Featured Band Profiles

The Green Parrot  Hosts Annual Chicken and Waffle Jazz Brunch and Fats Navarro Tribute
to benefit The Bahama Village Music Program, The Green Parrot Bar will  host their Annual  Chicken and Waffle Jazz Brunch and Fats Navarro Tribute.  Festivities kick off with The Green Parrot Jazz Allstars with Mike Emerson, Hal Howland, Tim Mc Alpine, and Mark Rose,  with special guest, Key West’s King of Soul, Robert Albury, featuring Fritz Sigler.

 The Jazz Allstars/Robert Albury set set will be followed at  at 3 PM by our annual Fats Navarro Tribute. Trumpeter Kenny Fradley and guitarist Larry Baeder will front this tribute to seminal be bop jazz trumpeter Theodore “Fats” Navarro.  Sharing the stage with Baeder and Fradley for this much-anticipated event will be guitarist Mike Emerson and some of the best jazz players the Conch Republic has to offer performing material written or made popular by Navarro.

The festivities, as always, will include Chicken and Waffle platters,with all proceeds from the sale of Chicken and Waffles Platters to benefit The Bahama Village Music Program.

Navarro, who was born in Key West, and after spending his childhood and adolescent years in the Bahama Village neighborhood of Key West, went on to a meteoric career as a jazz trumpeter and was one of the seminal figures of the bebop style of jazz improvisation, and the style of jazz that ultimately became synonymous with modern jazz and as such made an indelible mark on American culture. Navarro was considered by many, including Dizzy Gillespie himself, to be the best bebop trumpeter of all time.

According to Gillespie, quoted in an obituary by George Simon in Metronome (Oct. 1950), marking Navarro’s untimely death at age 27, Navarro was “the best all-around trumpeter of them all. He had everything…a trumpeter should have…”:

The tribute was instituted in 2006 by Larry Baeder who realized that jazz giant Navarro had grown up in Key West yet was not honored with a a statue, plaque or formal recognition in his hometown.