Words for Charlie Parker’s Flights of Fancy

from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording

At the end of last March, this site discussed the reissue of the debut album of vocalist Roseanna Vitro, entitled Listen Here. Exactly one month ago, Vitro’s label, Skyline Records, released her latest (fifteenth) album, Sing a Song of Bird. The title refers to taking the recordings of saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker and selecting tracks from that discography for vocal performance. While Vitro organized the contents of this album, she did not sing on all the tracks. Instead, she shared these arrangements with three bebop jazz legends, Bob Dorough, Sheila Jordan, and Marion Cowings.

The tracks were recorded over the course of two sessions. At the first session Vitro was joined by Dorough and Jordan, while Cowings partnered with her during the second session. Accompaniment was provided by a quartet at both sessions but with different performers. The first session included Mark Gross on alto saxophone (Parker’s instrument) with a rhythm section of Jason Teborek on piano, Dean Johnson on bass, and Bill Goodwin on drums. Johnson is the only musician to play also in the second session. He was joined by saxophonist Gary Bartz with Alan Broadbent on piano and Alvester Garnett on drums. It is also worth noting that Dorough was 94 and Jordan was 89 when they recorded their tracks, and Dorough subsequently died shortly after his session with Vitro on April 23, 2018.

There is no doubt that this was an honorable undertaking. Nevertheless, some of the vocal arrangements work better than others; and the same can be said of the saxophone solo work. The fact is that Parker’s contemporaries tended to capture the spirit of his music better than the others. Turning improvised jazz into vocals with newly invented lyrics has been around for quite some time; and Dorough created a vocal version of “Yardbird Suite” with his own lyrics in 1956, not long after Parker’s death. Personally, I would prefer to spend my time with my many archival recordings of Parker, allowing me to focus on the music without any words getting in the way.