What I've Learned

There has been a lot of horse manure written about Dean Benedetti, and the record should be set straight.

Benedetti did not stop playing the saxophone because, being white, he realized he would never be black. Benedetti was not a drug dealer. Benedetti did not give up the saxophone when he heard Charlie Parker play and then follow Parker all around the country like some kind of groupie.

Much of the misinformation – a better word would be lies – about Benedetti was spread in a book called Bird Lives! written by Ross Russell and published in 1973. The book is about jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, whose nickname was Yardbird or simply Bird.

Russell seems to have made up just about everything he wrote about Benedetti. And because Russell was viewed as a respected music historian, what he wrote was accepted as the gospel and spread throughout jazzdom.

Here's the truth. Dean Benedetti is a musical hero who contributed more to the history of jazz than Russel or a hundred like him ever could.

In the early 1940s, Benedetti was a tenor sax player and band leader. In 1945, he first heard a recording of Charlie Parker and was profoundly moved. He began transcribing Bird's recorded solos, studying them, and trying to incorporate some of Bird's genius into his own playing.

When Bird was booked for a two-week engagement at the Hi-De-Ho Club in Los Angeles, Benedetti, like just about every other jazz musician in the area, showed up to listen. But Benedetti went one step further. He bought a 78 RPM disk cutting recorder and captured Bird's playing almost every night of the engagement. He couldn't afford to record everything, so mostly he recorded just Bird's solos.

In addition, Benedetti went to New York in 1948 and, using a tape recorder, taped Bird on March 31 and on July 7, 10, and 11.

That's the extent of Benedetti's recording of Charlie Parker. He did not follow him around the country like a groupie. But he did manage –  though the audio quality of the recordings is not great –  to capture what amounts to a third of all Charlie Parker recordings that exist.

Benedetti stopped playing the saxophone, not because he was discouraged by the brilliance of Parker's playing or because he was sad he was white and couldn't be black. He stopped playing because he had a rare muscle disease, Myasthenia Gravis, that began to affect his playing. As the disease progressed, destroying his health, he moved to Italy to stay with his parents. He died on January 20, 1957, at the age of 34.

In 1990, a boxed seven-CD collection of the Benedetti recordings was released. Because they cost a whopping $112, probably neither you nor I will own a set. But that doesn't mean we can't hear some of them.

Phil Schaap, who has a regular jazz show on WKCR called Bird Flight, did a segment on the Dean Benedetti recordings. WKCR is Columbia University’s non-commercial, student-run radio station.

There are some archives of Bird Flight available at philschaapjazz.com. If you go to September 27, 2011, you can hear almost an hour and a half of informational wonderfulness, including some of Benedetti's recordings.