© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“I first heard Ed Bickert on
a record with Paul Desmond and I immediately thought, ‘Wow! Who’s is that? It
was such great harmonic playing.’”
- Lorne Lofsky, Jazz guitarist
“Edward Isaac Bickert in
never one to blow his own horn – figuratively – he is one of the most modest
and unassuming men in Jazz. But literally – he blows up a storm ….”
- Frank Rutter, The Vancouver Sun
“Bickert’s self effacing style
masks a keen intelligence. His deceptively soft tone is the front for a shrewd,
unexpectedly attacking style that treats bebop tempos with the same equanimity
as a swing-styled ballad.”
-Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The
Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
“Lorne Lofsky is a talented
cool-toned guitarist in the tradition of Jimmy Raney and his fellow
Canadian Ed Bickert ….”
- Scott Yanow, allmusic.com
I have no idea
why, but Charlie Parker’s Ah-Leu-Cha has
always been among my favorite Bebop compositions.
With its theme
stated as a staggered interaction between the two horns – what might be
considered as countermelody phrasing – the tune is as much fun to play on as it
is to listen to.
It’s a tune that
is only rarely heard and not often recorded. Allmusic.com lists 89 versions of Ah-Leu-Cha many of which are alternate
versions by Charlie “Bird” Parker and Miles Davis, who was a member of Bird’s
group in 1948 when the tune was first recorded.
Jack Chambers, in
his seminal work, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis [NY: William
Morrow, 1983/85] explains that Ah-Leu-Cha
was included as one of four tunes recorded in October 1955 when the Miles
Davis Quintet consisting of Miles, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Red
Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones made their
recording debut for Columbia Records.
Jack goes on to
explain:
“Ah-Leu-Cha is Parker's tune, recorded by Davis and
Parker in the last days of the original Parker quintet, in 1948; it had hardly
been played at all since then by anyone, and Davis Davis
The next time I
heard Miles play Ah-Leu-Cha was on a
recording that Columbia made in performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with
his famous sextet that included Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto sax,
Coltrane on tenor, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on
drums.
Remarkably, this
stellar group’s performance of Ah-Leu-Cha
at the 1958 NJF was a disappointment mainly because Miles counted it out at a
ridiculously fast tempo that made a hash of the intrinsic qualities of the
tune.
As Jack Chambers
describes it: “The sextet’s performance is substandard. Davis
Miles would make a
habit of such “overzealous tempos;” witness what he did over the years with the
tempos he counted out to So What, first
heard with a slow, lopping beat on the classic Kind of Blue album.
Ah-Leu-Cha needs room to breath. Although it is
structured around a basic, 32-bar AABA format, with the “A’s” based on the
changes to Honeysuckle Rose and the
“B” using I Got Rhythm changes, the
counterpoint manner in which the melody is fashioned has to have room for the
countermelodies to be expressed.
Over the years, I
heard a few other versions of Ah-Leu-Cha,
most notably one which has Art Farmer on trumpet on Italian pianist Enrico
Pieranunzi’s Isis CD, but I pretty much left the tune alone after Miles
trashed it at the 1958 NJF.
Much to my
delight, I recently rediscovered its allure while revisiting Ed Bickert’s
playing of it with fellow guitarist Lorne Lofsky on their This is New Concord Jazz
CD [4414] with Neil Swainson on bass and Jerry Fuller on drums.
Ed and Lorne play Ah-Leu-Cha at a medium tempo that allows
its intricacies to nicely come together while, at the same time, setting up a
platform for some interesting improvisations on the tune’s familiar changes.
Have a listen and
see what you think of Ah-Leu-Cha as
I’ve included Ed and Lorne’s interpretation of this all-too-infrequently heard
bebop tune as the audio track on the following video [Ed takes the first solo each time around].
