Ballade is a 1950 jazz ballad performance by Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and Charlie Parker on alto sax, with Hank Jones on piano, Ray Brown on bass, and Buddy Rich on drums. It was recorded for Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic project and exists in both a film version and an audio release, with the three-part structure featuring Hawkins opening and closing solos and Parker in the middle. The piece—named Ballade after the classical term for a three-stanza poem—highlights the clash and blend of Hawkins’s old-school lyricism and Parker’s bebop velocity. The session is notable for uniting two generations of jazz masters and for bridging swing era sensibilities with the new bebop language, and the recording has appeared on various Hawkins and Bird compilations over the years.
