KIM PARKER, vocal
MAL WALDRON, piano
ISLA ECKINGER, bass
ED THIGPEN, drums

Recorded May 28 and 29, 1985
at Barigozzi Studio, Milano
Engineer: Giancarlo Barigozzi
Mastered at PolyGram, Tribiano - Milano
Engineer: Gennaro Carone
Producer: Giovanni Bonandrini
Cover Photography: Carlo Pieroni
Album Design: Rob Anderson
© 1985 Soul Note 1211331-1/2/4

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Having the same name as someone who was spectacularly renowned in your field is not all that much help.  It'll get you listened to carefully the first time, but if you don't have much to say, the name stops working for you.  It is a measure of Kim Parker's development of her own voice and style that her career continues to build on musical terms - not because Charlie Parker was her stepfather.

This is her most evocative recording so far because, it seems to me, it is her most confident.  She knows what she wants to do, she can do it, and she's at a stage where she can have fun doing it.  Like a horn player who has been able to go beyond notes into music, Kim sings from inside the songs.  A reviwer in Cadence magazine wrote of one of her earlier albums, Good Girl, that "she so often becomes the song that it is hard to believe that she is only the singer, not the composer."  That's even more so now.

In the French monthly, Jazz, another reviewer said of Good Girl - and it applies to this album as well - that Kim's voice us used in a way that reveals its artistry under an appearance of naturalness.  Put another way, there is no straining for effect, no self-conscious hipness, no showing of the machinery of the music. Kim has accomplished one of the most difficult goals in any art - making it all look easy.

She is hip, as is clear from the first chorus.  How could she not be hip growing up in the households of Bird and then her second stepfather, Phil Woods.   And spending all the time with her mother Chan Parker, a very lively, observant woman, a dancer and a jazz insider.  Yet there is a gentleness, almost an innocence, to Kim's way of being hip that makes for unexpected turns of feeling - all the more so because of the delicate sensuality of much of her singing.

She has seen a lot, and as Charlie Parker said, the more you experience, the more you can put into music.  Her first years were in new York, followed by New Hope, Pennsylvania, followed by a flood in which she and her mother lost everything.  By the time she was 13, Kim was in Europe - Phil Woods being on tour with Quincy Jones's band - and Kim found herself in a Swiss boarding school, a radically different environment from the Big Apple's Fifty-Second Street where she lived as a small child.

Back in the States, Kim continued an interest in acting and also won an award as best jazz vocalist at an inter-collegiate jazz festival.  In 1967, however, she did something few aspiring jazz musicians do.  She dropped out of the scene.  Far out.  She and her husband became farmers, housepainters, and homesteaders in Maine for two years.  I expect that some of the serenity at the core of even her most provocative singing may come from having spent that time in a place where the sky, all of it, can be seen.

Kim did not return to music on a sustained basis until the late 1970's.  Since then, she's worked clubs in New York and abroad, performed at festivals, toured Europe a number of times, recorded for Soul Note, worked in films, and has surely proved that she has something of her own to say.  As Leonard Feather has noted in the Los Angeles Times: "The cheerful conviction, attractive vibrato and easy phrasing of Kim Parker should establish her as a significant new jazz singer."

In this album, an intelligently selected program of songs of variously subtle moods, Kim reveals a gently distinctive sound and touch.  (Singers have "touch," in their way, just as pianists and bassists do).  in addition, unlike a good many other vocalists, she knows how to use space so that a rest, a touch of silence, can become quite eloquent.

At times, listening to Kim is like overhearing a private conversation; at other times, the words - and all the emotions interwoven with them - are directed, with wit and grace, right at you.

Kim has a most aptly resilient, attentive trio of accompanists in bassist Isla Eckinger, pianist Mal Waldron, and drummer Ed Thigpen.  As you listen to them, you can also hear them listening to her - so gracefully exact in their accompaniment.

A key quality of Kim's singing is illuminated in this statement to an interviewer: "I remember at various phases in my life when I thought I knew everything that was happening.  The all of a sudden I find out that I don't know too much.  And it's a great feeling! To realize that there's more, and how exciting that is!"

-Nat Hentoff