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Original private test pressings from Bird's brief visit to his home town in the autumn of 1943, on which occasion he put down an unforgettable version of Ray Noble's "Cherokee", a performance of a little over three minutes but which delivers a palpable frisson and has lost none of its ability to exhilarate, surprise and delight - it is like hearing the penumbral emergence of modern jazz. "Cherokee" was Parker's "favourite practice warhorse" (ANB), the tune that he worried away at and on which he confessed he "came alive" during a jam session with guitarist Biddy Fleet at Dan Wall's Chili House in Harlem at an unspecified time in the late '30s/early '40s (cited in Gitler, p. 20). In particular, it was the fiendish B-section (bridge) of "Cherokee" that threw a lot of players - they simply wouldn't solo over it - but which Bird mastered and stamped with his own thrilling imprimatur. Bassist and fellow McShann band member Gene Ramey recounts that, "I am sure that at that time nobody else in the band could play, for example, even the channel [bridge] to Cherokee" (cited in Reisner, p. 188). But, he goes on, "when I look back, it seems to me that Bird was at that time so advanced in jazz that I do not think we realized to what a degree his ideas had become perfected". Ross Russell remarks that "He was using the upper intervals [of the chords], ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, skimming along on the very tops of the chords. Nobody knew where he was getting the new line. It had never been done in jazz before. He felt he had stumbled onto something. Hawkins, Lester Young, none of those players had ever used a similar line. It was his". The song's chord sequence would become the basis for "Koko", one of Parker's abiding compositions. An earlier private recording exists, made at Clarke Monroe's Uptown House in New York in early 1942, with members of Jay McShann's band. Parker scholar Carl Woideck calls the two versions "very similar" but perhaps it is the present recording's sharper acoustic, pared down trio format, the fact that Bird is more playful, toying with the seemingly intractable middle section, that makes this hometown version shine. It is a reading of enormous humanity and warmth; the woodshedding in the Ozarks, the interminable Klose exercises, the hours and hours of practice, have all paid off. Quite simply, he flies. The discs comprise: Cherokee My Heart Tells Me I Found a New Baby Body and Soul Personnel: Charlie Parker, Efferge Ware (guitar), Edward "Little Phil" Phillips (drums); Parker aficionado Peter Losin remarks that "the guitarist may be Leonard "Lucky" Enois". Typed on the label "Cherokee, Charlie Parker, Effergee [sic], Phil, (2)". Provenance: from the celebrated collection of Norman Saks. Ira Gitler, Jazz Master of the Forties, 1974; plosin website; Robert Reisner, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, 1962; Ross Russell, Bird Lives!, 1980; Ken Vail, Charlie Parker & Jazz Club Memorabilia: The Norman R. Saks Collection, 41 (illustrating labelled disc); Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life, 2001. 2 10-inch acetate discs, original label to one side only ("A Victor Damon Recording"), two sides with no label but reading Audiodisc, of these one faintly inscribed in crayon pencil "From new", 3 additional drive pin holes visible on flip sides, new plain paper sleeves. Some surface cracks and abrasions, slight chipping to edges, label palely stained and torn but largely whole and perfectly legible, a few old tapes to flip sides, overall remaining in good condition.
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