http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Live-at-Rockland-Palace/dp/B001IQDAZ2Bird Flight WKCR Radio NYC via internet.
This morning they are playing a live recording of Bird with Strings, some of the best Bird I've heard.
Live at Rockland palace
teddy blum violinist coordinator
other strings unknown
Mundell Lowe guitar
Teddy Kotick
Walter Bishop Jr
Max Roach
Recorded 9/26/1950
One of the few times I've heard Bird completely healthy, well rested, eager to play, optimistic, and the notes just flowing out effortlessly toward the end of his career at the peak of his powers. Aggressively creative, the kind of playing you hear short glimpses of in earlier work, but always leave me longing for more. On this they happen a few times per track, and you can tell that he is trying to push it, and has the horsepower to pull it off this time.
In particular are his turnarounds, the two bars leading into a new verse. Bird was the ultimate master of turnarounds. This is where the harmonic innovations of bop happened. Eventually they wrote custom tunes that were made entirely of turnarounds (Confirmation) that enabled twisting and altering of conventional pop song harmonies into what became hard core bebop and made legends out of Bird, Monk, Dizzy and Bud.
In this, Bird frequently plays one bar of 64ths in one key and plays the same exact phrase or even more complex in the alternate dominant chord on the next bar. No matter how fast or complex, he shifts it down a half step and gracefully lands on the root of the new verse every time. This is really hard. Even if you practice it ahead of time, there are few musicians in history that could play this as gracefully, musically and convincingly genuine as Bird. As a bop fan this is a revelation. In some other live recordings he shifts up a half tone, but that is more tonal relativism than inspired from above ("Jazz" is 90% relativism nowadays, Bird did it first.) Some of the turnarounds on these recordings are the best ever recorded in bebop.
It is all Bird with Strings, with the usual tunes and arrangements of that band, but it's the solos that are gems here.
In giving the credits Phil Schaap mentioned that these recordings were previously known as "unknown masters."
