Back on August 21, 2016 (when Barack Obama was still happily President of the USA) one so-called Wile E. Coyote reviewed a two-CD collection of some 51 tunes by the noted UK alto (and other) saxophone artist Freddy Gardner (1910–1950).

Mr. Coyote wrote : “Freddy Gardner had been the consummate alto saxophonist in England during the dance band years … Granted, those interested in alto saxophone recordings expecting something similar to Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker will be disappointed, as Gardner plays more in a ‘concert’ style.” He was “nonetheless a virtuoso on his instrument.”

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I grew up in a half-old-school Canadian world of the late 1950s and early 1960s where Freddy Gardner and not Charlie Parker was the exemplary alto saxophone artist. It was not until my late 20s and even 30s, I think now (in my late 70s), that I finally seriously discovered the altogether awesome brilliance of Charlie Parker — on recordings and in Omnibook transcriptions.

All too many years after this discovery, I certainly know that, whatever else, Freddy Gardner was not Charlie Parker’s successor (he was 10 years older, for one thing, and died about five years before) or even a serious precursor. There are nonetheless a few intriguing parallels. (Once you set aside the disparate hard facts that Freddy Gardner was born in London, England in 1910 and Charlie Parker in Kansas City, Kansas in 1920.)

To start with, both men were recognized more or less early in their careers as the leading alto saxophone players in their respective musical worlds. Gardner was (again) “the consummate alto saxophonist in England during the dance band years” (1930–1950 in Gardner’s particular case), with special reference to London. Parker was the same in the USA, with special reference to New York City (where he was happiest and would finally die), c. 1940–1955.

Tragically early deaths in their 30s is something else that Freddy Gardner and Charlie Parker shared. Parker died in his mid 30s, Gardner when he was 39.

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There is one clear enough difference on the shared early deaths. In his Boss Tom Pendergast’s Kansas City youth (in “The Paris of the Plains”), Charlie Parker was addicted to hard drugs by his mid teens. (On the plus side this may be part of what fueled the legendary “11-15 hour” daily practice regime of his later teens, that forged his astounding instrumental technique?)

By his early 20s the “Bird” who was especially fond of chicken had acquired other voracious appetites. His logical enough death at 34 had a lot to do with the abuse he subjected his body to. (The attending physician when Parker died at the apartment of the Rotshchild heiress and New York jazz patroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter — honoured by Horace Silver’s “Nica’s Dream,” among more than a few other tunes — is said to have estimated his age as early 60s!)

Freddy Gardner seems more of a gifted boy from even comparatively prosperous branches of the London working class (or “lower middle class”?) between the two world wars. (Though Bird owed a parallel debt to his “well situated” head-nurse mother in Kansas City.) Gardner also seems to have married only once early on and become a family man.

The unforgettable Freddy Gardner apparently suffered an altogether unexpected and unexplained but fatal stroke just before he turned 40, while fixing his son’s bicycle. The photographic images we can now see online (but not when I first listened to Freddy Gardner on one of my father’s LPs) similarly suggest an upwardly mobile English working guy on the make, who is brilliant at his job and (maybe not so?) quietly knows it.

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The vinyl LP of my father’s that I first listened to some classic recordings of the English master of the alto saxophone on was called “Freddy Gardner The Unforgettable” (with a photo of mid 20th century Trafalgar Square in London on the album cover : as in illustration at beginning above).

My father alas died long ago and this particular record seems to have vanished from the collection of his LPs I still have. (I blame my brother the piano player, also alas now deceased.) Happily enough in the Age of the Internet, however, you can still buy a used copy of “Freddy Gardner — The Unforgettable Capitol Records LP” on amazon.com, for $35 US.

If the $35 seems a bit stiff, in the Age of the Internet six of the eight tunes on “Freddy Gardner — The Unforgettable” have also been thoughtfully placed on YouTube by Graham Miles, as “SIX CLASSIC FREDDY GARDNER SOLOS — Peter Yorke and his Concert Orchestra.”

Mr. Miles begins his helpful written notes with : “In the last two years of his life, England’s unforgettable genius of the saxophone Freddy Gardner (1910-1950), recorded six classic solos with Peter Yorke and his Concert Orchestra … The first session was on 29th April, 1948 … with the final recording on 30 January, 1950.”

“Freddy Gardner — The Unforgettable” also includes two tunes where he is accompanied by just “piano and guitar.” Though missing, as it were, from SIX CLASSIC FREDDY GARDNER SOLOS, these are available as single items on YouTube ; see “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and “Stardust” — two good introductions to the classic alto saxophone artistry of Freddy Gardner.

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There is much else on YouTube by or somehow featuring Freddy Gardner — and among the 51 tunes by the noted UK alto (and other) saxophone artist on the two-CD collection reviewed by Wile E. Coyote back in the summer of 2016.

What much of this shows is a rather different Freddy Gardener from the genius of the alto saxophone who recorded some classic “concert” performances in the last two years of his life. (Many of the originals of which, it seems, were first heard on BBC Radio, where Peter Yorke and his Concert Orchestra were something of a fixture after the Second World War?)

As often as not in this more diverse work from the 1930s (and 1940s) Freddy is a band leader (and arranger apparently) and/or is playing clarinet or tenor or baritone as well as alto saxophone. He is improvising like a jazz musician (in some ways). And as often as not he is something almost opposite to “the world’s sweetest saxophonist” alluded to by Hector Stewart in his liner notes for “Freddy Gardner — The Unforgettable.”

Here are an interesting enough half dozen examples of this Gardner genre on YouTube : “It’s D’Lovely” (Freddy Gardner And His Swing Orchestra) ; “I Want To Be Happy” (Freddy Gardner and his Swing Orchestra) ; “Limehouse Blues” (with larger orchestra) ; “The Dipsy Doodle” (same larger orchestra) ; “The Japanese Sandman” (with rhythm section?) ; and “You Can’t Stop Me from Dreaming” (same larger orchestra).

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When you look at Freddy Gardner’s recorded work in this more diverse way, the most apt parallel between the awesome world of the Yardbird and the alto saxophone virtuosity on “Freddy Gardner — The Unforgettable” from the late 1940s is the “Charlie Parker With Strings” recordings, also from the late 1940s.

Fortunately for we who now dwell in the Age of the Internet an excellent outfit called Classic Mood Experience has posted “Charlie Parker With Strings — The Master Takes (1950)” on YouTube. This presents a half dozen memorable tunes, all recorded in 1949.

Parker’s work with strings (and oboes etc) was once (when I was younger) viewed as not serious Yardbird modern jazz. But he liked this rather brief side of his musical life himself. And it now seems to get a somewhat more welcome hearing from jazz critics.

Whatever else, the six tunes from “Charlie Parker With Strings” on YouTube compare and contrast nicely with “SIX CLASSIC FREDDY GARDNER SOLOS” on YouTube. Listening to these two postings back to back could make an intriguing exercise that reveals subtle features of life just after the Second World War in London and New York City.

Meanwhile, in the obvious comparison between two masters of the craft that arises in any such exercise there is utterly no doubt in my mind that Charlie Parker is by some distance the greater alto saxophone player.

Bird is brilliant, beautiful, and cool, where Freddy is masterful but almost too sweet. And then the comparative geographic remoteness of African America in England between the world wars makes even Freddy’s more diverse improvisations of the 1930s and 1940s altogether too square.

(While Bird anticipates a later lionization, with his mixed race African Indigenous American natural heritage, nicely if also insidiously nurtured by the Paris of the Plains in Kansas City, 1928–1938 — a place of learning as well for President Harry Truman, 1945–1953.)

At the same time, as Miles Davis once said (I think) nobody is as good as Bird. And that certainly in my book applies to the world of the alto saxophone generally, well beyond “jazz.”

In the end Freddy Gardner’s contribution to alto saxophone playing still commands some attention — even if no one quite wants to play the way he did now. (At least no one I’ve heard for quite a while.)

In fact I checked over my aging LP collection in my basement music room this morning. I have more than a few Charlie Parker albums, but still nothing by Freddy Gardner. I’m starting to think about paying the $35 US on Amazon, for a used copy of “Freddy Gardner — The Unforgettable.” And who knows just where this thought might end?

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POSTSCRIPT : On the “Street Scene” Alto Saxophone of Jay White, who “made very few recordings, but a lot of people liked them.” I cannot leave the subject of Freddy Gardner without quickly noting another much less famous but still notable alto saxophone giant from my own late 1950s/early 1960s North American tutelage.

I am indebted to Donald’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music online for a good short description of the man in question : “WHITE, Jay … (James Anthony White, 1917-76) American dance-band musician who played all the reeds, but was best known for his alto saxophone. He made very few recordings, but a lot of people liked them. Jay White grew up in Boston, graduated from Commerce High School and the Bentley School of Accounting, but chose music as a career.”

Jay White was recommended to me by my first saxophone (and clarinet) teacher, as an alto player whose sound might be the kind of not-quite-Freddy-Gardner example that had been more vaguely suggested by my father (whose alto saxophone I was taking lessons on, and who didn’t quite believe in my early efforts to emulate the cool sound of late 50s/early 60s youth).

I still have the Jay White LP I purchased back then, called “Street Scene” — and with a 1950s auto accident at a deep urban intersection on its cover. I listened to this album again for an umpteenth time this morning. (I was pleasantly surprised by how good the sound still is on a now more than 60-year-old vinyl LP.)

Like Freddy Gardner on alto, Jay White is a master of long notes, with amazing breath control. He has a less rich vibrato than Freddy — a slightly more hip tone but still in the somewhat sweet zone : far away from the beautiful cool sound and restrained vibrato of even the concert version of Bird at his best, in “Charlie Parker With Strings.”

At any rate I still can’t see this as quite the way I’d like to play myself, if I were in some if-you-build-it-they-will-come dream. But I am glad I still have Jay White’s Street Scene album. In the Age of the Internet two of its most notable alto saxophone classics are also accessible on YouTube : “Street Scene” (the title tune as it were) ; and the still iconic (if lately too little performed) “Harlem Nocturne” (written by Earle Hagen for UK band leader Ray Noble, who also played some role in both Martin and Parker careers!).

According to the first volume of Stanley Crouch’s masterful biography (Kansas City Lightning, 2013) both parents of the Charles Parker Jr. who largely invented modern jazz could trace at least part of their most visibly African American ancestry to the first peoples of North America.

This seems especially (and perhaps most openly) true of “Charlie Parker’s mother, Addie.” She “was from Oklahoma, the region once called Indian Territory … She was part Choctaw, her Indian blood probably the result of President Andrew Jackson’s policies.”

These policies had led to the infamous Trail of Tears — “a series of forced relocations of approximately 60,000 Native Americans … from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States, to areas to the west of the Mississippi River that had been designated as Indian Territory.” The Trail followed “the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830,” and “included members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations.”

On another account : “Taking place in the 1830s, the Trail of Tears was the forced and brutal relocation of approximately 100,000 indigenous people … Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole … to land west of the Mississippi River. Motivated by gold and land, Congress (under President Andrew Jackson) passed the Indian Removal Act by a slim and controversial margin in 1830.”

African-Choctaw American meets British Indigenous pop tune in late 1930s

On another page of his first volume Stanley Crouch summarizes all this in his account of Charles Parker Jr’s birth : “On August 29, 1920, a brown baby, with a red undertone to his skin, came yowling from the womb …”

It seems that Addie Parker made her only child aware of why his skin had a red undertone — which may help explain his deep attraction to the late 1930s pop tune “Cherokee.” (Charlie Parker is also not the only noted jazz musician with some Native American roots. And he recorded an indigenous blues tune of his own called “Mohawk” in June 1950.)

“Cherokee” itself was written by the British bandleader Ray Noble, as the first of five movements in his late 1930s “Indian Suite” (Cherokee, Comanche War Dance, Iroquois, Seminole, and Sioux Sue).

The Noble band recorded Cherokee in 1938. But it was an arrangement of the tune by trumpeter Billy May that became a hit instrumental for Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra — rising to “number fifteen on the pop charts” in 1939.

The road to the modern jazz legend of Ko Ko in 1945 (and 1947)

Charlie Parker would have first heard Ray Noble’s Cherokee on the radio in his late teens, and it does seem to have almost possessed him for much of his early career.

The most celebrated outcome of the possession was a brilliant recording made in New York City on November 26, 1945 — an astonishing “improvisation” on the Cherokee chord changes or harmonic structure, released without the Ray Noble melody as “Ko Ko” to avoid royalty payments.

As in many other cases, listening over and over to this late 1945 recording of “Ko Ko” — and then actually trying to play the transcription in the Charlie Parker Omnibook (first published in 1978) — is what finally helped me understand just why Charles “Yardbird” Parker Jr (1920-1955) was such an awesome innovator, in the modern jazz that took shape between 1940 and 1970 and still haunts us today (and perhaps especially) in 2020.

This November 26, 1945 “Ko Ko” quickly became a legend among the early aficionados in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and beyond (Toronto eg), who first recognized and proselytized “Bird’s” genius. A second version of “Ko Ko” was recorded at a Carnegie Hall concert in New York in 1947.

Two earlier expressions of Charlie Parker’s Cherokee possession

To me the Carnegie Hall Ko Ko recording of 1947 is somewhat less commanding than the 1945 original. It makes eminent sense that a written transcription of the 1945 recording is what appears in the Charlie Parker Omnibook of 1978.

Much more recently, however (and largely through the often astounding musical resources that now appear on YouTube), I have discovered (along with many others) at least two earlier expressions of Charlie Parker’s Cherokee possession, that retain the Ray Noble melody as part of the performance.

They certainly do not surpass the 1945 Ko Ko or in any way contest its status as the first great expression of the Yardbird’s talent and defining contribution to modern jazz. But the late great baritone saxophonist and arranger Gerry Mulligan much later reported :

“Somebody sent me a little bit of tape that had Bird playing at home when he must have been maybe seventeen years old or something with a friend of his, a guitar player, and of course he was playing ‘Cherokee.’ This was his number, man, he worked on that thing for years. Somebody said that when he did ‘Ko-Ko.’ It was not just a little accident that it came out the way it did. He had been layin’ for that thing for twenty years anyway. The solo he played on that is like a masterpiece in itself.”

Jay McShann Orchestra recording of Cherokee featuring Charlie Parker?

Both the early Charlie Parker Cherokee recordings I have recently stumbled across myself illustrate just what Gerry Mulligan is talking about here.

(Allowing that “layin’ for that thing for twenty years anyway” is in an honoured older musician’s hyperbolic recollection : Cherokee was only first recorded in 1938 when the Yardbird was 18, and he recorded the original Ko Ko in 1945 when he was still only 25.)

The first of my early Charlie Parker Cherokee recordings is said to be by the Jay McShann Orchestra “featuring Charlie Parker.” This was the blues and swing big band based in Parker’s Kansas City hometown that he cut at least several of his musical teeth with in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

A gentleman called Rob Chalfen, commenting on the YouTube posting by jon ancker, claims that the group playing here is “not McShann, but house band at Monroes in NYC with someone named Tinney on piano, about ’42.” Mr. ancker appears to accept this claim, but I am far from dead certain myself. No one seems to dispute that it is Charlie Parker playing an extended alto sax solo on Cherokee (preparing for Ko Ko a few years later).

The 1942 (or 1941?) Kansas City Trio recording (and free transcription on the Net)

My second early Charlie Parker Cherokee recording seems at least very close to Gerry Mulligan’s “ little bit of tape that had Bird playing … with a friend of his, a guitar player.” And I think it’s considerably more interesting than the Jay McShann or Monroe’s house band recording of (maybe) “about ‘42.”

The documentation on the YouTube posting of this version of Cherokee reads : “Vic Damon Studios, Kansas City, September 1942 … Charlie Parker (alto sax), Efferge Ware (guitar), Little Phil Phillips (drums). There is also some reporting on the Net that sets the date in 1941.

I have stumbled across two further resources for understanding this early 1940s Kansas City trio version of Charlie Parker’s Cherokee. One is some interesting commentary from the young UK alto saxophonist Sam Braysher on what (to further complicate the universe) he suggests is a tune recorded in 1943, that certainly sounds like the YouTube “September 1942” version. The other resource is a free five-page transcription of what certainly is the YouTube “September 1942” version of Charlie Parker’s part in the Kansas City trio recording. (Although this transcription itself suggests 1942 or 1941 as the recording date.)

Of course the early 1940s trio version of Cherokee is not up to the same elevated standard as the 1945 quintet version of Ko Ko. It is part of the preparation for climbing the mountain not the ultimate climb itself. On the other hand, it is probably more immediately accessible for a somewhat broader audience than Ko Ko. And yet, at the same time, I have recently been trying out the new five-page transcription. And I can report that, as usual, attempting to play such things at all adequately remains a force for deep humility in my experience, at the very least.