Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker: Live Revisited

The first six tracks on this album, which were recorded at New York City's Town Hall on June 22, 1945, are amongst the most exciting in the jazz compendium. Not only because of their intrinsic artistic merit but also because they mark one of the first, if not the first, occasion the vanguard of the bop revolution emerged from the basements of 52nd Street, equipped with a fully formed manifestation of the new music, on to a stage bigger than a postage stamp and in front of an audience which included, along with hardcore devotees, a sprinkling of adventurous listeners from the world of establishment-approved jazz.

By June 1945, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Don Byas (on the first track), Al Haig, Curley Russell, Max Roach (on the first four tracks) and Big Sid Catlett (on the fifth and sixth) had been refining their aesthetic at the Three Deuces in 52nd Street for around six months, playing the Gillespie-penned soon-to-be-standards "Bebop," "A Night In Tunisia," "Groovin' High" and "Salt Peanuts" plus Tadd Dameron's "Hot House" and Thelonious Monk's "Fifty Second Street Theme." The group had already recorded some of these tunes and the buzz around bop was building fast. The excitement—onstage and in the auditorium—is palpably intense and it comes through in full effect thanks to Ezz-thetics' immaculate, richly resonant sound-restoration and mastering.

In 2023, conventional wisdom holds that bop was not so much a revolution as an evolution, a development of swing. Certainly, one can trace a thread running between the musics. But think of these Town Hall tracks alongside contemporaneous small-group recordings made by Benny Goodman. The rhythmic, harmonic and attitudinal differences are so deep as to be practically irreconcilable. Goodman's groups make one feel good. Parker and Gillespie's group makes one feel good but also sets one on fire. It is from another planet. It will shave your ass.

The remaining tracks on Live Revisited catch Parker and Gillespie fronting quintets at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and Birdland in 1951. John Lewis and Bud Powell are the pianists, Al McKibbon and Tommy Potter the bassists, and Joe Harris and Roy Haynes the drummers. The music is edge of your seat thrilling—check the Carnegie Hall "Koko" on the YouTube below—and still sounds as box fresh as it did in 1945. But there is something extra special about the Town Hall tracks. That night, bop began to go overground. And for just over half an hour, the listener is part of the moment.

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