September 18, 1948: Constellation and I Got Rhythm

And we come to the end of the miraculous September 18, 1948 session of the Charlie Parker All-Stars with the fourth of the songs they recorded for a total of 28 unbelievable minutes of music (that's counting every alternate take): "Constellation."

All in all, it's 4 Parker originals recorded in this order:

1. Barbados (3 full takes)

2. Ah-Leu-Cha (1 take)

3. Constellation (3 full takes)

4. Parker's Mood (2 full takes)

(Plus a few aborted or incomplete takes).

The personnel, as in the other 3 songs (except for Parker's Mood, where Miles Davis does not play), is:

Charlie Parker (as); Miles Davis (tpt); John Lewis (p); Dillon "Curley" Russell (b); Max Roach (d)

Here's "Constellation":

Interestingly, 2 out of the 4 songs in the session share the same source material: "I Got Rhythm" by George Gershwin (see previous entries for more information): "Ah-Leu-Cha" and "Constellation" are all 'reworkings' or 'contrafacts' (a song based on a previous song) of that song. In fact, these are only 2 instances out of a staggering minimum of 11 songs which Parker derives from the Gershwin original, others being "Anthropology" (aka "Thrivin' from a Riff"), "Chasin' the Bird," "Celerity," "Dexterity, "Moose the Mooche," "Steeplechase," "Red Cross," "An Oscar for Treadwell" and "Passport".

As explained in "The Gershwin Initiative":

George and Ira wrote many hits, but this song stands apart from the rest for its influence on jazz history and musicians in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and beyond. “I Got Rhythm” has become a part of a larger tradition of music making in jazz and influenced notions of musical creativity and innovation.

If you look at a list of "Jazz Contrafacts", that is, jazz songs based on other songs, you'll find that "I Got Rhythm" is the most common source song with well over 30 jazz songs based on it: Sydney Bechet, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis or Ornette Coleman or  are just a few of the jazzmen that write tunes based on the Gershwin song.

Since this is a blog about Charlie Parker, I don't want to do an entry based on all the different reinterpretations of "I Got Rhythm" but I'll leave you with this excellent NPR tribute to the song and its transformations and with one particular example, the incredible "Rhythm-A-Ning" by Thelonious Monk: