Dear Charlie Parker,
You are turning 100 today. Your first century!
Thank you!
Charlie Parker's Reboppers, November, 26, 1945, WOR Studios, New York.
Charlie Parker (alto sax); "Dizzy" Gillespie (trumpet); Sadik Hakim or Dizzy Gillespie (p); Dillon "Curley" Russell (bass); Max Roach (drums)
There is still controversy on who plays piano and who plays trumpet. The general consensus is that Dizzy plays piano AND trumpet here. But some people contest it and say it's Miles Davis on Trumpet and either Sadik or Dizzy on Piano. I don't pretend to know (or actually care: this is the stuff of legends).
Let it be said, however, that Miles himself said that it's Dizzy who plays trumpet here. And Dizzy agrees. So who knows why the controversy.
You can read it all about the song here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ko-Ko
http://www.plosin.com/milesahead/BirdSessions.aspx?s=451126
http://www.themusicofmiles.com/articles/the-ko-ko-session/session.php
These are two bad pictures I took 10 years ago on a disposable camera (as a premonition or augur on my way to Rochester, the very home of Kodak), of Parker's grave. But he is not actually there as he is not really dead, that much we know, for remember:
BIRD LIVES!
