"CHEROKEE" (1938)

Charlie Parker had a musical epiphany while playing "Cherokee." In Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff’s book Hear Me Talkin’ to You, they quote Parker’s description of that moment, "I remember one night before Monroe’s I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December 1939. Now I had been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used at the time, and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night I was working over "Cherokee," and as I did I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive." (Monroe’s refers to Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, a Harlem nightclub where Parker frequently played.)
Many sources have attested that "Cherokee" was one of Parker’s favorite songs. In 1945 for Savoy Records he recorded his composition "Ko Ko," based on the chord changes in "Cherokee." The historic recording session, Parker’s first as a leader, included Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet and piano, Max Roach on drums and Curly Russell on bass, and is widely considered to be the first time bebop was recorded. On the first take of "Ko Ko", the sound engineer whistled them to a stop because Parker and Gillespie were straying too close to the copyrighted melody of "Cherokee" and Savoy Records didn’t want to have to pay royalties. It was no surprise to baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, who was deeply influenced by Parker’s playing, that Parker used "Cherokee" as his inspiration. Mulligan related in his memoirs, "Somebody sent me a little bit of tape that had Bird playing at home when he must have been maybe seventeen years old or something with a friend of his, a guitar player, and of course he was playing "Cherokee." This was his number, man, he worked on that thing for years. Somebody said that when he did "Ko Ko." It was not just a little accident that it came out the way it did."
Jazz fans may associate "Cherokee" with Charlie Parker and the birth of bebop, but probably few recall that it was written by the quintessential English gentleman, Ray Noble. Noble was a classically trained pianist whose main musical interest was dance music. He had been a well-respected dance bandleader in England before moving to the United States in 1934, but once here his career took an odd turn. As a bandleader he was not as successful as he had hoped and in 1937 he disbanded his orchestra, only occasionally serving as a bandleader after that. Instead, he moved to Hollywood to work as a radio emcee and music arranger and as a comedian. His comic acting career was a strange potpourri of roles. Taking advantage of his British accent, he specialized in comedic roles in which he portrayed pompous and dim-witted upperclass Englishmen. He appeared on the George Burns and Gracie Allen radio shows, where he played an obtuse character who was in love with Gracie; he became known for his catchphrase "Gracie, this is the first time we've ever been alone together." He also appeared with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen as the stooge for Bergen’s famous partner Charlie McCarthy and sidekick Mortimer Snerd, and as Fred Astaire’s romantic rival in the film A Damsel in Distress.
In reality, Noble had little in common with the silly characters he portrayed. Since the early 1930s he had been composing and arranging beautiful and popular songs, usually writing both the lyrics and music. Though his songwriting output was not large, it contained a disproportionate number of songs that became hits, including "The Touch of Your Lips," "Love is the Sweetest Thing." "I Hadn’t Anyone Till You," "The Very Thought of You" and the song that once seemed to be played at the end of every high school and college prom and the last song played by a dance band to signal the end of the evening, "Goodnight Sweetheart." He was inducted into the Songwriters, Big Band and Jazz Halls of Fame and his song "The Very Thought of You" into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
In 1938 Noble composed an "Indian Suite" that consisted of five movements, of which "Cherokee" was the first, followed by Comanche War Dance, Iroquois, Seminole, and Sioux Sue. He recorded "Indian Suite" in 1938, but it wasn't until 1939 when Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra recorded "Cherokee" that it became popular. An instrumental arrangement by Billy May for the Barnet band, it was played at its original slow tempo and peaked at number fifteen on the pop charts. The song was deemed a "sweet" swing band tune, a standard commercial instrumental and not seen as a vehicle for jazz improvisation until Parker's 1945 recording. Listening to the Barnet recording and then to Parker’s "Ko Ko," made only six years later, would help present day jazz fans understand why Parker’s interpretation of "Cherokee" was so radical. Gary Gibbons, in Visions of Jazz, describes the impact of Parker’s treatment, "Even now, decades later, unprepared listeners often respond to it as an explosion of sound, a mad deluge of notes – as listeners did in 1945. On repeated hearings, however, the logic and coherence of Parker’s solo is revealed. "Ko Ko" became the point of departure for jazz in the postwar era, having an effect that paralleled Armstrong’s "West End Blues" in 1928."
Over the last sixty years "Cherokee" has become a rite of passage for aspiring jazz musicians; the ability to improvise over the chord progressions in the bridge remains a classic test of skill. Jazzstandards.com says, "This is a jam session war-horse, usually played at "tempo de bitch" (quarter note = 250 b.p.m. or more). The many long, sustained pitches and slow harmonic movement make it a vehicle for virtuosos desiring to display their technique by playing lots of very fast notes." While Charlie Parker’s solo may be regarded as the definitive version, many other instrumentalists have recorded exceptional covers of "Cherokee" – standouts include Clifford Brown, Don Byas, and Bud Powell. The rarely heard lyrics were written for a male singer, but are recorded more frequently by females, who often substitute "sweet Indian warrior" for "sweet Indian maiden." Singers Sarah Vaughn, Keely Smith, and, more recently, Karrin Allyson, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Dianne Reeves have made noteworthy recordings of the song.
The history of "Cherokee," written by a British dance band leader as a sweetly romantic homage to Native Americans and transformed by an African-American alto saxophonist into a hard-blowing bebop pyrotechnic, exemplifies what Charlie Parker said, "They teach you there’s a boundary line to music, but, man, there’s no boundary line to art."