Charlie Parker vs Coleman Hawkins
Ballade

THE REVIEW

This is not a review, it's the desire to share a video that I've been enjoying for some time in all its three minutes on YouTube, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta_UByyi4Z0.

A bit of background, we're in 1950 and there are two saxophonists playing together on TV, one older and composed with a famous and sentimental style, the other is a thirty-year-old punk who spends ten hours a day studying the instrument without ever giving up, never being satisfied, always searching for new scales and novel expressive forms. Addicted and alcoholic, he sleeps two hours a night when he manages to sleep and often pawns his saxophone, but at his musical appearances, jazz players gather to take notes, his style and technique are formidable, and no one can keep up with him. In this recording, Hawkins and Parker are tackling a piece from 'Parker's Mood,' and it's not true that the recording is playback, only the second part (from the third minute onwards) is taken from another television broadcast. This 'Ballade' flows pleasurably for a minute, Coleman plays as he does, but Bird chuckles like a pig and glances around, almost ready to whip out scissors and clip his nails, he even scratches his butt; he's visibly mocking the reflective and slow style of the old master and is itching to start. Then Charlie moistens his lips for the tenth time and starts off like Hendrix, quadrupling the notes in half the measures, Coleman Hawkins is clearly overwhelmed but is a gentleman and doesn't swing his sax at his head. Then he joins back in and Bird's face, for heaven's sake, from the second minute on is a show, even makes eye contact with the camera and makes faces like 'this guy's good, but'.

Charlie, the charming rogue, who occasionally fills my half hours and makes me feel for a while like I hear and understand the cursed fire he had, those phrases twenty years ahead of their time and that damned hurry to play and live, given he died at thirty-five. Heavy metal, indeed.