Rinse, Repeat

About to leave to start another stretch on the Bateaux. The BeeB was fun last night.

There have been some great Bird Flights with Phil Schaap on WKCR this week:

He just wrapped up the entire catalog of recordings made by Charlie Parker with Max Roach on drums (as a memorial for Max's passing last August) a couple of weeks ago and now is back in time - back to 1946 and '47 in Los Angeles.

I don't have time to lay it all out here, but Bird was 26 years old, a genius, a junkie and having NO idea what kind of shit he was about to get into on a West Coast trip for a weeklong gig.

Everyone else made the flight back to New York, but not Bird. He disappeared.

Honestly, I am sorry I started this because there is SO much to this story and I have no time now to get further into it.

Suffice it to say that Bird was sick - VERY sick - and wound up getting in an altercation and was sentenced to 6 months in Camarillo State Mental Hospital. There is a picture of him from that time and he looks like absolute crap. It is scary.

But after six months, he got out in Feb. of '47 and was healthy, strong, and playing his ass off (of course).

It is these recordings - done just weeks after he got out of Camarillo, and that Phil played today - that restore some kind of hope in mankind after the desolation of the "Lover Man" recording done just before he got committed, 6 months prior.

And then a few months later in '47 he would be at the Royal Roost in NY with maybe his greatest quintet recordings. and you can hear the results on the amazing "Complete Royal Roost Recordings".