by Steven Cerra
Monday, May 2, 2016
The following feature first appeared in the November 2015 edition of JazzJournal. You can locate more information about the magazine by going here.
Just like Cecil Payne, Sahib Shihab, Gary Smulyan and many others Leo Parker began on the alto saxophone before eventually switching to the baritone which became his instrument of choice. Born on the 18th. April 1925 in Washington D.C. he studied the alto in high-school and Sonny Stitt remembered him playing at local sessions there with Roger ‘Buck’ Hill and Leo Williams.
By 1944 he was living in New York and sitting-in at Minton’s with among others Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach. It was because of his appearances at the club that he was invited to take part in what is considered to be the first bebop recording date on the 16th. February 1944 for the Apollo label. Coleman Hawkins was the leader and he was keen to record with some of the younger musicians like Gillespie, Roach, Don Byas and Oscar Pettiford.
He told Budd Johnson who played baritone on the date and was responsible for some of the arrangements, “I want to see what these cats are doing. What better way to do it than to get them together on a record date?” A twelve-piece group recorded three titles including the premier of Woody’n You and six days later they did Disorder At The Border, Feeling Zero and Rainbow Mist. The latter was Hawkins’s fresh look at Body And Soul and although Parker does not solo on either session, his presence reveals how highly he was rated by his peers.
Later that year he joined the trail-blazing Billy Eckstine band eventually sitting in a section with Sonny Stitt, John Jackson and Dexter Gordon who were known as “The Unholy Four” possibly because of their extra-musical activities. Jackson is a somewhat obscure figure now but he was a well-respected lead alto man at the time. Gordon told Ira Gitler in Jazz Masters Of The ‘40s, “The band was a little rough. I thought the reed section was the best - the most cohesive and the most together.” Initially Leo played second alto (Charlie Parker – no relation - was very briefly there on lead) but when Rudy Rutherford left, Eckstine bought him a baritone and persuaded him to make the switch.
He left the Eckstine band in 1946 and in March of that year he worked at the Spotlite club first with Benny Carter and then with Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy’s group (Milt Jackson, Al Haig, Ray Brown and Stan Levey) had been appearing in Los Angeles with Charlie Parker. On their return to New York, Charlie had stayed on the west coast so Leo was selected to take his place on baritone. In an interview for JJ (September 1999) Stan Levey told me, “Leo was a very good player. He got all over the horn and had all of Bird’s licks down but he died much too young”.
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