Charlie Parker Seen And Heard

For years, I have thought that the only film showing Charlie Parker at work was a well-known 1952 clip of Parker with Dizzy Gillespie when they appeared on a television program to receive a magazine award and played “Hot House.” It turns out, happily, that I was wrong. A website called Dailymotion has filmclips and videotape sequences of a number of musicians, jazz and otherwise, including two with Bird.
In Dailymotion’s Parker video, we see him at first listening with great appreciation to Coleman Hawkins play what seems to be “I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good,” then sharing the performance with the great tenor saxophonist. An up-tempo blues follows—Parker with pianist Hank Jones, Bassist Ray Brown and drummer Buddy Rich. It’s nearly as much fun watching Bird dig Buddy’s solo as to see and hear his own playing. Another piece has the rhythm section with Lester Young, Bill Harris, Harry Edison, Flip Phillips and Ella Fitzgerald. The video quality is crisp, the sound clear. To see the clip, go here. If you do not have a high-speed internet connection, it may download slowly.
The knowledgeable Jim Harrod of the Jazz West Coast listserve says that the clip is “from NORMAN GRANZ PRESENTS IMPROVISATION released in Japan on 9/26/1997 by Toshiba EMI, release number TOVW-3258, VHS. I believe it has also been released on DVD. The entire film runs 64 minutes and includes footage from 1966, 1977 and 1979.”
The footage of Parker and the other stars of Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic troupe is, of course, from the early 1950s. Parker died fifty-one years ago next Sunday, on March 12, 1955. My internet search turned up references to the DVD on web sites, apparently Russian, whose links did not work. Maybe you’ll have better luck. If you know where the DVD can be obtained, let us know, please.
To see part of the Parker-Gillespie “Hot House” clip, go here.
As long as I’m directing you to the Dailymotion stash of videos, I should mention Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow” from the 1957 CBS program The Sound of Jazz. If you have never seen the look on Holiday’s face as her friend Lester Young plays his perfect blues chorus, go here.