The Quintet
Jazz at Massey Hall, Volume 1
Debut/OJC 5044

The Amazing Bud Powell
Jazz at Massey Hall, Volume 2
Debut/OJC 111

In 1953 the jazz genre called Be Bop, Bop, Re Bop, or Modern Jazz had fully matured and was settling in as the established mainstream rather than the cutting edge movement it had been in the early 1940s. Jazz as a style collective had begun to further fray at the ends and Be Bop gave way to such subtypes as "Cool," "Hard Bop," "Third Stream," and "Soul Jazz," all considered reactions to Be Bop's frenetic, nervous nature. However, on May 15, 1953, in Toronto's Massey hall, Be Bop in all of its brilliant invention was alive, well, and in charge. Sponsored by the New Jazz Society of Toronto, the program brought together perhaps THE five principal architects of Be Bop- Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach.

The story surrounding these recordings is an improvisation worthy of the improvisers. According to Gene Santoro in his recently published biography of Charles Mingus, Myself When I Am Real (Oxford University Press, New York, 2000), the New Jazz Society of Toronto had originally tried to contact Bud Powell to headline a gala concert but were unable to locate him. This was because Powell was residing in New York's Bellevue Hospital on one of his numerous stays for mental illness. Powell had every bit the cult following Parker had and the Society was most interested in having him perform. The Society next tried to find Dizzy Gillespie with no luck and finally was able to contact Charles Mingus, who ultimately contacted Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Powell's manager, Oscar Goodstein. The concert was set up.

On the day of the concert, things began to go wrong. It was discovered that the New Jazz Society of Toronto had provided only five airline tickets for travel to the show and the quintet had grown to a septet that included Mingus' wife Celia and Oscar Goodstein into whose authority Bud Powell was to be released from Bellevue. Gillespie and Parker decided to remain in New York to catch a later flight. When the two leaders arrived at Massey hall, they discovered a partially filled house that bolstered the fact that The Society had not sold enough tickets to pay the musicians after the show. Instead, the Society offered the musicians tapes The Society made of the concert.

Armed with only the tapes of the concert as capital, Charlie Parker approached Norman Granz, whose label, Verve, had Parker under contract and offer the tapes to him for $100,000.00. Granz declined. The Quintet, as they have come to be known, decided to release the concert on the recently formed Debut Records. Charles Mingus and Max Roach founded Debut Records as a means for jazz musicians (namely Mingus) to have more creative control over recording and distribution. The Toronto concert put Debut on the map and established a positive cash flow for the label.

The best that can be said for the actual recording of the concert is that it was a mess, both in sound and release policy. The show was recorded from the Massey Hall public address system, which was substandard, even by early '50s standards. This resulted in Mingus' bass being lost in the ground noise, particularly the very low notes. To compensate, Mingus overdubbed his bass parts for all of the quintet pieces and a couple of the trio pieces at Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studios. Charlie Parker was credited on the album sleeves as "Charlie Chan," a clever juxtaposition of Parker's name with his wife's name, to avoid contractual difficulties with Verve. Once assembled, the concert was released on three 10-inch LPs.

The release history of concert is as dry and complicated as an Old Testament lineage detail. So, cutting to the chase, the concert currently exists on two separate compact discs, one featuring the quintet and one featuring the trio of Powell, Mingus, and Roach, and ultimately others. The Quintet-Jazz at Massey Hall, Volume 1, finds The Quintet cruising through six Be Bop standards. These musicians, while very familiar with one another, most likely had never recorded as a quintet before, much less practiced together for this concert. The high musical quality of the show illustrates the greatness of Jazz and the Jazz Musician. A certain collective unconscious existed between these men enabling them to just stand and deliver this Art. Ellington's "Perdido," Denzil Best's "Wee," Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" and "Night in Tunisia," Tad Dameron's "Hot House," and the ground-zero "All the Things You Are," could very well fill out a "best of" Be Bop list. The Massey Hall Quintet performances are that much more essential because they would be the last time Parker and Gillespie would perform together.