Printed menu card for legendary New York jazz club Birdland, c.1950, signed and inscribed in green ink on the front cover by Charlie Parker ‘To Beverly, Good Luck, Charlie Parker’ - photo 1

Printed menu card for legendary New York jazz club Birdland, c.1950, signed and inscribed in green ink on the front cover by Charlie Parker ‘To Beverly, Good Luck, Charlie Parker’

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£ 7 560
Auction dateClassic
28.09.2023 13:00UTC +01:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
United Kingdom, London
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ID 1016391
Lot 180 | Printed menu card for legendary New York jazz club Birdland, c.1950, signed and inscribed in green ink on the front cover by Charlie Parker ‘To Beverly, Good Luck, Charlie Parker’
Printed menu card for legendary New York jazz club Birdland, c.1950, signed and inscribed in green ink on the front cover by Charlie Parker ‘To Beverly, Good Luck, Charlie Parker’

Charles “Charlie,” Jr. Parker

PARKER, Charles “Charlie,” Jr. (1920-1955).



Printed menu card for legendary New York jazz club Birdland, c.1950, signed and inscribed in green ink on the front cover by Charlie Parker ‘To Beverly, Good Luck, Charlie Parker’. Additionally signed and variously inscribed by jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie (in pencil), Louis Jordan, Billy Eckstine, Roy Haynes, Tommy Potter, vocalist Joe “Be-Bop” Carroll, DJ Fred Robbins, singer and actress Connie Russell, violinists Al Feller, Seymour Barab and Jerry Molfese, harpist Wally McManus, and oboist Gaetano Musumeci, dated in an unknown hand 7 July 1950. The menu dates from Parker’s first residency at Birdland with his Bird with Strings orchestra, following the popular success of the albums of the same name.



Birdland, named in honour of sometime headliner Charlie Parker, was opened on 15 December 1949 at the corner of Broadway and 52nd Street in Manhattan. ‘When the owners of Birdland contemplated the idea of naming the club after a practicing jazz musician,’ writes Ross Russell, ‘there had been no one else to consider. Big names of the past no longer held any box office allure. Of the contemporaries none, not even Dizzy Gillespie, possessed Parker’s charisma, or could lend the weight necessary to launch a club that would in fact be the “Jazz Corner of the World” for decades. Interviewed by Robyn Flans for Modern Drummer in 1982, Charlie Watts spoke of his love for Birdland ‘When I had the honor to go to New York, that was it! All I wanted to do was go to Birdland and I was lucky enough to get there before it closed and that was it for me. I still walk down 52nd Street. I know it’s not the same anymore, but I do it. It’s just something that really meant something to me as a kid, listening to Charlie Parker, and to think that he lived there and walked down that street and played there.’ Russell, Bird Lives! 275.



Single-fold menu card, printed in blue on pale yellow card stock, 281 x 216 mm.



[And:] WATTS, Charlie (1941-2021). Ode to a Highflying Bird. London: Beat Publications Ltd, [1965]. First edition, first impression. Small octavo. Illustrations in colour throughout by the author. Price label of ‘Seven Shillings’ tipped to front free endpaper. Original white boards, titles to covers in black, portrait of the author to rear cover. (See note, lot 171.)

Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
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28.09.2023 – 28.09.2023
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