour. He was gracious and treated me like an adult, even though I looked and felt like a kid. I didn’t dare tell him I had never done this before. I wish I had saved the tape, but I didn’t. The New Times published a full-page article. It was my real start as a journalist. I remember the lead, or at least the crux of it. It was something like: “Sitting down with Chick Corea is like watching him sit at the piano and perform on stage.” The goal was to capture his passion, enthusiasm and zest for both life and music. He seemed to be having so much fun, when he played and when he talked, even to a 20-year-old starstruck kid like me. The discussion we had was focused primarily on spirituality and music.

I know I saved the article, somewhere, and this morning I went through every possible file up here in The Berkshires and couldn’t find it. I have a feeling I brought it to New York a little while ago with the idea that I would transcribe it and post it on Jazz Collector. I will search the next time I am in New York. I hope I can find it and, if I do, I promise to reproduce it here at Jazz Collector.

That, of course, was my first memory of Corea, other than hearing him on record. My guess is the first record I heard him on would have been Sweet Rain by Stan Getz, but I couldn’t swear to that. Obviously, by 1973 with Return to Forever, Corea had moved into a totally different sphere as an artist, performer and jazz icon, and would remain there for the rest of his life.

My last memory was from 2019 when he played at the local theater here in Great Barrington, the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center.  The Lovely Mrs. JC and I were fortunate enough to get seats in the front row of the center mezzanine. Just as in my first memory, Corea played with the passion of someone who truly loved what he was doing, was totally inspired and acted as if there was no place in the world that he would rather be than on that stage, playing with those musicians for this particular audience. The music was awesome, as you would expect, a mix of standards, originals and experimentations. I walked away with a warm feeling and immense gratitude that he was still so passionate about sharing his gifts. I felt blessed just to be in his presence and felt like he would just go on forever. What a loss.

The post Chick Corea first appeared on jazzcollector.com.]]>

‘Bird’: The Biggest Bopper of All

By Al Perlman

April 13, 1975

“Motherfucker”
It was the only word that fit.

The band had been on stage for more than an hour without its leader, without the man the throng had come to see and hear – Charles Christopher Parker Jr. He was backstage stuffing his face with tacos, tamales, enchiladas, tortillas, beer and Gordon’s Gin, but then he was ready. He put the food down and grabbed his alto sax. The band was playing “Cherokee.” The tempo was fast and powerful, like a pneumatic drill ripping apart concrete.

The fans could hear him as he moved from backstage to the center of the club, playing all the way. “The Bird” was in flight. Notes poured from his horn like sparks from an erupting volcano. The speed at which they flowed was incomprehensible to the young black man in the tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses, as were the melodies they formed, each one stemming from, yet more beautiful than, the one before it.

The young listener could take no more. He climbed atop a table and shouted the only word that fit, the only word he knew to describe Charlie Parker.

“Motherfucker.”

He was right. Unfortunately, too many took too long to realize it.

Remarkable Talent 

During his lifetime, Parker, who died poverty-stricken at the age of 34 in 1955, received adulation only from fellow musicians and a select group of “hipsters.” By the time most critics and fans recognized his genius, Parker was mentally and physically wasted from, among other things, heroin addiction, alcoholism and artistic frustration. Critical acclaim was, by then, of no use to him.

The Parker story parallels the stories of Dylan Thomas and Lenny Bruce – two other remarkable talents who appeared well before the general public was ready to accept them. Each man had immense talent. Each died young. Each had a twist in his personality, caused by addiction to alcohol, dope or both. Each had a love-hate relationship with friends and family. And each, in his own way, was at the vanguard of an artistic and social revolution. Parker had one added burden. He was black.

He did not begin to achieve recognition outside his native Kansas City until 1941, when he was 21. By then, he had spent a lot of time woodshedding, jamming and playing with Kansas City bands. Although he had no formal training, he had begun to develop the musical style with which he would be identified for the rest of his life.

He had already developed the personal style that would also remain with him. He was in his fifth year of heroin addition. He had already been married, a father and separated from his wife and son. He had long since finished high school where he spent three years and wound up in the ninth grade. He had, since the age of 11, cultivated a taste of the nightlife, a taste he would never lose, and he had picked up the nickname “Yardbird,” later shortened to “Bird,” probably given to him as a result of his fondness for friend chicken.

Legendary Story

The year 1939 was Parker’s turning point. It was during a jam session at an all-night chili joint in Harlem that Bird, as he said later, “came alive.” The story of him working over the changes of “Cherokee” and “discovering” that he could use the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line to get a new sound and a new feel is, by now, legend.

From there he moved straight to the forefront of the “bebop revolution.” Along with a number of other young musicians, Parker overturned everything that had been taught about jazz. The boppers changed the rhythms, played at never-before-dreamed-of tempi, played in small groups rather than big bands, played on chord changes that seemed to have no logical flow and did whatever else they wanted, as long as it hadn’t been done before.

The also berated older musicians, calling them Uncle Toms, turned their backs on audiences, hid behind berets, goatees and dark glasses and developed an exclusive “bop language” only the hip could understand, let alone speak.

They alienated older musicians and critics (one critic said, “Bebop sounds to me like a hardware store in an earthquake”) but knowledgeable jazz fans and younger musicians created enough interest in the new music that, by 1945, a good bop musician could make a living in New York City. And there was no better bopper than Charlie Parker.

No Recognition

Then the boppers make a big mistake. They tried to conquer virgin territory in California. The people there were not ready for them. And drugs more difficult to get. Dizzy Gillespie returned to New York in a hurry. But Parker cashed in his plan ticked and stayed behind. By 1947, his drug connection in jail, Parker was placed in the Camarillo State Mental Institution for six months.

Meanwhile, the “revolutionaries” were gradually becoming the establishment, especially Parker’s old buddy Gillespie. Bop had caught on, but Parker had not. In the next two years Life, Time and The New Yorker did articles about bop. None mentioned Charlie Parker. He not only missed out on the recognition, but the money that accompanies it.

Once the superlatives started coming, after he died, they were as rich as they were deserved. Almost all agreed Parker was a musical genius, the finest jazz musician of his generation and one of the finest musicians ever to play jazz. There can be no argument about Parker’s contributions and influence. It would be as if a baseball expert carefully examined the game and concluded that Babe Ruth was a terrible player.

Musicians held Parker in awe from the first, and attempted to copy everything he played. “My first impression of Charlie’s playing was that he was a sort of Pied Piper,” said drummer Stan Levey in a 1970 DownBeat interview. “I didn’t really know what he was doing, but it made me feel good to listen to him.”

“Bird befriended quite a few guys,” said saxophone great Sonny Rollins. “It was like a father thing. When we were hung up personally, we went to talk to him, just to see him. The purpose of his whole existence was music, and he showed me that music was the paramount thing and anything that interfered with it I should stay away from.”

Drug Addiction

Unfortunately, Rollins and countless other musicians that idolized Bird did as he did, not as he said. It is ironic that they should have gone to him with their problems, because he probably had more than all of them combined.

But, the feeling was, to play like Bird, you have to do like Bird. As pianist Hampton Hawes said, “Those of us who were affected the strongest felt we’d be willing to do anything to warm ourselves by that fire.”

So they did anything. Especially drugs.

Sonny Stitt did two years in the Federal Narcotics Hospital in Lexington, Ky.; Red Rodney did five in Leavenworth. Rollins was addicted for several years before quitting cold turkey. Trumpeter Fats Navarro died at 26, in 1950, of, among other things, narcotics additional and tuberculosis. Tadd Dameron spent three years in the Federal Narcotics Hospital in Lexington before his 1965 death. Saxophonist Jackie McLean was arrested three times for possession and spent 11 months in jail. The list seems to have no end. Many of the men influenced by Parker are still addicted. Yet they still love and idolize the man.

“Jazz is nowhere near him right now,” according to pianist Barry Harris. “Bird was a swinger from way back. No matter what the drummer and bass player are doing, you’re supposed to be able to swing by yourself. And he could,” Or, as Hawes put it, “Bird never once in his lifetime played a single bar of bullshit.”

The thrust of Parker’s influence could be seen in the number of imitators he spawned among saxophone players (Stitt, Charles McPherson, Cannonball Adderley, Gene Quill, Phil Woods and Charlie Mariano, to name a few), but his influence was not limited to that instrument.

New Movement

“Bird was responsible for the way I played drums,” claimed Max Roach. “Not just because his style called for a particular kind of drumming, but because he set the tempos so fast; it was impossible to play a straight, Cozy Cole, four style. We had to work out variations.”

After the bop movement of the Forties, there were no major innovations in jazz (unless one counts the “cool” movement that came and when with barely a whimper) until the “New Thing” of the late Fifties and early Sixties. Ornette Coleman, who, like Parker, was ostracized and ignored (Dexter Gordon once kicked him off the bandstand, literally) has been called the Bird of the new movement.

Parker’s influence on the now-acclaimed Coleman (he is in the DownBeat Hall of Fame) is pervasive. Pianist-composer John Lewis said Coleman’s music is the next logical step after Bird, but cornetist Ruby Braff provides a more critical comparison: “Once I heard Charlie Parker sound like that (Coleman),” said Braff, “when he was completely sick.”

Ross Russell, Parker’s biographer, points to Parker’s influence on Coleman’s “modal, jet stream style.” Parker’s major impact on jazz, however, has not just been harmonic or linear, but rhythmic. Coleman’s music is not as influenced by Parker harmonically or melodically – where Parker still has it all over everyone – as it is rhythmically.

It was Parker and his contemporaries who beat straight four-four time into the ground. Not only did they play at lightning tempi, but they wrote songs purposely accenting the “wrong” beat. One example is Parker’s “Moose the Mooche.” Another is his “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” which had so many “off” accents that many contemporary musicians never could get it right, even though it’s only a 12-bar blues, which any jazz player can play in his sleep.

Pervasive Influence

Parker changed the concept of rhythm in jazz, making syncopation the rule rather than the exception. Coleman and other contemporary musicians went one step further, stripping the moving of all chord changes and harmonic forms, opening the way for unlimited rhythmic forms.

Russell rightly says that Parker has influenced all succeeding jazz players, from Coleman, to John Coltrane, to Eric Dolphy, to Miles Davis. “Even recent, controversial, iconoclastic improvisers – Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Sonny Simmons – have their roots in Charlie Parker.”

Aside from the harmonic and rhythmic changes Parker instituted in jazz, he also introduced other, more subtle innovations. He changed the way altoists played ballads from the standard Johnny Hodges “play the melody straight and use all the vibrato you can muster” style to one in which vibrato was rarely employed, and one in which the melody line was implied but never stated.

He explored new techniques on the saxophone, helping to move it from, as Russell said, “a fattener of orchestral textures to the most expressive instrument.” Parker also pioneered to use of “Tin Pan Alley” songs as jazz vehicles and was the first major jazz musician to record with a string section.

Although his influence is apparent in just about all music we hear today, many are still interested in the real thing. A “Back to Bird” movement has been underway for about three years. No few than seven record companies – ESP, Saga, Spotlite, Onyx, Alamac, Phoenix and Mark – have recently released previously unavailable material by Parker.

Unique Tribute

In 1971, saxophonist Med Flory and bassist Buddy Clark formed Supersax, probably the greatest tribute to Bird ever conceived. Supersax employs a five-person horn section, which, in unison, duplicates Parker’s solos in exact or near-exact reproduction. It is like looking at him through a giant magnifying glass.

The ultimate effect is to put Parker on a par with classical composers. By orchestrating his improvised work, Supersax is eternally preserving his spontaneity while surrendering its own. What Parker played for the moment will be preserved as if he wrote it down on paper. No jazz musician has ever before been accorded such recognition, and it is doubtful any will in the future. The group’s first two albums were Grammy winners, and the recently released Supersax Plays Bird With Strings may be the best of all.

It is apparent that Parker still hovers over the jazz world. “If I owned a radio station,” critic Ira Gitler was recently moved to say, “I would program continuous tapes of every bit of music Charlie Parker recorded.”

Gillespie was even more reverent. “The Negro people should put up a statue to him,” said the trumpeter. “This man contributed joy to the world, and it will last a thousand years.”

A Parker cult seems to be springing up again. When he died, this large eccentric group refused to believe it, and lined subway walls and buildings with “Bird Lives” graffiti to proclaim their faith. Now the cult is more preoccupied with finding rare tapes of Parker’s concerts and recording sessions. For many, however, Parker is still regarded as a Jesus figure, a savior, and “Bird Lives” graffiti is again popping up on subway walls and on college campuses.

But it is only his music that lives. March 12 marked the 20^th anniversary of his death.

Long live Charlie Parker.