Kansas City Lightning
New recordings of a legend at home. Plus: Music of 2024
By July of 1951 Charlie “Bird” Parker was in a period of artistic consolidation, modest commercial success and accelerating personal catastrophe. He was several weeks shy of his 31st birthday and already the world’s most influential jazz musician, an alto saxophone of astonishing grace and invention. His imitators and disciples numbered in the thousands. A growing body of recordings dating back to 1944, which generations of musicians would learn note by note, have ensured that the armies of the faithful would never shrink.
He had less than four years to live. Parker had been addicted since his teens to heroin or, in its absence, whatever he could get. It ate him out from inside. When he died in early 1955 the doctor who signed his death certificate would overestimate his age by nearly 20 years.
But in 1951 he was glad to be home, visiting his mother Addie in Kansas City. A drug bust in New York City had ended better than it could have — a suspended sentence — but his cabaret card, a condition of employment in the Big Apple’s jazz clubs, was suspended. In Kansas City he could rest and dip in and out of an astonishingly vibrant local music scene before trying his luck again in New York.
One night at a party at bandleader Phil Baxter’s house, Parker played seven pieces, accompanied only by a bassist and drummer whose names have since been lost to the record. Somebody switched on a wire recorder. It captured 28 minutes of surprisingly good audio. The material was simple enough. Parker would kick a tune off, improvise with maddening ease through a few choruses, and when he’d had enough, end without warning on a six-note figure drawn from the Sunday movies:
But the presence you get from these recordings doesn’t have a lot of equals in the Parker discography. You hear one of the great minds in this music in three dimensions, the air above and beside and behind him as well as the space he occupies, as he goes through what amounted to proficiency exercises to keep his game up.
The Phil Baxter recordings, never previously released, are the highlight of a significant album that came out just before Halloween on Verve Records, Bird in Kansas City. I’m a little surprised it hasn’t received more attention. Perhaps I shouldn’t be: So much music receives so little attention. But there was a time when fresh tracks by a relaxed Charlie Parker in his prime would have drawn significant coverage. I wanted to tell you about it because of the music’s intrinsic value, and because of the role in its release that was played by a Canadian, Ken Druker, who’s played a central role in bringing a series of previously-unheard jazz performances to public attention.
Druker is Senior VP (Jazz Development) at the Verve Label Group in New York City. I knew him a lifetime ago when he was working for Verve in Montreal and hosting a jazz show on CKUT, McGill’s radio station. In recent years he’s been Verve’s resident vault miner, making a series of significant recordings by long-lost jazz legends public: Stan Getz in New York, Louis Armstrong in London, Ella Fitzgerald in Berlin, John Coltrane in his favourite studio with his greatest band at the peak of their powers.
Because so much of jazz is improvised, each performance is different from any other, and any new recording offers an insight into the artist’s creative process. “The element that sets these recordings apart from most every other Parker recording available is how relaxed Bird sounds on these tracks,” Druker said when I asked him about the Kansas City release. “It makes sense. He’s at home amongst friends and, in the case of the Baxter recording, playing in the basement of a friend’s home. In addition, the rhythm section players don’t solo and there are no other soloists waiting to jump in as soon as Bird ends. He has as much or as little room as he likes on each song and it lends these recordings a certain sense of ease or lightness that’s unique in his discography.”
The Parker release — rounded out with some earlier informal recordings at the Vic Damon studio and some previously-unheard 45s that featured Parker as a soloist with pianist Jay McShann’s band — are a handy reminder of the importance of Parker’s Kansas City roots. The border town between Kansas and Missouri was a hotbed of early jazz. Count Basie, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, Hot Lips Page and dozens of other figures came from Kansas City or stayed there for extended periods. In his extensive liner notes, Druker’s co-producer Chuck Haddix, a Kansas City historian and archivist, describes the ferment of Kansas City in the 1930s: as many as 50 clubs at a time operated in a 12-block area between 12th and 18th streets. Bands would play dances until 2 am, then the after-hours sessions would roll until well after dawn. It was an inherently competitive situation for hundreds of musicians.
Charlie Parker was silenced as a teenager when Basie drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at the floor of the Reno Club to announce that Parker wasn’t ready. He retreated to his mom’s house and practiced from morning to night, logging what Malcolm Gladwell would later call his 10,000 hours, and when he went back into the clubs, no player anywhere could match him for quick-witted harmonic ingenuity.
But it’s not just that he rose from this soil, it’s that in important ways he never left it. For all the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of the “bebop” language he developed with Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and a few others, Parker stayed close to the music’s home virtues, as practiced in his home town for crowds that expected to dance and carouse. He never stopped playing the blues, swinging hard, and leaning into the pretty notes in a melody.
It’s the fact that everything on the new release was recorded in Parker’s hometown that made it worth putting on the market, Druker said. The album isn’t just a display of extraordinary virtuosity, it’s a story about a legendary man’s roots and life.
“The question as to whether a particular newly-discovered recording needs to be released is a key element of my job,” Druker said. “The first issue is whether the musical performance captured is noteworthy or sheds light on the musician’s artistry. In the case of artists like Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk, I’ve yet to hear a performance that doesn’t meet those criteria.
“So then you consider the recording quality—and there can be a fairly wide range of what’s acceptable. You would always like a pristine, professional recording whenever possible, but that’s not usually what we’re working with. In the case of something like John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle, I would hardly call the original recording pristine. But because of the unprecedented opportunity to hear the A Love Supreme suite played live in its entirety and with an expanded band that included Pharoah Sanders, we balance the importance and quality of the music itself against the recording quality (which, in the end, is always ameliorated by the Herculean efforts of our audio engineers).
“That, then, leads to the third consideration: Is the ‘story’ of the recording something that can help attract listeners and add character to the entire project?” In the case of the Parker recordings, which show the music’s pre-eminent creative force in a period of relative calm, that’s definitely the case.
Music of 2024
It’s almost the end of the year and I haven’t put out a list of my favourite recordings of 2024. I’ve been writing about music for as long as I’ve been writing about anything, and taking stock is a way for me to decide what I found significant, lasting or especially promising in the year’s recordings.
There’s more jazz here than in recent lists. It was a good year for jazz. But other genres sneaked onto the list too.
In no particular order:
Vanisha Gould, She’s Not Shiny, She’s Not Smooth (Cellar Live)
Samara Joy, Portrait (Verve)
Two of the leading figures in the current renaissance of jazz vocals. You’re likelier to have heard of Samara Joy, the Bronx wunderkind, just turned 25, who won the Grammy for Best New Artist a few years ago. It takes guts, given that trajectory, to make an album as rich and complex as this. Arrangements come from the members of a new eight-piece band. A lesser vocalist would get lost in these charts; Joy soars over them.
Vanisha Gould is less known, less glamorous, but she has lots to say and she’s impatient to say it. This is the New Yorker’s third album in two years, and it best showcases a tough, matter-of-fact songwriting style that reminds me of Nina Simone and Carmen McRae. If Gould’s young peers aren’t already covering her songs, they soon will, or should.
Daniil Trifonov, My American Story: North (Deutsche Gramophon)
The Russian-born pianist has grown up in the U.S., and he’s been taking notes. Trifonov is a virtuoso soloist and a charismatic force on a concert stage, but what makes him a leading figure in classical music is his cheerful eccentricity. This double-album survey of American literature makes choices nobody else would: Gershwin’s Concerto in F, John Adams and some nicely spiky Aaron Copland, sure, but also movie music, jazz transcriptions from Art Tatum and (less successfully) Bill Evans, and a meaty new concerto from Mason Bates. The basic argument: a society as big and wild as America needs to be tackled in big and wild ways. Back in the monoculture days, an album like this would have rocketed across the headlines. Now you needed me to tell you about it.
Patricia Brennan, Breaking Stretch (Pyroclastic)
Evidence that there can still be something new under the sun. Mexican-born and classically-trained, Brennan approaches the vibraphone for its textural possibilities in a large ensemble that strikes me as a kind of underground all-star band: Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Mark Shim and Jon Irabagon on saxophones. Brennan’s compositions recall the music Dave Holland and Steve Coleman were making in the 1980s, but like them, she’s working on her own terms.
Kurt Elling/ Sullivan Fortner, Wildflowers Vol. 1 (Edition)
They decided to make the album one night, booked a handy studio and by the following week it was out. It’s nominated for a Grammy, if that means anything. Elling is my age, and he should maybe be settling into some sort of congenial semi-retirement, but instead the Chicago singer has been jumping into one remarkable new partnership after another for nearly a decade: Branford Marsalis, Danilo Perez, and now this. Sullivan Fortner is the pianist everyone’s talking about this year. Usually he plays with Cécile McLorin Salvant, but his endless inventiveness and careful ear make him popular with any singer who can get him. Here he and Elling play standards and a Mumford and Sons tune, because why not. McLorin Salvant drops by for one song. It’s all so casually, offhandedly brilliant. A masterpiece by midnight.
Grace Bowers and the Hodge Podge, Wine on Venus (Grace Bowers Music)
The Nashville-based blues-rock guitarist — think Clapton or Santana, then realize those comparisons aren’t wildly out of place — just turned 18. She shreds convincingly on her Gibson, of course. But what kept me coming back was the generosity of this debut album and the band it showcases, especially the way Bowers shares the solo spotlight with a second guitarist, left-handed Fender slinger Prince Parker.
Caroline Shaw, So Percussion, Rectangles and Circumstance (Nonesuch)
It’s 11 years since Shaw became the youngest winner of a Pulitzer Prize for composition. She’s made it clear since then that she’s the real deal, distinctive and engaging. She worked with Kanye West, but don’t hold that against her, and she wrote the music for that very smart Fleishman is in Trouble miniseries. Here she joins with the percussion ensemble So Percussion for a suite of art songs that should appeal to a broad audience. The best whatever-this-is since Philip Glass’s Songs From Liquid Days? Maybe.
MGMT, Loss of Life (Mom+Pop)
The ’80s called. They want their brilliantly crafted synth-pop back. And they can’t have it.
Julian Lage, Speak To Me (Blue Note)
The most ambitious album yet from the most accomplished and well-rounded American guitarist since John Scofield and Pat Metheny. As I’ve written before, I hope Lage keeps pushing the boundaries of his considerable talent, but this is a hefty down-payment on wonders yet to come: Lage plays more acoustic than electric, augments his trio with skronking saxophone and Kris Davis’s ornery piano, and takes as many esthetic cues from alt-rock — via producer Joe Henry and Lage’s wife Margaret Glaspy — as from anything jazz. This is the kind of album people used to make when anything seemed possible. It still is.
Goldmine
The kismet of this landing in my inbox as I pull into Kansas City on a Midwest road trip is quite remarkable. Thanks for the incredible soundtrack for wandering the streets of this historic jazz city Paul!