Consumer Guide Album

The Quintet [Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie/Bud Powell/Charles Mingus/Max Roach]: Hot House: The Complete Jazz at Massey Hall Recordings [Craft, 2023]
Somewhere in my unkempt trove of Charlie Parker CDs gather large portions of this legendary May 1953 bebop showcase, most of it recorded at 2753-capacity Massey Hall in Toronto's toddlin' town--not to a full house, especially with Joe Walcott defending his heavyweight championship against Rocky Marciano in Chicago the same night, a piece of history Dizzy Gillespie elected to follow on a backstage TV whenever he could grab the chance. The rest of this never again duplicated ensemble comprised doomed eternal bebopper Parker on alto, indomitable Max Roach on drums, a zonked Bud Powell replacing originally scheduled Lennie Tristano on piano, and Oscar Pettiford's replacement on bass Charlie Mingus, who when he discovered that some of his music had gone unrecorded that night absconded with the tapes so he could dub his own parts onto them. If this reads like some kind of mess, in some respects it was. For years when I wanted to hear some bebop I'd return not to Massey Hall however legendary it was but to the aforementioned Charlie Parker trove, especially his Dial sessions and the de facto Bird showcase Now's the Time. But given the historic weight of this event I'm definitely not done with Hothouse. And just for the record, whether those are the right Mingus bass parts doesn't seem to matter that much. A