Charlie Parker: Now's the Time

One of my favorite moments teaching musicians at the annual Stanford Jazz Camp was a longstanding workshop tradition: the Nows the Time communal jam. At a preordained time, classes and instruction stopped and all the participants no matter where they were inside the hallowed halls of the Department of Music played or sang Parkers Now the Time. Im not sure whether program founder Jim Nadel saw this as a tribute to Bird, or just a grand joke on everyone else in the music building probably a bit of both -- but he maintained the peculiar tradition every year. Nadel could not have picked a better song. This timeless riff sounds like a primal blues, as old as the hills. Forcing the students to learn it which we did, every year -- was an important part of their jazz education. Parkers recording remains a classic, and his playing here demonstrates that his modernism did not involve a rejection of the past, but rather a return to first principles, which Bird respected in shaping his own novel vocabulary and musical structures.