Charlie Parker
The Complete Dial Sessions

I will not reiterate here how Charlie Parker disrupted the course of jazz, a charge of dynamite on the tracks of a peaceful and lush locomotive. Nor will I pedantically retrace one of the most heartrending, pulsating biographies ever intertwined with the swirls of brass. That recording, that's what I want to try to recount to you, even though pens far more inspired have already done it justice. But so be it, you listen to it and get moved once again, you quickly look it up in the database, and at the "DE-Sorry" you have no choice but to jot down a few words on that July 26, 1946.

Embodiment of excess, depository of genius, plenipotentiary of the chirp, "Bird" blew himself into the sax, always. And it was a fine blowing. In hindsight, it was a valve, that sax blowing. Too much prodigy in that body, too much pain of being human, too much stuff passed through those limbs, impossible to quell the urgency to let it out. Not that he didn't try, Charlie, to calm that fever. Everything in him was excessive, first and foremost the search for the soul's pleasure, through the body. And so food, and alcohol, and drugs, and women, Bird was ravenous, like a bird without water in an August cage, and it was always an August cage, and the water was never enough. And so he blew, spat into that sax, puffed steam otherwise he would explode. He was not an entertainer, he never giggled like Armstrong, nor did he flatter the crowds like Benny Goodman, no, no smooth swing, no ingratiating notes to soothe post-war woes in a sway of hips. Bebop, that's what Charlie Parker's music was called, fiercely opposed by the guardians of tradition, labeled inconclusive, based on a series of trills without apparent purpose, anti-melodic and complicated to whistle. But how much there was, in the steam of that sax, ah if anything Parker put everything into it, not that he wanted to, it was a must, it was the whale's breath.

He was 25 years old when he arrived in Los Angeles with Dizzy Gillespie, the princes of bebop, together, to gather the insults of conservatives and the enthusiasm of the (few) pioneers. Drugs were a constant worry, it was not easy to find opium in the new venue, but Bird managed to raise a congregation of music and heroin by blowing: the "Finale" became thanks to him the toy club, a brothel where jazz was played to inflame the whole West Coast, and the best drugs were bought. When the Law intervened, the toys stopped dancing, and for a moment longer than others, the Sparrow lacked breath. In the blackest bottom of that moment, Dial had the insane idea to please him: he wanted four new people around, for a recording that had to be different. But the label men truly smelled danger, they attached a psychiatrist to his heels, right in the studio. The merry band was completed by one Elliott Grennard, a journalist who later documented that distorted and sick session on July 26, 1946, in a splendid novella. Charlie Parker cradled his instrument like a crying mother takes her child. Desperate, devoid of light, a broken line that no longer is. Only the breath exhaling from a sax, only that way can you carry on until the next gleam, the next fragile respite. That session was tragic, but dramatic comedy must not have been absent. The psychiatrist understood nothing, Bird sweated and he gave him pills, Bird trembled yet he had to play, and Ross Russell, boss of Dial, was impotent there, and Grennard was taking notes. In the end it was recorded, and above all published everything. "Max Making Wax," "Lover Man," "The Gypsy," "Bebop." In these four tracks lies the portrait of a naked and bleeding genius, one of the most shocking testimonies of 20th-century art. For it is the soul of jazz, breath that narrates, tale of life, crooked, swollen with ecstasy, or dead. Deformed masterpiece, that is how Arrigo Polillo defined it, I must quote him, I couldn't have said it better.

I will not try to contaminate that music with my words, I only invite you to dwell on the immeasurable agony of The Gypsy, but perhaps I shouldn't even have told you this. Well then, The Complete Dial Sessions consists of four CDs, the result of the nine recording sessions that account for two dramatic years in Charlie Parker's life. But drama and inspiration, as we know, are comrades. In this box set, beyond that session, is seminal music, but even more, celestial: suffice to say it features tools like Davis and Gillespie, suffice to say there are pearls lined up like Ornithology, Embraceable You, and many others, all in multiple performances (except, for obvious reasons, the four tracks from that July 26, all in one take). Suffice it to say of the immeasurable value of the chronicle of the Sessions (for instance, the splendid "Relaxin'at Camarillo" recounts Parker's psychiatric hospitalization, which occurred, needless to say, after The Session). The very "1940s" audio quality, far from being a nuisance, adds prestige and depth to the listening (but that's just an opinion).

I stop, I believe I have said everything, I fear I have said nothing, I know for sure I have said too much, for my tastes. Erase everything and publish this: "Indispensable box set, contains the most moving hesitation in jazz history, the insanely delayed entry of the sax in "Lover Man." Trembling tale of a man touched by God, perhaps too abruptly. That man died at 35, but those who buried him thought he was 53".