Paul Chambers finally receives the Mosaic Select treatment and there's a surprise tossed in with his catalog for fans and connoisseurs: his material recorded for the Transition label. Also included on the Paul Chambers set are the albums Chambers' Music and Whims of Chambers from 1956 and Bass on Top and The Paul Chambers Quintet from 1957. Musicians on these dates ran the gamut from Elvin Jones to Donald Byrd, Clifford Jordan, Horace Silver, Kenny Burrell, Hank Jones, and Art Taylor -- an overwhelming number of fellow Detroiters. There are some other odds and ends as well, but most importantly, the Transition material will be of prime interest to John Coltrane fans. "Trane's Strain," an 11-minute legato orgy, was recorded and released on a Transition sampler called Jazz in Translation. It features Chambers, Coltrane, Pepper Adams, Curtis Fuller, Philly Joe Jones, and Roland Alexander. Two other selections, "High Step" and "Nixon, Dixon and Yates Blues," were recorded on the same day and issued on the Blue Note sampler High Step. Two other selections, "Chamber Mates" and "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm," on which Art Blakey is featured, were originally issued on samplers as well: Blue Berlin and Blakey's Drums Around the Corner. What it all adds up to is nearly four hours of some of the most elegant, heated playing in hard bop history. Away from their membership in the Miles Davis Quintet, Chambers, Trane, and Jones created a standard for all of Chambers' recordings for Blue Note: complex yet airy arrangements, impassioned and highly stylized playing, and plenty of improvisation. This is a set that goes beyond the boundaries of standard Blue Note fare (which is high-quality fare, indeed) and extends into the realm of pure musicology as articulated by jazz. Most of the players on these sessions had their musical vocabularies altered permanently by their participation. Many harmonic ideas were born in these dates in the mid-'50s, and most are still being articulated and built upon to this day. This box is essential.
One of a handful of musicians who can be said to have permanently changed jazz, Charlie Parker was arguably the greatest saxophonist of all time. He could play remarkably fast lines that, if slowed down to half speed, would reveal that every note made sense. "Bird," along with his contemporaries Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell, is considered a founder of bebop; in reality he was an intuitive player who simply was expressing himself. Rather than basing his improvisations closely on the melody as was done in swing, he was a master of chordal improvising, creating new melodies that were based on the structure of a song. In fact, Bird wrote several future standards (such as "Anthropology," "Ornithology," "Scrapple from the Apple," and "Ko Ko," along with such blues numbers as "Now's the Time" and "Parker's Mood") that "borrowed" and modernized the chord structures of older tunes. Parker's remarkable technique, fairly original sound, and ability to come up with harmonically advanced phrases that could be both logical and whimsical were highly influential. By 1950, it was impossible to play "modern jazz" with credibility without closely studying Charlie Parker.
