CHARLIE PARKER IS ONE BIRD you can't catch. Parker, who died in 1955, was a jazz innovator, a sax master, a wildly talented instrumentalist who could improvise his way through songs with an easy daring and offhand profundity. Saxophonists who pay too literal tribute to Bird's work miss its spark and point--its emotionality is linked to its originality.
How wise, then, that Parker's Mood, a tribute album to Parker by the Roy Hargrove-Christian McBride-Stephen Scott Trio, takes such an intriguingly indirect approach to its subject. The three young jazzmen record some of the tunes Bird made his own but with one...