• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Charlie Parker Seen And Heard

March 8, 2006 by Doug Ramsey

For years, I have thought that the only film showing Charlie Parker at work was a well-known 1952 clip of Parker with Dizzy Gillespie when they appeared on a television program to receive a magazine award and played “Hot House.” It turns out, happily, that I was wrong. A website called Dailymotion has filmclips and videotape sequences of a number of musicians, jazz and otherwise, including two with Bird.
In Dailymotion’s Parker video, we see him at first listening with great appreciation to Coleman Hawkins play what seems to be “I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good,” then sharing the performance with the great tenor saxophonist. An up-tempo blues follows—Parker with pianist Hank Jones, Bassist Ray Brown and drummer Buddy Rich. It’s nearly as much fun watching Bird dig Buddy’s solo as to see and hear his own playing. Another piece has the rhythm section with Lester Young, Bill Harris, Harry Edison, Flip Phillips and Ella Fitzgerald. The video quality is crisp, the sound clear. To see the clip, go here. If you do not have a high-speed internet connection, it may download slowly.
The knowledgeable Jim Harrod of the Jazz West Coast listserve says that the clip is “from NORMAN GRANZ PRESENTS IMPROVISATION released in Japan on 9/26/1997 by Toshiba EMI, release number TOVW-3258, VHS. I believe it has also been released on DVD. The entire film runs 64 minutes and includes footage from 1966, 1977 and 1979.”
The footage of Parker and the other stars of Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic troupe is, of course, from the early 1950s. Parker died fifty-one years ago next Sunday, on March 12, 1955. My internet search turned up references to the DVD on web sites, apparently Russian, whose links did not work. Maybe you’ll have better luck. If you know where the DVD can be obtained, let us know, please.
To see part of the Parker-Gillespie “Hot House” clip, go here.
As long as I’m directing you to the Dailymotion stash of videos, I should mention Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow” from the 1957 CBS program The Sound of Jazz. If you have never seen the look on Holiday’s face as her friend Lester Young plays his perfect blues chorus, go here.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. larryb says

    March 9, 2006 at 10:45 am

    The Hawkins/Bird duet has been listed in discographies as “Ballade;” the uptempo Bird solo is: “Celebrity”
    Ballade is indeed based on “I got it Bad…”
    The film was apparently made at the Gjon Mili studio in Manhattan, and aspects of it certainly remind me of Mili’s “Jammin the Blues,” which had an early, pre-JATP cast (Prez, Edison, Jacquet).

  2. al basile says

    March 9, 2006 at 2:59 pm

    here’s one place which carries it:
    http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=6647151&style=music&cart=317001045&BAB=E

  3. Lady Domi says

    March 11, 2006 at 9:05 am

    Thank you so much. It was such a thrill to see Bird, and Prez too. This film lightened up my whole day!
    Swingingly yours,
    Lady Domi.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in