PARKER, Charlie.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Two original acetate discs of Bird and Diz performing at Billy Berg's in LA, Unique original source for Bird and Diz's 17 December 1945 radio broadcast live from Billy Berg's in Hollywood, this pair of acetates made at the behest of club owner Billy Berg, and formerly in his possession. These historic fragments were captured one week into Gillespie and Parker's debut engagement in California, the trumpeter remarking that "the audience wasn't too hip. They didn't know what we were playing" (cited in Vail, p. 36). According to Parker chronicler Carl Woideck, "Gillespie was contracted to bring a quintet for an eight-week engagement but due to Parker's unreliability, Gillespie brought along an additional player [Milt Jackson]... Parker's state of mind and behaviour varied according to his ability to buy heroin, which was much more difficult to find in LA than in New York. A disturbing photo in Ross Russell's Bird Lives, taken at Billy Berg's around Christmas of 1945, shows an ill-looking Parker on stage with Gillespie". Acclaimed jazz historian Ted Gioia describes the arrival of the Gillespie/Parker band on the Coast as "the most visible, the most celebrated, and the most controversial event in the development of modern jazz in California. If one is seeking a milestone, a disjunction, a rupture with the past, Billy Berg's one-story stucco building on Vine Street, December 1945, is the time and place". This Los Angeles sojourn is memorialised in the unforgettable preface to Ross R

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