SWR Big Band & Magnus Lindgren & John Beasley - Bird Lives

Format: CD
Catalogue No.: ACT9934-2
Barcode: 0614427993427
Release Date: 19 Nov 2021
Genre: Jazz

 2020 wasn’t just Beethoven’s year, it was also the centenary of Charlie Parker’s birth. And if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, the world would have seen notices of all kinds of major concerts to celebrate the legacy of Bird (as Charlie Parker was known), one of the giants of jazz; one of the great musical innovators of the 20th Century; the coinventor of bebop; and probably the most important and influential saxophonist in jazz.
 The ‘Bird Lives’ music on this new album was to have been recorded and premiered by the SWR Big Band a couple of months before Charlie Parker’s 100th Anniversary, which was on August 29, 2020. The world premiere was scheduled at the iconic Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles - which seats 18,000 people - with co-arranger and conductor, John Beasley and his six-time GRAMMY Award-nominated MONK’estra Big Band with a string section during the week leading up to Bird’s centenary.
 Both of those dates were lost but the recording, a commission from the SWR Big Band, and with a stellar roster of guest artists, was able to develop at a much more measured pace. The extra time enabled the collaborative partnership of Swedish saxophonist Magnus Lindgren and American pianist John Beasley as co-arrangers to imagine further and dive deeper.
 Magnus Lindgren was voted Sweden’s Best Jazz Musician in 2001, he has gone on to win many important prizes internationally. Lindgren has been Artist In Residence with the SWR Big Band since 2018, a post which has been renewed for him for another three years.
 John Beasley’s work as composer-arranger and pianist extends beyond jazz into film and television, notably alongside Thomas Newman working on ‘1917’ and ‘Skyfall’ and ‘Spectre’. Beasley has nine GRAMMY nominations and won Best Arrangement for Charlie Parker’s ‘Donna Lee’ in 2021. He is Music Director for International Jazz Day global gala concerts hosted by the Herbie Hancock Jazz Institute. His 2016 ‘Jazz in the White House’ earned Beasley an Emmy nomination for Best Musical Direction.
 Based in Stuttgart, the SWR Big Band was founded in 1951 and, from its early days, has been known as the ‘Daimler of the big bands’ - a reference to the fact that Stuttgart is Motor City. The band has been ranked among the best jazz orchestras in the world for many years, with four GRAMMY nominations. It has attracted a roll call of stellar guests, from Miles Davis and Chet Baker in the early days to Dee Dee Bridgewater and Jacob Collier much more recently.
 ‘Bird Lives’ feels like a soundtrack for an imaginary film co-written by Lindgren and Beasley. The SWR Big Band performs with a string section of 10 players, but this recording is not a re-creation of Parker’s ‘Bird With Strings’ albums. “We wanted to introduce new generations to Bird’s music, but we also wanted Bird fans to hear his music in a fresh and new approach,” Beasley explains, noting that near the end of his life, Parker idolised Edgard Varese and was longing to bring more structure, depth and variety into the way he wrote for orchestra. “We didn't want to repeat what that has been done before, but rather create some-thing different,” adds Lindgren.
 Charlie Parker was still in the early stages of working with orchestras when he died at the tragically early age of 34. ‘Bird Lives’ may chart territory that Parker was not able to explore in his short lifetime. This recording has nothing of the ‘museum piece’ about it: this is music both of and for our time.

Tracklisting
Cherokee/Koko (Ray Noble, Charlie Parker) 8:44
Solos: Camille Bertault, vocal; Chris Potter, tenor sax; John
Beasley, piano
Summertime (George & Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward) 6:47
Solos: Tia Fuller, alto sax; Klaus-Peter Schöpfer, guitar
Scrapple from the Apple/Ah Leu Cha (Charlie Parker / arr.
by John Beasley) 5:48 Solo: Martin Auer, trumpet; Magnus Lindgren, tenor sax
I´ll Remember April (Gene Paul, Don Raye / arr. by John Beasley) 5:14
Solo: Joe Lovano, tenor sax
Confirmation (Charlie Parker) 8:15
Solos: Magnus Lindgren, flute; Axel Kühn, tenor sax; John
Beasley, Fender Rhodes; Marc Godfroid, trombone
Donna Lee (Charlie Parker) 6:59
Solos: Miguel Zenon, alto sax; Decebal Badila, bass; Magnus
Lindgren, flute; Andi Maile, tenor sax
Laura (David Raksin) 5:17
Solo: Charles McPherson, alto sax
Overture to Bird (Charlie Parker, Barry Harris, David Raksin, George Gershwin, Gene DePaul / arr. by Magnus Lindgren) 4:18 Solos: Klaus Graf, alto sax; Matthias Erlewein, alto sax; Magnus Lindgren, flute; John Beasley, piano; Marc Godfroid, trombone