Bird

This is the first tune played by Parker once the credit sequence has carried him from child to boy to jazzman on 52nd Street. It is the first sound with which the film introduces him.

• “Lester Leaps In” is a tune by the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. A piece by the elder musician Parker looked up to in his Kansas City days, here it shows Parker at his height, so the starting point and the destination overlap in a single tune.
• The tune's framework is the chord sequence (chord progression) of Gershwin's “I Got Rhythm.” Jazz musicians call it rhythm changes, and it is a favorite foundation for improvisation (playing that is not written out in advance but invented on the spot).
• The accompaniment, with Monty Alexander on piano, Ray Brown on bass and John Guerin on drums, was newly recorded in 1988. Because only the alto was extracted from the old tape, the saxophone's texture sounds a little rougher and older than the backing.
• Over the same rhythm changes, Parker pours out very short notes at great speed, then suddenly leaves a rest. This catch of breath is the characteristic diction of bebop.

This tune belongs to the passage where bebop is born on 52nd Street. One of Parker's signature works, recorded in 1945, it shows at a stroke what the new music was.

• “Ko Ko” lays an entirely different melody over the chord sequence of the standard “Cherokee.” This method of borrowing another tune's chords to write a new melody is called a contrafact (substitute melody).
• The heart of the tune is a tempo so fast it is hard even to sing along. It marks the moment when jazz passed from swing for dancing to music for listening.
• On the soundtrack, Jon Faddis's trumpet, Walter Davis Jr.'s piano and Ron Carter's bass supply new accompaniment. Rosenbaum pointed out that Max Roach's drum solo passage on the original recording was replaced by a different performance in this remix.
• Listening side by side with the original recording, you can hear how different the drums sound. It is the tune on which opinion about the new recording method is most sharply divided.

This tune sits in the brightest period, leading through Birdland and Paris. It is one of the two pieces for which Niehaus wrote new string arrangements.

• The original is the theme David Raksin wrote for the 1944 film “Laura.” A melody born of film music is, in effect, carried back into a film by a jazz musician.
• Playing with strings, Parker does not twist the melody much but blows as if singing. Then, near the end, he scatters ornaments — a lyrical face quite unlike his fast bebop.
• Rosenbaum judged that Niehaus's new string arrangement tempered the excessive sweetness of the original while keeping its feeling. The strings support Parker by following the same chord sequence he does.
• Barry Harris on piano and Chuck Berghofer on bass handle the rhythm. It is worth listening for whether jazz's sense of pulse survives the entry of the strings.

This tune overlaps, starting with its title, the passage in which Parker is welcomed in Paris as an artist. Along with “Laura,” it was newly dressed in strings.

• A standard (a piece of the core repertoire played again and again by many musicians) written by Vernon Duke for the Broadway stage in 1932. It is a song of longing for springtime in Paris.
• It belonged to the repertoire of the period when Parker was recording with a string orchestra. His wish to draw closer to classical music shows even in his choice of tunes.
• Over long-held chords in the strings, the alto slips in short ornamental phrases. The contrast sounds like a meeting of two worlds.
• The gentlest tune on the soundtrack, it is remembered as the sound that symbolizes the brief calm of his prime.

It is tied to the stretch where Parker tours with Red Rodney. On the soundtrack, this is the tune on which the real Rodney played trumpet.

• Rodney was a real trumpeter who played in Parker's band as a young man. While the film told the story of his younger self, the man himself, now in his sixties, was playing its music.
• The tune is a 12-bar blues, in which the same sequence of chords comes around every twelve bars. Its theme is built on a riff (a repeated phrase) that cycles a short phrase over and over, so it sticks in the ear after a single hearing.
• Charles McPherson, an alto player of the generation after Parker, also took part in this track. In the film, McPherson also stood in for part of “Lover Man.”
• One of Parker's first recordings as a leader in 1945, it shows that bebop never abandoned its roots in the blues.

Rosenbaum singled this tune out as the first Parker solo in the film to flow unbroken from beginning to end. It arrives only past the film's midpoint, in the stretch that runs through the tours and the arrest.

• Until then, the film had often cut the music short with dialogue and scene changes. That makes this tune the moment when the audience first hears Parker play whole.
• It sounds like a lively, sharp, full-throated performance. The alto bursting out in the high register is especially striking.
• It is a short piece of a little over two minutes, yet within the frame of the 12-bar blues it builds up by turning a few short motifs (brief melodic figures) this way and that.
• Walter Davis Jr. on piano and Ron Carter on bass provided the new accompaniment.

The last track on the soundtrack album. A single slow blues gathers up the story's lingering mood.

• The tune opens with a short phrase the alto flings out alone, unaccompanied, almost like a cry. That first sound alone sets the emotion of the piece.
• Unlike fast bebop, it is a slow blues. The space between notes and the bends that nudge a pitch slightly up or down carry the feeling.
• The original 1948 recording later became widely known when the jazz singer King Pleasure sang it as vocalese, setting lyrics to the improvised solo. It means the instrumental improvisation flows so much like speech that it could be carried over into song.
• On this album, Barry Harris and Chuck Berghofer accompanied. Because the accompaniment is more restrained than on the original recording, the alto's voice sounds even more alone.