The Quintet
Jazz at Massey Hall

The evening of May 15, 1953, at Massey Hall in Toronto represents the culmination of the Be Bop parabola.

A parabola that began a decade earlier, in the jam nights at Minto's Playhouse in New York. Throughout this decade, all the revolution and all the excesses that would make Jazz an authentic lifestyle, in which to pour anger, joy, desire, despair, the break with past patterns; a break that represents much more than the "simple" break, indeed, with the musical patterns of the pre-Bop era.

The Quintet, yes, meaning Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charlie Mingus, and Max Roach. Something solemn indeed. Solemn like when you say Rhythm Section and immediately think of Miles's guys.

The refined beauty of "Perdido," a classic by the Duke that opens the evening, causes orgasms among the audience, and the climaxes at the end of every phrase by Charlie and Dizzy practically make it ejaculate. The guys, and that sense of profound nostalgia they grant with the notes of "All the Things You Are," a sense almost whispered with strength. Dizzy's "Salt Peanuts" prolongs the sense of pleasure, bringing the evening to excitement. Dizzy was also excited when he screamed "Salt Peanuts," while a frenzied Charlie climbed up and down from heaven and hell with his alto sax. Things handed down to future generations of the Jazz people, but also things returned (re)handed down by the protagonists themselves to their intimacy.

A journey with oneself: Powell the dark madness, Parker the exasperation of talent, Gillespie the magic of creation, Roach the diligent brilliance, and Mingus the muffled mystery, like the sound of his double bass. "A Night in Tunisia," for example, a very famous standard by Dizzy, encapsulates all this: it is mysticism, hypnosis, chiaroscuro transcendence. Then it ends, and the album ends. You can either remove it or die, start it over, and relive.

An album in a perpetual state of life and death, two conditions that nonetheless cancel each other out, because in the album's dimension, it would be trivial even to talk of life and death. I remember the day Max died. They said he was no longer self-sufficient (...). Roach was the last of the Quintet's boys to leave. And Charlie? So far back in time that these days the memory is lost. Max was old, and perhaps the sense of time, not only in the musical sense, remained in his memories, abandoning his body. Max died, like that, in his sleep, not a jazzman's death. He had returned to live with the boys from Minto's, in a place we don't know, but which should resemble Massey Hall in Toronto. For sure.

They had fun, that evening. The only flaw was the sense of "emptiness" in some cases between one piece and the next, because this is just a taste of a much more eternal evening, in which "Lullaby of Birdland" was also played.

Goodnight, Charlie. Play me the lullaby, perdi(d)o...