Still, one is brought up short by the realization that a “typical” Parker phase turns out to be much the same phrase one had heard years before from, say, Ben Webster. The secret is, of course, that Parker inflects, accents, and pronounces that phrase so differently that one simply may not recognize it. – Martin Williams

Williams seems to have picked Ben Webster’s name out of a hat, but the connection might be deeper than he realized. Webster’s chromatic motives may have added a missing component to Bird’s conception in the early 1940s.

When I say chromatic motives, I’m talking about consecutive half steps in a melodic line. By that definition, Bird used few chromatic motives during his period with Jay McShann (1940-42), aside from connecting two diatonic notes together. This began to change in 1943, as evidenced by the Redcross recordings from February 15.

Bird became a tenor player when he joined the Earl Hines Orchestra in December 1942, and he’s playing tenor on these no-fi hotel room recordings. They add a great deal to our understanding of Bird’s development, while also revealing his remarkable grasp of the tenor saxophone tradition. He can sound, at will, exactly like Hawkins, Webster, or Lester.

Webster isn’t remembered as a modern jazz innovator, despite his involvement at Minton’s. This is likely due to bad timing. His melodic and rhythmic advances, different from Hawkins’, gathered steam in the late 1930s and culminated during his stay with Ellington, in the early 40s. This was good timing for Bird, who was at a crucial juncture in his development, but Webster’s contributions were quickly swept downstream by the bebop revolution. What’s more, Lester Young’s ascendance made Webster’s Hawkins-based tone sound outdated, even though his ideas were modern.

“Cotton Tail” (May 4, 1940, full track below) seems to have influenced Bird directly, not just Webster’s 64-bar solo but the saxophone soli, as well, which, as far as anyone can tell, was written by Webster himself. This alone qualifies him as a modernist pioneer.

A great unknown hovers over this thesis: when did Bird first hear “Cotton Tail?” As with all unknowns, we don’t know. He was probably aware of it when it first came out, but it’s likely the recording took on new importance when he began playing tenor. This would explain why Webster’s chromatic motives don’t enter Bird’s vocabulary until 1943.

We know Bird knew “Cotton Tail” (based on “I Got Rhythm”) because he quotes it in its entirety on the Redcross recordings. On “Yardin’ with Yard” (February 15, 1943), he plays it as a background riff behind Billy Eckstine’s (!) trumpet solo, starting at 3:11. He uses the main theme on the A sections and the saxophone soli at the bridge (full track below):

Until recently, I had been out to lunch concerning the “Cotton Tail” recording date, which I vaguely placed around 1943. As a result, I didn’t make much of the chromatic motive in Webster’s solo that became a mainstay of Bird’s vocabulary. In 1943, the zeitgeist was such that I thought Webster might have even picked it up from Bird, at Minton’s or Monroe’s. But the 1940 recording date changes everything. It was a one way street, Webster to Bird.

Here’s Webster’s chromatic motive from his “Cotton Tail” solo (0:58). Henceforth, this phrase will be referred to as Motive 1. (Recording slowed down for clarity).

Bird uses it for the first time (on record) in his solo on “Yardin’ with Yard,” at 1:14 (slowed down for clarity):

It should be noted that certain fundamental building blocks in young Bird’s vocabulary were actually quotes, “Honeysuckle Rose” being the prime example (Parkeology 005). I believe this is also the case here.

Webster’s Motive 1 appears throughout Bird’s career, in multiple keys. A brief survey of 1947 Dial recordings yields examples from “Bongo Bop” Take A (October 28), “Bird Feathers,” and “Klact-oveeseds-tene” Take B (November 4):

Motive 1 is equally common on Bird’s Savoy recordings from September 1948. Here are three examples, from “Barbados” Take 1, “Ah Leu Cha” Take 2 (September 18), and “Perhaps” Take 3 (September 24):

Motive 1 had the greatest impact on Bird, but Webster had many other unique chromatic ideas. His use of such motives developed gradually, but by the time he joined Ellington (1940) they could be found in most solos. Here’s a chronological pastiche, starting with “Congo Brava” (March 1940) and ending with “Main Stem” (June 1942):

One example does not an argument make, but I have a second. Webster plays a phrase in “Linger Awhile” (November 7, 1940) that appears in Bird’s solo on “Scrapple From the Apple” Take C, and in a great many other solos. I have transposed Bird’s phrase down a whole step so it matches Webster’s key:

Henceforth, this phrase will be referred to as Motive 2, but I’m leaving it aside for now.

Bird explicitly acknowledges Webster’s influence himself, in the rather surreal interview with John Fitch on WHDH radio, Boston (June 13, 1953). Armed with a list of inane questions, Fitch (aka McLellan), a goodhearted square, interrogates a very drowsy Bird about the origins of modern jazz.

John Fitch: Whom do you feel were the really important persons, besides yourself, who… started to experiment?

Charlie Parker: Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke… It was Charlie Christian… There was Bud Powell, Don Byas, Ben Webster, yours truly.

Note that Bird lists their names together, at the end. In my opinion, he’s acknowledging Webster’s influence on his own conception, as much as on the movement in general.

Those who doubt the Webster connection might argue that Bird was surrounded by influential saxophonists of every description, with Webster somewhere on the outskirts of this throng. What reason would Bird have had to single him out for study? There’s a simple answer to that: they were both born and raised in Kansas City.

Bird was eleven years younger than Webster, so it’s unlikely they ever met in their hometown (no such meetings have been documented). Webster was working locally with Andy Kirk in 1933, but in 1934 he joined Fletcher Henderson’s band and adopted New York City as his home. Bird would have been fourteen then, just getting serious about music.

Despite his departure, Webster was still Kansas City’s native son, and Bird would go on to work with many musicians who knew him and had played with him. This, I believe, drew his attention to Webster’s music, which might not have occurred otherwise.

We know Bird and Webster met in New York City, the only question is when. There are three contradictory anecdotes about their first meeting. The first, proposed date winter/spring 1942, takes place at Monroe’s Uptown House. Webster describes it in an interview with John Shaw:

There was this guy on the stand blowing this weird stuff. It was Charlie. I said to Clark [Monroe] “Is that cat playing what I think he’s playing?” I was feeling pretty fit, but I didn’t trust my ears.

The second anecdote takes place at Minton’s and comes from Billy Eckstine:

Charlie’s up on the stand and he’s wailing the tenor. Ben had never heard Bird, you know, and he says, “What the hell is that up there? Man, is that cat crazy?” And he goes up and snatches the horn out of Bird’s hands, saying, “That horn ain’t supposed to sound that fast.” But that night, Ben walked all over town telling everyone, “Man, I heard a guy—I swear he’s going to make everybody crazy on tenor.”

This couldn’t have happened any earlier than December 1942, when Bird switched to tenor.

In his own account, Webster says nothing about Bird playing tenor. There’s no mention of it in the Les Tomkins interview, either. Webster simply says:

New York was really the place to be, with guys around like Hawk, Don Byas, Chu, Pres, Herschel Evans, Ike Quebec. And I heard Charlie Parker for the first time and that was quite a thrill. This guy scared me to death!

In anecdote three, Jay McShann sows further doubt by claiming that Webster first heard Bird in February 1942, when his orchestra made its debut at the Savoy Ballroom:

When we got to New York, Ben Webster went down and told all the saxophone players down on 52nd Street, he said, “All you guys who think you can play saxophone, you’d better go up there and there’s this little saxophone player up there with Jay McShann’s band, a new band in town from Kansas City. All you guys better go up there and go to school.”

One simple fact clears away all this underbrush: Webster was on the road with the Duke Ellington Orchestra for all of 1941 and 1942, spending almost no time at all in New York City. (See the unimpeachable website The Duke—Where and When.) In 1942, the year these anecdotes purportedly take place, the Ellington band was only in NYC for one day, for a recording session!

Research concerning the Earl Hines Orchestra may not be as ironclad, but the band (with Bird on tenor) apparently rehearsed in New York City throughout December 1942, then played a Christmas Day gig, a New Year’s Eve gig, and a one-week stint at the Apollo Theater, January 15–21, 1943.

Meanwhile, the Ellington Orchestra was wending its way back to New York from Canada, finishing a three-day run at the Stanley Theater, in Utica, NY, on Thursday, January 14. They were off for the following three days, then reconvened at Nola Studios, NYC, on Sunday, January 17, where they rehearsed throughout the following week.

Nothing in either Webster biography suggests that Webster took some kind of hiatus from Ellington in 1942, returning to New York and encountering Bird at Monroe’s. It would seem, then, that he could only have intersected with Bird (on tenor) between Friday, January 15 and Thursday, January 21, 1943. By January 22, the Hines band was in Baltimore, and they spent the next three months on tour.

So Eckstine’s anecdote is more plausible than McShann’s. (McShann, more raconteur than historian, has provided three versions of how he first met Bird.) And it’s at least conceivable that Eckstine was confusing Minton’s with Monroe’s, in which case his recollection wouldn’t necessarily conflict with Webster’s. No point, though, in spinning my wheels here any further.

I don’t know whether or not I’ve drifted off topic, but there’s much more to say about Webster’s influence on Bird that will have to wait. Here’s one more Webster quote, though, that shows he had gotten to know Bird pretty well by 1945.

Bird played in Webster’s band on 52nd Street for a short time that year. Between sets, Bird would take his horn and sit in at other clubs, and if he was having fun he wasn’t overly concerned about making it back for Webster’s next set. Jay McShann dropped by one night to hear Bird, who was nowhere to be seen. He asked Webster if Bird was on the job and Webster replied:

“Yeah, he works for me, but he plays up the street.”

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Here’s “Cotton Tail,” and “Yardin’ with Yard” (Bird quotes Lester’s “Shoeshine Boy” solo at 0:43):