Quintet of the Year - Hardcover

The story of the greatest jazz concert ever

It has entered musical legend as simply “the Massey Hall concert,” the night in Toronto in May 1953 when five of the most creative and influential jazz musicians of all time took the stage together, for the only time in their lives: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach.

The event did not have auspicious beginnings. There was no rehearsal not even a sound check. A world heavyweight title fight on the same night meant the hall was less than half full. Charlie Parker turned up with a white plastic saxophone. But a tape machine was running, and the recordings of the concert became an album that has been reissued over and over again for nearly fifty years – sometimes entitled, with little exaggeration, The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever.

Quintet of the Year is the tale of that historic concert - but to fix its co-ordinates in history this groundbreaking book navigates decades of musical innovation and social change. Geoffrey Haydon traces the lives of these five jazzmen from their beginnings in music to the point where they boarded the plane to fly to Canada: the reckless excess of the world-famous Parker; the fragile and mercurial pianist Bud Powell; Gillespie, the high priest of bop; Mingus, the bassist from the West Coast; and Roach, the modern drummer supreme. And it follows their lives afterwards, whether to civil rights activism or tragically early death, to show how their stories dramatized for the world the condition of black artists in America.

At its centre, Quintet of the Year recreates the never-to-be-repeated occasion of that remarkable concert itself, from the backstage rows to the embarrassment of box-office receipts insufficient to pay the illustrious performers – and most importantly, the wonder of pieces like “Hot House,” “Salt Peanuts,” and “A Night in Tunisia” treated to the prodigious artistry of five of the finest American musicians of the twentieth century, for one night only.