"Blues for Charlie Parker ranging from the angry protestations of the upper register to the muted: blurred remorsefulness of the subdued sequences, indicated why Scott is held so consistently in esteem all over the world. It proved him to be that rare amalgam - a combination of jazz intellect, profound jazz emotion and faultless technique." (unknwon African Newspaper)

BLUES FOR CHARLIE PARKER by Tony Scott ©

I was in Paris, and one day the pianist Horst Jankowski proposed a tour in Yugoslavia for me. I accepted, without even talking about money and after some days we arrived in Ljubljana where our first concert was.
I remember we were very tired and during the concert I said to my friends: "Let's make an F minor Blues", and I told them something else.
We started to play and out came very fine music, with great feeling. It was there that I first decided to dedicate a number to Charlie Parker and this resulted in one of the most dramatic things that happened in the entire trip. I wanted to convey all the thoughts I felt might have been in Bird's mind when he was playing. I made it a minor blues, full of protest, anger, starting out unaccompanied and ad lib with just some cries-just wailing. At the very moment I did that, lightning started. There were about a thousand of people there under a large canvas tent, open to the sky.
The audiences were just fabulous. They've been completely starved for jazz, so they're soaking it in desperately and they just went mad. I went into tempo with a fairly full sound, then brought it down gently to subtone. As I did that it started to rain on the canvas.
Nearby there was a railroad station, and just as I reached this part a train passed by and the train whistle sounded-exactly on the minor scale, I caught it and made it part of the performance. It was uncanny.
At the end, I was holding a note and reaching for the climax of the composition when it began to thunder. I've never in my life had such a hauntingly weird and dramatic experience during a performance. "That first night when I played it was like a movie scene.
The impact was so terrific , they just wouldn't let me continue the show until I'd played the Blues for Bird again. From then on I played that piece in my concerts. Somebody recorded the concert and gave the tape as gift to me. When I came back to New York, in September of the same year, I played the tape for Billie Holiday. She cried and her tears fell on the tape.…she kept saying slowly: "Where are you?...Where are you?". It was a very emotional moment for me. For years she had made me cried singing her sad songs and now, I had made her cry...Tony Scott ©