Bird Lives (On Acetate Disc and Paper Tape)
A dive into The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings (Mosaic, 1990)
Here’s a little music secret for you: Deadheads didn’t invent taping a concert. Although they might want you to think otherwise. Indeed, bootlegging live music has a long history, one that’s covered by Clinton Heylin in his book Bootleg (Penguin, 1996). It wasn’t always a history of people bringing elaborate decks to shows and frowning at people who came to enjoy themselves (the gall!). It was one made of people who recorded live shows so they could learn parts or whole songs, or sometimes just wanted to listen again at home.
Long before Jerry Garcia strapped on an electric guitar, people hiding in the rafters at Broadway shows would slyly try and record the night’s performance to disc. Meanwhile another guy in New York named Bill Savory made copies of jazz broadcasts to aluminum and lacquer discs; these sat around for decades before Mosaic issued them in a limited-edition set back in 2018.
But perhaps the original taper was a guy named Dean Benedetti. Like the most devoted Deadhead, he followed his favourite musician around, taping as much as he could. That musician also happened to be one of the seminal figures in jazz: Charlie Parker.
Parker’s one of those names almost everybody knows about. An alto sax player who quickly exploded in popularity, Parker was one of the key figures in bebop. I’m not a musician, so I’ll leave the technical details to them, but his approach to soloing helped expand the language of jazz - within a few years it went from Louis Armstrong to Thelonious Monk. Parker lived hard and died young. The legend is that the coroner thought Parker was decades older than he was. His fans took to writing Bird Lives on walls and sidewalks. And Charles Mingus wrote a tune called “If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger, There’d Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats.” They were that kind of people.
But even among the hardcore, Benedetti stands out. While other fans took to playing a sax, he would follow Parker to clubs with a mobile recording unit in tow. At first he’d record on paper tape, later on acetate discs. And he’d turn the thing on when his hero started to play, intent on only capturing the brief moments when Parker would burst out of the song and into a solo.
For a couple weeks starting in March 1947, Benedetti was on hand to capture his hero. He’d record parts of each night’s solos and then ignore the rest. The discs piled up; by July 1948 there were some seven hours of recordings, often no more than a minute long. Soon after, Benedetti moved to California where he died about a decade later. His tapes were rumoured to exist for years before Mosaic bought the rights and in 1990, they put out a seven-CD set of them, their first unlimited edition box.
The set is massive and it’s complex. There are 270 tracks, some as little as ten seconds long. Others are marred by tape damage or muffled sound. One is reminded of reading a translation of Sappho: some phrases have made it down to us, but the context is gone and we’re left making educated guesses. And to think: some of these musicians were still alive when this set came out.
But what emerges from these tapes is some wonderful playing. Disc One has some takes from a show on March 7, 1947 where even the low fidelity and muffled drum booms can’t hide Parker’s tone and the call and response playing between him and trumpet player Howard McGhee. The interplay between the two of them on “Byas A Drink” shows a group in sync, each of them responding to the other’s solos. Meanwhile “Bean Soup” is a good example of Parker stretching out, taking quick little runs without running over the rest of the band. Towards the end of disc one, there’s a two-minute excerpt from “Moose the Mooch” where you can hear this band clicking; it’s too bad Benedetti faded out when Parker stepped back from the spotlight.
As the March 1947 takes pile up, one is left wondering: is this what Parker sounded like on a regular basis? These were not really special gigs for him, certainly not like the Toronto show recorded as Jazz At Massey Hall (Candid/Original Jazz Classics, 1956/2002) that featured an all-star lineup. These are closer in line to surviving air checks, like the At Storyville record Blue Note put out back in the 80s. It’s hard to really get a clear picture, but from the surviving elements, the group of Parker, McGhee, bassist Addison Farmer, drummer Roy Porter, and pianist Hampton Hawes sounds like a well-oiled machine, especially compared to the ad hoc groups from many of the surviving air checks.
By disc five, the scene moves ahead a year to March 1948. Parker’s band has shifted to a who’s who of jazz: Max Roach, Duke Jordan, Tommy Potter, and a young hotshot named Miles Davis. Instantly one can hear the difference: the tempos are faster, with Roach pushing the group along, and Davis is burning it up on the bandstand, trying to keep pace with Parker’s frantic solos. This disc itself is a treat, with several lengthy takes that offer a great snapshot of this lineup in full flight: the twisting lines of “Dizzy Atmosphere,” the way Davis’s sharp tone sounds there a full decade before his commercial breakthrough, the way Parker’s horn is a counter to the singer on “All the Things You Are.” One wishes, perhaps, for better sound. But even through the muffles and background chatter, this band’s skill shines through.
The July 1948 gigs on the last two discs are a blurrier picture. Roach’s drums dominate the roomy, atmospheric sound; it also pushes Potter’s bass sound up in front. A few lengthy songs show this band chemistry, especially on the slower numbers; the more fragmentary bursts leave you wanting more. A nice treat shows up at the end: Thelonious Monk sits in for “Well You Needn’t” and Parker fits right in.
As noted above, Mosaic Records issued this as their first unlimited set back in 1990. As opposed to their other, limited edition sets, this one wasn’t bound by a set number of copies or a period of time. However, it was bound by sales - a few months ago, the set vanished from their website. I emailed the label to ask what happened and was told that it’s become too expensive to repress thanks to dwindling sales. It’s kind of a bummer, although it’s also not expected.
Although there are dozens of archival Parker concerts for sale, it can be hard to find one that’s fun to listen to. Blue Note issued one a few years back that I’ve heard described as unlistenable; gray market releases are a risky gamble at best. The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings is admittedly a tough one to work through thanks to less than stellar fidelity and its fragmentary nature. But that also works in its favour: a passion project if there ever was one, it’s as much a piece of bootleg history as it is a piece of Parker’s. It can be maddening to sort through and even now some scraps are impossible to identify. But like Sappho’s poetry, the little bits we do have are tantalizing and show a heck of a talent at work. Maybe with some luck, it’ll be the first record issued on Mosaic’s Bandcamp.
(Picture of Parker via Google Images, which tells me it’s in the public domain)