Flipping The Bird Dept.

A rare impromptu smile from a serious-type guy

Charlie Parker is to sax as Django Reinhardt is to guitar. Both play with a level of virtuosity that surpasses all reason, all predicted norms and limitations. It's like they suddenly and inexplicably burst free of the instrument to express themselves directly - one soul sounds like sax, the other like guitar. But that "natural" and deceptively liquid fluency was won through endless practice, hardship ... and inspiration:

"I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn't play it ... Well, that night I was working over 'Cherokee' and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive ..."

The theory is way beyond me, but "I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive ..." is as close as words can get to describing breaking down the door to heaven - which he never claimed to have done. There's a pure shining spirit of living in his playing, which he has in common with Django - through grace, not work. It's something that eluded John McLaughlin, a self-advertising spiritual adept for whom the door never opened no matter how earnestly he knocked. Parker passed through at a cost, and the toll was severe.

The devil has the best tunes? Depends if you hear God on your knees in a cathedral, or with a drink in your hand in a smoky N.Y. dive.

Charlie Parker With Strings may seem like an odd choice, dividing those who hear the strings from those who listen to Parker, at the top of his game. The strings are a setting - a frame for his artistry. The Savoy L.P. Collection presents no such difficulties. Music like rain from a clear blue sky.