Tony Scott is a restless, original and innovative genius who, more than any other major musician today, has traveled, played and preached jazz throughout the world. He has cultivated close spiritual and musical relationships in the diverse places he has visited. Their native music has constantly fueled his fertile imagination, and he has imparted his own version of Black jazz through their sounds and rhythms. But it was in Africa, with its complex rhythms, in its strivings and frustrations, that he felt he had encountered the soul of his idol, the late Charlie 'Bird' Parker.

AFRICAN BIRD is a suite, a collection of related mood pieces, tone poems and improvisations. The opening track, from which the record takes its title, established the complex rhythms-exhilarating and hypnotic. Its uninhibited and instrumental sounds evoke all varieties of flora and fauna. Even for those who may be unfamiliar with parker and his connotations, this piece of music envelops its listeners in an exotic, wild fantasy. Spirits return is a more intimate extension of the first mood.

There is a confluence here of tribal chanting and jazz improvisations compounded by reverberation and overdubbing SPIRITS DANCE is even more ethnic African where Tony's chanting in multiple voices, and his modal clarinets could serve beautifully as background to Katharine Hepburn and Humprey Bogart aboard " The African Queen". But Tony, I'm sure has something more in mind, and it is realized beautifully. The marimba resembles and is interchangeable with any number of tropical instruments.

In COME BACK! MOTHER AFRICA it sets up the rhythm and a pedal point figure that underlies wild, high polytonal improvising by Chris Hunter on alto sax. Glenn Ferris' deep trombone echoes the theme and inches its way sure-footedly though the rhythmic jungle, gathering momentum as it goes. Gradually Tony's clarinet joins in, soaring into the trees like a fiery tropical bird. This is modern jazz of a virtuoso stripe used in an atmospheric, even pictorial sense. There follow quit moments of meandering along the trails, but then the exciting first theme roars back with all the horn blowing, the trombone repeats his elephant calls and the safari is swallowed up by the Continent.

It's just the clarinet, marimba and African maraccas piano for a reprise of AFRICAN BIRD - a very personal statement by Tony's ethnicized clarinet.

REQUIEM FOR LOST SPIRITS is another Scott intimate masterpiece in the tradition of his heartfelt "Blues for Charlie Parker" and "Requiem for Hot Lips Page". (the late, beloved Kansas City trumpeter). It's quiet, contemplative and sincere in its expression of grief for departed Black idols like parker, Billie Holiday and Lester Young, whose spirits, Tony asks us to imagine, have returned to their roots.