Bird Calls

Description

Inspired by his love of the music of legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Bird Parker, Rudresh Mahanthappa pays homage to the late bebop innovator on 2015s Bird Calls. It was purportedly while breaking down Parkers performance on Donna Lee to help a student learn the infamously difficult song that saxophonist Mahanthappa came up with the concept of a different way to interpret Parkers music. Taken in small, easily digestible bites, Mahanthappa began to hear Parkers architectural bop motifs less as swinging, blues-based jazz and more as modern classical or even avant-garde music. Combining his own creative approach to jazz with Indian raga, funk, post-bop, and other eclectic stylistic elements, Mahanthappa wrote pieces loosely based on Parkers songs or parts of solos. For example, Both Hands reworks Parkers Dexterity into a roiling, machine-gun stream of sound, and Talin Is Thinking turns Parkers classic bluesy ballad Parkers Mood into a frenetic spiritual jazz workout. Furthermore, just as Parker was often backed by a quintet featuring a trumpeter like the great Dizzy Gillespie, Mahanthappa takes the same approach, bringing with him 2014 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Trumpet Competition third-place winner Adam OFarrill along with pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Fran?ois Moutin, and drummer Rudy Royston. Only 20 years old at the time of recording, OFarrill (the son of pianist Arturo OFarrill and the grandson of legendary Cuban percussionist, and Parker associate, Chico OFarrill) is an immensely gifted trumpeter with a robust, rounded tone and lithe improvisational style. Joining with the other members of Mahanthappas quintet, he brings an intensity and buoyant creativity to Bird Calls that effectively updates the classic Parker/Gillespie partnership. For his end, Mahanthappa, a brilliantly capable improviser blessed with a fluid, harmonically engaging approach to jazz, blazes his way through these songs, which are at once accessible yet boundlessly inventive. Ultimately, with Bird Calls, Mahanthappa has crafted an exuberant, expressive album thats as fresh and surprising as the music Parker originally recorded. ~ Matt Collar