Search - Charlie Parker :: Bird

What we have here is either a jazz purist's worst techno-heresy or a sublime pipedream of progress. When life-long jazz aficionado Clint Eastwood made his 1988 Charlie Parker biopic Bird, he faced a more daunting challenge than casting and dramatic nuance: who would play Bird's epochal sax solos? Eastwood ultimately decided that only Bird could play Bird, and so gave his longtime musical director Lennie Niehaus the task of digitally extracting Parker's four-decade-old solos from often primitive sources, then sonically upgrading them and recasting them anew within ensembles consisting of a mix of contemporary players and veteran Parker sidemen. Where the results are masked by a little club ambience, as in "Lester Leaps In," "Cool Blues," and "Ornithology," they can be remarkably convincing--even "Now's the Time" rendered within the naked confines of a small group sounds convincing. Only Niehaus's efforts to conjure up Bird's own unrealized dreams by wrapping large string sections around the standards "Laura" and "April in Paris" clearly belie the wizard behind the curtain. Perhaps not the best introduction to the Parker legend, but a compelling "what if?" nonetheless. --Jerry McCulley