I was 21 when I first came across the record entitled Jazz at Massey Hall Live by “The Quintet”. On the sleeve of the LP, the liner notes said that this was the only time that these musicians (the be-bop virtuosos Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), Charlie Parker (alto sax), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), and Max Roach (drums)) had ever been recorded live together. I was anxious with anticipation when I first spun that LP and the record killed.
Jazz is a fight. Being on the bandstand is to fight to make yourself interesting and make the others interesting. This is the legacy for me of the Quintet’s performance– a one of a kind event that brands Toronto’s place in jazz history with a special and enigmatic quality of self defense in the face of the chaos of the universe.
Charlie Parker’s phrasing was inspired. Even though he had sold his brass saxophone for heroin and was playing a plastic one, each of his phrases stood alone as its own exhaustive statement. Dizzy Gillespie’s solos were in the pocket, but with his trademark calls to the wild, and sophisticated accidentals and glissandos. And as always, Dizzy surprised you with his endless vocabulary. Bud Powell’s voicings and frightfully sly rhythmic accompaniment (especially considering that he was just coming off of electric shock treatments at a sanitarium) on piano with Charles Mingus’s unmistakeable hard swinging bass sound and Max Roach’s solid, powerful, tasteful drumming made for a rhythm section that stamped this performance by jazz’s bepop titans a tour de force putting Toronto and Canada firmly on the obscure jazz map of my imagination.
Is jazz still fighting all these years later or has it become commercialized and neutered of its vitality by the mass market cannibalism of the music and communications industries? These musicians on that record innovated a whole new language with which we could understand modernity thorough individual agency and the diatonic instruments of classical music.
But does popular music need to be vital to matter anymore? Or does it simply need to shock or provide a balm? That night of the concert there was a prize fight between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott which everyone, including Dizzy, wanted to watch. Musicians and audience members wandered out to check on the fight at the bar across the street. But the concert of the Quintet Live at Massey Hall was far more significant than that forgettable fight (Marciano won by knockout in the first round). “The Quintet” christened jazz as the martial arts of music, founding of a new form of expression featuring discipline, humility, restraint and respect in its philosophy of combat.
The Quintet Live at Massey Hall celebrates its 56th anniversary on May 15th.
