ARTS BEAT : S.D. Jazzman McPherson Helps Make ‘Bird’ Fly

There is a vivid scene in “Bird,” Clint Eastwood’s upcoming film biography about jazzman Charlie Parker, in which the giant of bebop comes face to face with Igor Stravinsky, the Russian expatriate who was one of the masters of modern classical music.

In the scene, Parker asks a girlfriend to drive him to Stravinsky’s Beverly Hills home. As Parker gets out of the car and walks toward the house, music from Stravinsky’s “Firebird” swells in the background. Moments later, after Stravinsky has come to the door and peered out into the darkness where Parker is standing, other music--from a solo alto sax, in Parker’s style--joins and overlaps “Firebird.”

The moment not only joins two distinct forms of music, but symbolizes the spirits of two brash innovators who caught the essence of their separate worlds and interpreted them with music that had never been heard before.

Parker fans may recognize parts of the sax solo in that scene and others from original Parker recordings, but the quality might throw them off. It sounds like Parker, all right, but how did the film makers get the recording that sharp, and where did all those other notes come from?

The answer is San Diego’s Charles McPherson.

At Eastwood’s insistence, most of the Parker music in “Bird” was painstakingly taken from old recordings and reel-to-reel tapes that were kept by Parker’s widow. But, for transition scenes and dramatic moments that called for new music, they called on McPherson.

“I’d seen Charles around a little bit. Several people mentioned him,” Eastwood said, in a recent interview. “He came up and played in a session and was terrific, so we had him come back. We used him on songs like ‘Moose the Mooch,’ where we needed intricate playing. We’d have Charles play along.

“Charles’ playing was pretty close to Parker’s. Obviously, he’d been influenced by him. We wanted theme material with a lone sax player. I would have Charles stand there and show him the sequence on the screen, and told him to use ‘Parker’s Mood’ as a theme--just play along with the scene, do what feels right. We got some pretty interesting stuff.”

Before leaving on a two-month European concert tour earlier this month, McPherson spoke in his La Jolla studio about his experience playing on “Bird” and the respect he gained for Eastwood.

“He’s a real professional,” McPherson said. “He knows about recording. He can remember particular takes. I’m sure many people think of him as a big dumb cowboy. He’s a lot more than that.”

For the Stravinsky scene, McPherson said Eastwood suggested he try some Kansas City blues and extemporize.

“When we heard it back, it was beautiful,” McPherson said. “Some of these thoughts we heard were compatible in an eerie way. The alto was a little echo. It was an uncanny, otherworldly kind of sound like Charles Ives.”

An alto saxophonist of international repute, McPherson is heard in the film on the alto melodies and as a soloist wherever the theme, “Parker’s Mood,” is used as incidental music.

McPherson said that Charles Mingus, with whom he toured and made half a dozen recordings from 1960 to 1972, was a bigger inspiration to him than Parker, but his ability to mime the nuances and phrasing of Parker’s style won him the job on “Bird.” McPherson acknowledges being wary that anyone could make a successful jazz movie.

“Usually jazz movies to me fall short. There’s either not enough money (to do it right) if they have a good writer, or they do not understand the life style and the vernacular,” McPherson said. “Or it’s too raw for the public . . . and they veil reality.

“It’s difficult to really hit the nail home. If you don’t do it right, it’s really in bad taste. If you do, how can it sell?”

Like Parker, McPherson began playing the alto sax at age 13. His style has been compared to that of Parker, although the comparison was made more often before he began to work with Mingus. McPherson, 48, has recorded more than 2 dozen solo albums and has been named best alto saxophone player by Downbeat magazine.

To McPherson, Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the co-founders of bebop had a phenomenal influence on society, chiefly by influencing arrangers and writers.

“If Parker influences an arranger on the Milton Berle show, he’s going to be influencing the total musical scene as we know it,” he said.

Although bebop at first baffled and alienated many critics and traditional jazz players when Parker, Gillespie and others began playing it in the 1940s, McPherson understood bebop and Parker’s playing from the beginning.

“I was able to make sense of all those notes. They made melodic sense to me,” he said. “They were just an extension of swing music.”

McPherson has worked chiefly for himself since 1972. He booked his current tour--to West Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland--on which he will be backed by a local combo in each city he visits.

As for San Diego, McPherson plays rarely in his adopted hometown. Although he notes that San Diego is a great place to live, he plays much more often in New York, where he says, people are willing to pay for good jazz.

“Bird,” which opens in Los Angeles and San Diego Oct. 14, is being premiered locally Oct. 12 as part of a jazz film series at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. The film series is tied to the “Henri Matisse: Jazz” exhibit of lithograph prints from Matisse’s book “Jazz,” which runs Oct. 7- Nov. 27 at the museum. The rest of the series lineup: “Paris Blues,” (Oct. 5); “The Last of the Blue Devils,” (Oct. 19); “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” (Oct. 26); “St. Louis Blues,” (Nov. 2).