Ornithology is a bebop composition credited to Charlie Parker and Benny Harris, written around 1946. It is a contrafact based on the chord changes of How High the Moon, the 1940 popular song by Morgan Lewis and Nancy Hamilton, with a new angular, syncopated melody composed over the original's 32-bar AABA form. The tune was first recorded on March 28, 1946, by the Charlie Parker Septet for the Dial label, a recording later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1989. The title references Parker's famous nickname Bird, connecting ornithology, the study of birds, directly to the man himself. Musically, the head features chromaticism, rhythmic complexity, and characteristic bebop devices including triplet figures and half-diminished chord substitutions. Parker later revised the second half of the melody to improve voice leading and tighten cadences, and he performed this updated version for the rest of his career. Ornithology stands as one of the cornerstone compositions of the bebop movement and remains a widely performed jazz standard, emblematic of the genre's approach of building complex new melodies over familiar harmonic frameworks. On AllSolos, it appears on Stephen Riley's 2018 album Oleo with solos by Riley on tenor saxophone and Joe Magnarelli on trumpet, as well as on the original 1946 Charlie Parker Septet session from The Complete Savoy and Dial Master Takes, featuring Parker on alto saxophone, Miles Davis on trumpet, and Lucky Thompson on tenor saxophone.
