Anyone who calls Charles McPherson a bopper has a talent for spotting the obvious. True, he does tread the well-worn boards of bop - he even provided some of Charlie Parker's solos for the soundtrack of Clint Eastwood's Bird - but he brings an indefinable, utterly personal quality to bear on it. And it requires something beyond the level of virtuoso craftsmanship to play that demanding jazz idiom as well as he does.
For though this great alto saxophonist is possibly the finest of all those whose musical DNA contains so much of Parker, others have also contributed to his genetic inheritance. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1939 and raised in Detroit, he first fell under the spell of Ellington's master of passionate cool, altoist Johnny Hodges. He also counts the Duke, Billie Holiday and Lester Young among his influences, the last-named a clue to why he was subsequently seduced by Bird, since Young was an influence on Parker.
Hearing Parker's recording of Tico, Tico for the first time in 1953 was McPherson's road to Damascus; it sounded, he said, like his "dream of how the horn should be played". Two years of study followed with pianist Barry Harris in Detroit and, after playing in the Motor City for a couple of years, he moved to New York at the end of the 1950s and began working with Charlie Mingus.
If any evidence is needed that McPherson was always much more than just the sum of his influences, this is it. Mingus, who once wrote a tune called If Charlie Parker Were A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats, wouldn't tolerate musical clones. McPherson was clearly individual and strong enough to pass that examination. He had to be; besides the volcanic Mingus, the bands included such diamond-hard players as trumpeter Ted Curson and the late, great reed-men, Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin.
What's happened since, his recordings suggest, has been a process of refinement, evolution rather than revolution. The material is usually a mix of standards, originals by Mingus and Thelonious Monk and McPherson's own compositions, and the settings are small groups, always with topechelon players such as Tom Harrell, Mulgrew Miller, Lewis Nash and Victor Lewis.
The results show a gifted improviser, with a gorgeously expressive tone, a sense of structure that somehow reconciles surprise with inevitability - who swings to the manor born. "I want it all," he says on the sleeve of his latest album, Manhattan Nocturne, "the virtuosity mixed with heart, the technique and inspiration." He's had that, and more, for many years now.
Charles McPherson plays at Mother Redcaps, Tuesday, 8.30 p.m., with Jim Doherty (piano), Dave Fleming (bass) and John Wadham (drums), in a concert organised by the Dublin Jazz Society