Extract from Evan Parker’s wonderful album liner notes:
“Bird Lives” was the prophetic graffito seen on a NY wall soon after Parker’s death
and it continues to testify to the remarkable time-capsule from the future that was bebop.
Already with “Beloved Bird” (LM004)), Django made it clear that his approach would be to deconstruct and reconstruct the Parker lines. Both the melodies and the harmonies are reconsidered, fragmented and thoroughly “Djangoised” in that joyful, insouciant and insanely clever way that characterises all his work. It is hard at this point to decide which decisions are made in advance and rehearsed, and which are arrived at in performance. By this time in the life of the trio it may well be that an intuitive understanding of the “methodology” by which this fragmentation and realignment is arrived at, on the part of Peter and Petter, means that we are hearing a mixture of both ways of working.
The Django originals stand in their own right but also serve to re-contextualise the Parker lines, using the same rhythmic and harmonic signature that is brought to bear in the re-working of “Confirmation” et al.
Stepping back and putting this dialectic in a longer historical context, it seems as though there have to be regular repeats of the debate over whether jazz is a closed language, ready for its “classical” phase, or an “open sky” that cries out for periodic renewal. There are either/or characters who take sides and others who want it all.
Django loves it all.
After all that, what to make of the almost de-coupled, almost secret track, the Bacharach/David classic, “A House is Not a Home”, sung with reverence by the usually irreverent Ashley Slater? Is this like that announcement at the end of side 2 of Gato’s “Chapter One” where he announces “Chapter Two”? and then what to make of the ghostly kaleidoscopic revisiting of Bird song in the coda? If it presages a “Bacharach reconstructed” project then look forward to more Djangology. Meanwhile dig “Confirmation”. As T.S.Eliot has it, “Art never improves, but… the material of art is never quite the same.”
Evan Parker, 2012.
