The set's longest and most exploratory performance arrives with Parker's ingenious reharmonization of the twelve-bar blues. At a medium 145 BPM, the relatively relaxed tempo gives all three soloists room for extended statements — Lefkowitz-Brown stretches to ten choruses on tenor saxophone, Feifke follows with seven on piano, and Chmielinski takes five choruses on acoustic bass, his longest solo of the session. The nearly nine-minute performance has the feel of a relaxed jam session, with the compact blues form encouraging the kind of melodic development and motivic improvisation that the shorter AABA forms make difficult. Parker composed Blues for Alice as a reimagining of the standard blues progression, threading chromatic descending chord movement through the familiar twelve-bar structure. The result is a piece that sounds like a blues but offers the harmonic complexity of a composed piece, and the quartet's generous solo lengths take full advantage of that dual nature. The set concludes with the uptempo Anthropology.
