Django writes:
Surprisingly, it was a book that sparked my obsession with Charlie Parker (a.k.a ‘Bird’). Having heard his music from my birth onwards, I knew it was good in the way that I knew that food was good. It was nutrition, a life force… But I’d lived with it for so long that it was water off a duck’s back.
As children, our father fed us strange books strategically chosen to amplify the strangeness of each stage of our lives. First there was “The Palm Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm Wine Tapster” by Amos Tutuola, a story of African witchcraft so frightening that since the age of eight I haven’t returned to it. Then came the perfect logic of Mulla Nasrudin. At the age of 9 or 10 he proffered a book where two people made love in chapter 15. I don’t remember the title, any other characters, or any other chapters. Then at a time when my school-friends started worshipping football players, father seized his moment and lent me “Bird Lives”, a highly romanticized view of the life of Charlie Parker by Ross Russell. I was hooked. Whilst my school friends had shrines to Gordon Banks and other sportsmen with cubist hairstyles, I had a self-made plasticine model of my hero Charlie Parker.
Living in a boring white suburb of London, I was virtually alone in my special interest. I took to whistling Bebop tunes on train station platforms in the hope of meeting other Bird obsessives. Surprisingly this actually paid off. I met saxophonist Steve Buckley in Brixton where we were both returning from a jazz summer school. We had been two slightly lost 12 year olds amongst hordes of mature saxophone owners and jazz nerds.
Having met through a whistled song, in the way that real birds do, we agreed to rehearse every Sunday for a year. We ruined Steve’s father’s collection of Parker 78s by slowing them down to 16 rpm and lifting the needle up every 2 beats in order to unravel the fascinating horn lines.
We returned to the jazz school the following summer raring to go. I was wearing a Bebop beret but was thankfully unable to sport the goatee. We knew the tunes.
This phase did pass. At the school that year were South African exiles Mongezi Feza and Harry Miller, and various jazz virtuosos from Kenny Wheeler to John Stevens, so it was a good time to let Charlie Parker rest in peace for a while and take in some new inspiration. But the dramatic shapes of Parker’s solos and compositions, and his free-flowing divisions of time, were embedded in my own music from that time onwards.
In 2005 I was asked to contribute to a celebration of the life of Charlie Parker at Copenhagen Jazz House. I used the opportunity to arrange compositions that I most associated with Parker; the tracks you hear on this album. When we played the warm-up gig in London, an attending critic wrote that Charlie would have ‘turned in his grave’. Obviously none of us have any idea how Parker would have been playing by now: he died fifty-five years ago. As an optimist I choose to believe he would have evolved. We know that he caused Stravinsky to spill his drink by spotting him in the audience and incorporating a theme from Firebird into his solo: Bird obviously appreciated the avant-garde and the cutting edge, regardless of genre.
What about this album then? This is Peter Bruun, Petter Eldh, and me, playing Parker’s music with respect, contemporary sensibility, and with joy. I believe there is no point in recording unless one has something special to say. Now’s The Time to say it: Bird Lives!
