Bird with Strings

Parker, Charlie

album cover

A Renegade Goes Uptown

Charlie Parker didn't just help invent the torrid jazz style known as bebop in the 1940s. The fast-living alto saxophonist, a notorious junkie who pawned his horn regularly, made an even more significant contribution: He taught often insulated jazz musicians to expand their thinking. He was a modernist, a curious citizen of the world who let his obsessions—Stravinsky and Bartók and Gypsy scales, not to mention Bach—inform his art. Through projects like the very popular Charlie Parker with Strings, which is among the first recordings to feature a jazz soloist with studio orchestra, Parker showed all who followed that it was possible to modify the vocabulary of jazz, that bebop's intricate codes could spread beyond its contentious small-group breeding grounds.

Though it now sounds almost quaint, Charlie Parker with Strings was a radical notion in 1949: It put the most technically adept improviser on the planet in a less rhythmically boisterous, almost plush setting. As Parker said in an interview, he'd been angling to record with an orchestra since the early 1940s. "I was looking for new ways of saying things musically. New sound combinations." That search led him to the arranger Jimmy Carroll, whose active, unschmaltzy charts provide the impulsive saxophonist with just enough structure. The album spawned several hit singles (including "Just Friends") and became Parker's biggest seller.

As Parker anticipated, the studio orchestra atmosphere compelled him to change his tactics as an improviser: He plays more lyrically, with an almost heartbreaking tenderness. The darting and dashing that distinguishes earlier works remains, however, and as Parker blows through the silky string counterlines and harp glissandos, he delights in confounding expectations. He's the ballroom renegade playing pretty for the dancers, just to show he can. Until that moment when pretty no longer cuts it, and the irreverent Parker steps on the gas to take every-one, including the unsuspecting string players, for a thrill ride.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1949, Verve (Reissued 1995)
Key Tracks: "Everything Happens to Me," "Dancing in the Dark."
Catalog Choice: Charlie Parker Collection
Next Stop: Clifford Brown: Clifford Brown with Strings
After That: Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
Book Pages: 578–579