Parkeology 004: Turnaround Is Fair Play

Bird used to turn the rhythm section around every night. He would play in such a way that it made the rhythm section sound like it was on 1 and 3, instead of 2 and 4. Max would scream at Duke [Jordan] not to try to follow Bird. Eventually, Bird would come back to where the rhythm section was, right on time. – Miles Davis

How much did Bird’s conception evolve throughout his career? That depends on how you measure it.

All the foundations were in place on his earliest recordings (1940), so you could say he spent the following fifteen years building from there. Bird says as much in the 1954 Paul Desmond interview: “That’s my first conception, that’s the way I thought it should go, and I still do.” Harmonically, a solo from 1945 and a solo from 1954 would be pretty much identical.

Rhythm is another matter. Bird was incarcerated at Camarillo State Hospital from August ‘46 through January ‘47, and a new rhythmic element enters his conception when he emerges. When you hear it, you can be sure the recording was made after 1946.    

This rhythmic element is what Miles is describing above. The idea is simple enough: you shift your phrase early by one beat. But that’s easier said than done, and you’re going out on a limb when you toy with the time. Bird’s contemporaries may have found this innovation too risky to imitate. Then again, it’s subtle, and Bird rarely used it in the studio, so it might have gone largely unnoticed. 

This Ornithology excerpt is from the Carnegie Hall concert, Christmas Eve 1949. In the last eight bars of his first chorus, Bird shifts his phrase one beat early, starting on the and-of-3 instead of the and-of-4, where it would normally occur.

Here’s Ornithology from Bird at St. Nick’s, February 18th, 1950. As above, the shift happens in the last eight bars of his first chorus.

Here’s another Ornithology excerpt that shows just how fleeting this effect can be, recorded at the Lowe’s Valencia Theater on March 25th, 1952. Bird makes the shift at the top of his second chorus.

This innovation first appears in the studio on Bird’s “homecoming” session on May 8th, 1947, which marked his return to New York. This is the strangely bedeviled Savoy date that produced Donna Lee. The fourth and final tune that day was Buzzy, a simple riff blues that required five vexing takes. Bird makes the shift at the top of his second chorus.

Bird uses it on a Mercury (Verve) date from May 5th, 1949. This example comes from the most obscure Bird blues of all time, which has no proper name and was issued sporadically at best. At this point, the accepted title is Tune Y (Rare). The shift happens at the beginning of Bird’s first chorus, in this case mid-phrase.

When did Bird use this shift for the first time? The Dean Benedetti recordings from the Hi-De-Ho club (March ‘47) are the obvious place to look. Lo and behold, it can be found on Ornithology #135, matching the Christmas Eve excerpt above.

There’s a less successful attempt in the same spot on Ornithology #155.     

But we can trace it back even further. On February 1st, 1947, just days after his release from Camarillo (exact date unknown), Bird performed at a party in his honor. The host, Chuck Kopley, recorded the proceedings on a portable disk-cutting machine. These were just becoming available to the public, and Dean Benedetti, who was at the party, would soon acquire his own (from Sears Roebuck!).

Bird plays Cherokee at a forgiving tempo, sounding rusty and relaxed. It’s possible he was picking up his horn for the first time, yet he immediately employs the shift in bar 23.

What’s the upshot of all this? I contend that Bird emerged from Camarillo determined to take syncopation to a deeper level. The rhythmic shift wasn’t an end in itself, but a byproduct of the new way he was feeling the time, syncopation on syncopation. He made this evolutionary leap while incarcerated, away from his instrument, and he worked it out on the bandstand at the Hi-De-Ho club. His new manifesto was Relaxin’ At Camarillo. (Dial 2/26/47)

Howard McGee described the rehearsal for that date: 

Bird wrote these twelve bars, and, man, those twelve bars hung up the session. Nobody could play it. We started out trying to play it, but the syncopation comes off the beat. It’s syncopated so differently, and so different than anything we had heard. Nobody could play it but Bird.

Next Time: Don’t Buy Sugar

P.S. At least one person took this rhythmic shift to heart: Ornette! In the ninth bar of his first chorus on Jayne (1958), he shifts his phrase over and stays there for the next eight bars!