THE QUINTET - Jazz At Massey Hall

The Quintet, essentially the prototype of the supergroup, to borrow a term dear to rock fans. Put together by Charles Mingus for a concert in Canada, this so-called "circus act" is truly a gathering of jazz royalty from the turn of the 40s and 50s, the crème de la crème of be-bop (despite the absence of a certain Thelonious Monk): alongside Mingus on double bass (perhaps the only one only partly "foreign" to bop in the strictest sense) we find Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Bud Powell on piano, Max Roach on drums, and a shadowy, mysterious Charlie Chan (just like the legendary fictional Chinese police inspector from Honolulu) on saxophone, who is none other than the legendary Charlie Parker performing under a pseudonym — not out of some eccentric artistic whim, but purely to get around the tedious record-label bureaucracy that prevented him from appearing under his real name in the credits.

The performance in question comes from a concert by the five of them at Massey Hall in Toronto, dated May 15, 1953, fortunately immortalized for us by Mingus himself with a portable tape recorder. The bassist, incidentally, later had to re-record the double bass parts, since those captured on the original tape were practically nonexistent, imperceptible.

The tracklist is a summation of be-bop classics, a concentrate of hot jazz that could almost be seen as the essence, the final result, the definitive account, the artistic testament of the entire jazz movement in question — one that took shape and developed mainly in the second half of the 1940s, starting with the famous sessions at Minton's in New York — all the more so in these early years of the 1950s, when the revolutionary style of Parker and company was beginning to lose its "vitality" in the face of new stylistic innovations: cool jazz, born as a reaction, on one hand, and hard bop, its natural evolution, on the other.

The tracks, as mentioned, are all classics of the genre, but that shouldn't lead us to mistake The Quintet for some kind of "sterile" be-bop anthology: their performance that night at Massey Hall seems wrapped in a kind of magic, charged with inspired playing and passion; listening to this recording, one can grasp, perhaps more than ever, or at least as rarely as on any other occasion, the very essence of be-bop — the warmth, the anger, the urge to break with convention that defined this way of playing jazz, which has been of fundamental importance (not only musically) to the evolution of jazz itself right up to the present day, and perhaps not only of jazz (would Chuck Berry have been the same without Charlie Parker?).

And so, in order: "Perdido", "Salt Peanuts", "All The Things You Are", "52nd Street Theme", "Wee (Allen's Alley)", "Hot House", "A Night In Tunisia". There's nothing left to do but drop the needle on this little gem and give ourselves over to it, well aware that we're in the presence of the most classic kind of landmark event: Parker and Gillespie prove once again that they know each other inside out, trading phrases, crossing lines, playing in unison; Mingus and Roach lay down a rhythm section that's genuinely stunning in its grit, precision and imagination; and Powell — no slouch himself — does the rest, delivering a near-perfect piano performance.

And to think it had all started in the worst possible way. At least that's how the legend goes. The concert in question had been carelessly scheduled to clash with the live television broadcast of the hotly anticipated heavyweight boxing title fight between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott, a circumstance that produced two unfortunate consequences: the venue, despite its sizeable capacity, was half empty (legend has it there were only seven hundred people in attendance), and the musicians themselves apparently would rather have been watching the boxing match than playing. On top of that, Parker had to play on a borrowed sax, having shown up in Canada without his own, and Powell was in precarious psychological and physical condition, having just been discharged from a clinic where he'd been held for a long stretch. It's also said that Parker, Gillespie and Powell himself were all completely drunk.

Clearly, as the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining.

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05/09/2005