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‘Groovin’ High’
Jumaane Smith, trumpeter, vocalist and composer
Written by Dizzy Gillespie, “Groovin’ High” is widely regarded as one of the defining masterpieces of the bebop era. This recording is especially meaningful to me because it features a 19-year-old Miles Davis, whose centennial we celebrate this year and with whom I also share a birthday.
Growing up, this was one of the very first bebop tunes I learned, and to this day I remain captivated by its rare ability to feel both effortlessly accessible and astonishingly sophisticated at the same time. There is a playful elegance and hidden complexity within the melody that continues to reveal itself every time I hear it. Charlie Parker’s solo is pure genius — innovative, fearless and deeply expressive. To me, this performance embodies jazz evolving in real time, filled with brilliance, spontaneity and remarkable chemistry between these legendary artists.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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‘Yardbird Suite’
Naomi Extra, poet, writer and cartoonist
Here’s the scene. It’s upstate New York in the mid-1990s. A preteen Black girl with chicken legs and a slightly uneven Afro is singing and sashaying to the melody of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s “Yardbird Suite.” As a kid, I think I was drawn to the tune’s deceptively simple and danceable melody. “Yardbird Suite,” which was first recorded in 1946, has a playful lyricism that makes you want in on whatever the band is up to. In hindsight, it’s no wonder I felt the urge to sing along; Bird co-wrote lyrics to “Yardbird Suite” (also known as “What Price Love”) that were later sung by the vocalists Carmen McRae (who at the time went by the name Carmen Clarke) and Earl Coleman. Although Bird has come to be singularly known as one of the main innovators of the bebop sound, he cut his teeth in big bands of the 1930s and early ’40s. When I listen to “Yardbird Suite” I can hear Bird’s musical history — the rhythmic bounce that came from playing in swing bands alongside the jagged and energetic air of early bebop. It’s a listener’s delight.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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‘Just Friends’
Tania Feghali, filmmaker and sound curator
This song reminds me of when — and why — I fell in love with jazz. As a teenager in Milan, jazz offered both shelter and a vision of how life might sound: Paris and New York, walking knowing why, Bird’s saxophone soaring. A decade later, late one summer night, I found myself in front of his house. In his cinematic arrangement of “Just Friends,” Bird carries far more than the suggestion of “just friends.” He transforms what was once written as a path backward into an opening. To me, the song contains the unnamed stages before love fully declares itself, a kind of prelude to love: the moment in which the possibility of it emerges. That trembling sensation — the unknown preceding an epiphany — the hesitance, the possible expansion. Bird adored this recording, considered experimental then as it pushed bebop into uncharted waters with strings. Ray Brown’s bass: the anchor from which Bird levitates. I wonder how it would sound with Max Roach on drums. Something in the recording remains suspended, difficult to fully grasp. Maybe that’s what I love most about it. “Just Friends” feels to me as though it encompasses all of Bird’s love songs, distilled into something subtler — the withheld sound of the possible itself.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
