Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I know you've thought this through and worked it out in practice to a degree I've never even attempted. Nonetheless, I can only go with my own responses in the end. There are solos that could be called 'all over the place' that I do enjoy, so maybe that wasn't the best description of what I'm hearing or not hearing here. I could give it at least a promising direction that he unfortunately didn't follow up on, which would put us not so far apart. For a music that's supposed to be about improvising, there's very little close analysis of not just what exactly happened in particular performances, but why is that good - the first is hard for more or less technical reasons, the second for more philosophical ones. And I agree about bebop being a closed little world, even if you think 52nd St. back in the day was some sort of Eden, you can't go back there and playing like Bird done it doesn't mean now what it meant to him or his audience. Thanks for giving me something to think about, as always.