Jazz Beat: The Charlie Parker Celebration wraps up this weekend

August 23, 2016

Larry Kopitnik,

Kansas City’s 10-day Charlie Parker Celebration, honoring this area’s most influential musical son, concludes this weekend with club dates, a historical tour, a graveside salute and a chicken feed.

Festival artist-in-residence Tivon Pennicott is recognized nationally as one of jazz’s young standouts, playing tenor sax with harmonic verve and imagination descended from Parker. Thursday night he performs with bassist Micah Herman at the Ship, in the West Bottoms, surrounded by the wonderful restoration of a classic 1930s-vintage KC nightclub. Friday night Pennicott joins trumpeter Hermon Mehari — one of this city’s outstanding young jazz voices — at the Blue Room, then the booty-shakin’ Boogaloo 7 at the Green Lady Lounge. Saturday concludes with Pennicott and vibraphonist Peter Schlamb — perhaps KC’s most smartly inventive jazz musician — back at the Blue Room.

Saturday starts at 10 a.m. with a historical tour hosted by KCUR 89.3 Fish Fry anchor Chuck Haddix, who has written books on Kansas City jazz history and on Parker’s life. He will narrate a walking and bus tour recognizing sites associated with Parker. At noon, in Lincoln Cemetery, a 21-sax salute at Parker’s gravesite honors his 96th birthday (which actually falls on Monday). Afterward, a free “chicken feed” — after all, his nickname was “Bird” — is open to the public at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center.

Also of note is a visit by Seattle alto saxophonist and flutist Mark Lewis. His bright and playful sound should go well with Bram Wijnand’s barrelhouse piano during their team-up at the Majestic Friday and Saturday nights .