From “Bird Land,” by Stanley Crouch

 

The  life of Charlie Parker was a perfect metaphor for the turmoil that exists in this democratic nation. It traversed an extremely varied world, in­cluding everything from meeting and talking with Einstein to attending par­ties with Lord Buckley where Communists tried to turn him. Parker was at once the aristocracy and the rabble, the self-made creator of a vital and breathtakingly structured jazz vernacular and an anarchic man of dooming appetites. He was always trying to stay in the good graces of those stunned by his disorder. His artistic power was almost forever at war with his gift for self-destruction. He was dead in 1955, at thirty-four, his remarkable musi­cal gifts laid low by his inability to stop fatally polluting and tampering with the flesh and blood source of his energy, with his own body.

 

Those musical gifts made it possible for Parker to evolve from an inept alto saxophonist, a laughingstock in his middle teens, to a virtuoso of all­encompassing talent who by the age of twenty-five exhibited an unprece­dented command of his instrument. His prodigious facility was used not only for exhibition or revenge, moreover, but primarily for the expression of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic inventions, at velocities that extended the intimidating relationship of thought and action that forms the mystery of improvisation in jazz. In the process, Parker defined his generation: he pro­vided the mortar for the bricks of fresh harmony that Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie were making, he supplied linear substance and an eighth-note triplet approach to phrasing that was perfectly right for the looser style of drumming that Kenny Clarke had invented.

 

 

 

The anomalies are endless. He performed on concert stages as part of Norman Granz's jazz at the Philharmonic, traveling in style and ben­efitting from Granz's demand that all his musicians receive the same accom­modations, regardless of race; but when he was at the helm of his own groups, Parker was usually performing in the homemade chamber music rooms of nightclubs. "One night I'm at Carnegie Hall," he once told the sax­ophonist Big Nick Nicholas, "and the next night I'm somewhere in New Jer­sey at Sloppy Joe's." These shifts of venue paralleled the contrasts in his personality. The singer Earl Coleman, who first met Parker in Kansas City in the early forties, said of him:

 

You could look at Bird's life and see just how much his music was con­nected to the way he lived.... You just stood there with your mouth open and listened to him discuss books with somebody or philosophy or religion or science, things like that. Thorough. A little while later, you might see him over in a corner somewhere drinking wine out of a paper sack with some juicehead. Now that's what you hear when you listen to him play: he can reach the most intellectual and difficult lev­els of music, then he can turn around-now watch this-and play the most low down, funky blues you ever want to hear. That's a long road for somebody else, from that high intelligence all the way over to those blues, but for Charlie Parker it wasn't half a block; it was right next door... .

 

It was not Parker's scope, however, but his wild living, and his disdain for the rituals of the entertainment business, that made him something of a saint to those who felt at odds with America in the years after World War II, who sought a symbol of their own dissatisfaction with the wages of sentimental­ity and segregation. Parker was a hero for those who welcomed what they thought was a bold departure from the long minstrel tradition to which Ne­groes were shackled. He was, for them, at war with the complicated fact that the Negro was inside and outside at the same time, central to American sensibility and culture but subjected to separate laws and depicted on stage and screen, and in the advertising emblems of the society, as a creature more teeth and popped eyes than man, more high-pitched laugh and wobbling flesh than woman.

 

 

 

Parker appeared at a point in American history when that bizarre image of the Negro had been part of many show business successes: min­strelsy itself, the first nationally popular stage entertainment; Birth of a Nation, the first epic film and "blockbuster"; "Amos 'n' Andy," the most popular radio program since its premiere in 1928; The Jazz Singer, where Jol­son's Jacob Rabinowitz stepped from cantorial melancholy into American optimism by changing his name to Jack Robbins, changing the color of his face, and introducing the recorded voice to film; Gone With the Wind, At­lanta's plantation paradise lost; not to mention the endless bit parts in all the performing arts that gave comic relief of a usually insulting sort, or that "realistically" showed Negro women advising lovelorn white girls in their boudoirs. Parker offered an affront to that tradition of humiliation,

 

In fact, the jazzmen who preceded Parker had also addressed the insults of popular culture, and countered those stereotypes with the elegant de­portment and the musical sophistication of the big bands. Parker turned his back on those bands, though; and not only because he preferred five-piece units. Manhandling the saxophone and Tin Pan Alley ditties, writing tunes that were swift and filled with serpentine phrases of brittle bravado, arriving late or not at all, occasionally in borrowed or stolen clothes so ill-fitting that the sleeves came midway down his forearms and the pants part way up his calves, speaking with authority on a wide variety of subjects in a booming mid-Atlantic accent, Parker nicely fit the bohemian ideal of an artist too dedicated to his art to be bought and too worldly to be condescended to. (Except, of course, when he chose himself to mock his own identity, as when he stood in front of Birdland dressed in overalls and announced to his fellow players that he was sure they must be jazz musicians because they were so well dressed.)

 

Historically, Parker was the third type of Afro-American artist to arrive in the idiom of jazz. Louis Armstrong had fused the earthy and the majestic, and had set the standards for improvisational virtuosity and swing; but he was also given to twisting on the jester's mask. Duke Ellington manipulated moods, melodies, harmonies, timbres, and rhythms with the grace of re­laxed superiority, suavely expanding and refining the art in a manner that has no equal. Armstrong's combination of pathos, joy, and farce achieved the sort of eloquence that Chaplin sought; and Ellington commanded the impli­cations of the Negro-derived pedal percussion that gave Astaire many of his greatest moments. But Parker was more the gangster hero, the charming an­archist that Cagney introduced in Public Enemy. The tommy gun velocity of Parker's imagination mowed down the clichés he inherited, and enlarged the language of jazz, but like Cagney's Tom Powers, he met an early death, felled by the dangers of fast living.

 

 

 

In many ways , Parker reflected the world in which he was reared, the Wild West town of Kansas City, where everything was wide open and the rules were set on their heads. The mayor and the police were in cahoots with the local mob; liquor flowed during Prohibition, and gambling and prostitu­tion were virtually legal. When the musicians went to bed, everybody else was getting up to go to work. Parker's mother was the mistress of a deacon considered an upstanding representative of the life led by those who lived by the Bible. These were, perhaps, the origins of Parker's conviction that finally there was no law; and the double standards of the racial terrain understand­ably added to that view.

 

Parker's father was an alcoholic drawn to the nightlife; his mother left him when the future saxophonist was about nine. Convinced that she could keep young Charlie away from the things her husband loved by giving the boy everything he wanted, she reared him as a well-dressed prince who could do no wrong. That treatment is far from unusual in the lives of Negro innovators. It gives them the feeling that they can do things differently from everyone else. But there was also a crippling side to it. As the bassist Gene Ramey, who knew the saxophonist from about 1934, remarks in the excel­lent oral history Goin' To Kansas City, "He couldn't fit into society, 'cause ev­idently his mother babied him so much, that he ... was expecting that from everybody else in the world."

 

But when Parker, who was known for his laziness, became interested in music in the thirties, he quickly discovered that the gladiatorial arena of the jam session made no allowances for handsome brats in tailor-made J. B. Simpson suits at the height of the Depression. He was thrown off many a stage. It was then that he decided to become the best. As Parker told fellow alto player Paul Desmond in 1953, "I put quite a bit of study into the horn, that's true. In fact, the neighbors threatened to ask my mother to move once when I was living out West. They said I was driving them crazy with the horn. I used to put in at least eleven to fifteen hours a day. I did that for over a period of three or four years."

 

He practiced incessantly, and was in the streets, listening to the great lo­cal players. He was drawn especially to Buster Smith and Lester Young, though he told the younger saxophonist Junior Williams that it was when he heard Chu Berry jamming in Kansas City in 1936 that he actually became se­rious about the saxophone. (So serious, in fact, that he gave his first son Berry's name, Leon.) Berry was swift, articulate, and a great chord player; Smith had deep blues soul; Young preferred a light sound that disavowed the conventional vibrato and invented melodic phrases of spectacular variety and rhythmic daring. Parker was also taken by the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, whom he quotes in an early homemade recording; and studied the harmonic detail of Coleman Hawkins; and he was surely inspired by the unprece­dented velocity of the pianist Art Tatum.

 

 

 

Velocity was essential to Parker's life. Everything happened fast. On the night that Joe Louis lost to Max Schmeling in 1936, fifteen­ year-old Charlie Parker proposed to Rebecca Ruffin and married her a week later. He was a morphine addict by the summer of 1937, which suggests that he may have mixed in an upper-class circle, since there was no heavy drug trade in Kansas City at the time. By January 1938, Parker was a father. He was also anxious to see more of the world and "rode the rails" with hobos later that year, stopping in Chicago, then continuing on to New York, where he arrived with a nickel and a nail in his pocket. It was there that Parker found the beginnings of his own style. In 1940 he returned to Kansas City for his father's funeral and joined Jay McShann's big band, becoming the boss of the reed section and the principal soloist. In a few years he headed the movement that added new possibilities to jazz improvisation and was termed, much to Parker's chagrin, "bebop."

 

It was during Parker's three years with McShann that the intellectually ambitious personality began to take shape. Parker was interested in politics, mechanics, history, mathematics, philosophy, religion, languages,, and race relations. He loved to mimic actors like Charles Laughton, was a prankster and a comic. His problems with dissipation became obvious, too; he told his wife Doris that he had never been able to stop, and recalled that his mother would have to come and get him from a hotel where he was using Ben­zedrine, staying up nights and going over music. These appetites made him unreliable, and McShann had to send him home for rest often, working with his mother to try and help him handle his addiction.

 

Parker was also, in fine modernist fashion, a man of masks. Gene Ramey, a member of the McShann band, recalled:

 

He shouldn't have been nicknamed Yardbird or Bird Parker; he should have been called Chameleon Parker. Man, could that guy change di­rections and presentations on you! But he also had a gift for fitting in-if he wanted to. That applied to his music most of all. Bird would sit in anywhere we went-Bob Wills, Lawrence Welk, wherever the local jam session was, anybody that was playing.... We used to prac­tice together often, just saxophone and bass, We would take "Chero­kee," and he would ask me to tell him when he repeated something so he could meet the challenge of staying fresh and fluent. Bird liked to take one tune and play it for a couple of hours. Then he would know every nook and cranny of the melody and the chords. He was very sci­entific about those things.... Now he might not talk about it, but don't let that fool you into believing he wasn't thinking about it.

 

But beneath the masks, beneath the obsession with music, the mimicry, and the involvement in the sweep of life, there was a need. McShann says that Parker had a crying soul that always came out in his playing; and his first wife, Rebecca, observed it when he was in his early teens:

 

It seemed to me like he needed.... He wasn't loved, he was just given. Addie Parker wasn't that type of woman. She always let him have his way, but she didn't show what I call affection. It was strange. She was proud of him and everything. Worked herself for him and all, but somehow I never saw her heart touch him. It was odd. It seemed like to me he needed. He just had this need. It really touched me to my soul.

 

The refinement of Parker's rhythm and the devil-may-care complexity of his phrases came to early distinction during those barnstorming years with McShann, in his next job with Earl Hines, and in the laboratory for the new vernacular that was Billy Eckstine's big band. On "Swingmatism" and "Hootie Blues," recorded with McShann in 1941, Parker had already put to­gether the things that separated him from the alto order of the day. His sound is lighter; he uses almost no vibrato; the songful quality of his lines have a fresh harmonic pungence; and his rhythms, however unpredictable, link up with an inevitability that seems somehow to back its way forward through the beat.

When McShann brought his band to New York in early 1942, Parker was able to spend time after hours with the musicians who were stretching the language of jazz uptown in Harlem, usually in Minton's Playhouse or Monroe's Uptown House. "When Charlie Parker came to New York, he had just what we needed," said Dizzy Gillespie. "He had the line and he had the rhythm. The way he got from one note to the other and the way he played the rhythm fit what we were trying to do perfectly. We heard him and knew the music had to go his way."

 

 

 

The importance of Parker's jamming with Gillespie, Monk, and the others has often been noted; but the importance of his big band experi­ence cannot be overemphasized. In those bands Parker learned not only how to blend with other musicians and how to lead a section, he also became a master of setting riffs, those spontaneous motifs that were repeated as chants. Riffs were what gave Kansas City's jazz its reputation; they com­pressed the essence of the music into one vital unit of rhythm and tune. By playing for dancers, Parker discovered the world of rhythms that Afro­American audiences had invented. Backing singers as varied as McShann's blues crooner Walter Brown, the romantic balladeer Eckstine, and the un­precedented virtuoso Sarah Vaughan, Parker had three distinctly different approaches to the voice to draw from, all of which were incorporated into the epic intricacy of his melodic inventions. Jazz had always demanded that the player think and play his ideas with exceptional speed and logic, but Parker proved that everything could be done even faster. Unlike Tatum, Hawkins, and Byas, who were excellent technicians given to harmonically sophisticated arpeggios, Parker was primarily a melodist; his work brought lyricism to the chords and made rhythmic variations that matched the best of Armstrong and Young.

 

 

 

By casting aside vibrato, Parker introduced a sound many consid­ered harsh at the time. But the ballad performances on Warner Bros.' The Yery Best of Bird (the famous Dial sessions of 1946-47) establish that the hard­ness of his sound was modified by a charming skill for elucidating the riches of romantic fancy in a way that made his music both spiritual and erotic; this was the romantic talent that drew many women to this disordered but be­guiling man from whom a high-minded sense of grandeur was delivered with imperial determination. That imperial aspect was also a part of his mu­sic's attraction: awesome virtuosity of the sort heard in "Warmin''Up a Riff" or "Ko-Ko" is always a protest against limitations. (Both performances are available on Savoy Original Master Takes.)

 

The small, curved brass instrument with cane reed and pearl buttons was throttled and twisted, until it allowed him to express a barely stifled cry that was ever near the edge of consuming rage, the pain of consciousness ele­vated to extraordinary musical articulation. Bird often sounds like a man torn from the womb of safety too soon. He resented the exposure that mu­sic demands, and yet he loved it, because there was no other way he could project himself. But this was no primal scream: the fearful force of Parker's music is always counterpointed by a sense of combative joy and a surprising maturity, by the authority of the deeply gifted. Parker brought the violent rage of the primitive blues (of Robert Johnson, for example) to the citadels of art inhabited by the music's greatest improvisers. For Parker, swing and lyricism were some sort of morale, the bars behind which the beast of hys­teria was confined.

 

Will, in sum, was important to the art of Charlie Parker. He was, after all, a heroin addict. Those who know little about intoxication often fail to realize that the repetition of the condition is what the addicted love most. They seek a consistency that will hold off the arbitrary world. If a few glasses of whiskey, or a marijuana cigarette, or an injection of heroin will guarantee a particular state, the addict has something to rely on. As Parker told Doris, "When you have a bad day, there's nothing you can do about it. You have to endure it. When I have a bad day, I know where to go and what to do to make a good day out of it." Doris Parker also notes that the saxophonist of­ten showed the strength to kick the habit, cold turkey, by himself at home. But the temptations ever present in the night world of jazz always over­whelmed him.

 

Charlie Parker's early fall resulted more from his way of making "a good day" than it did from race, the economic system, or the topsy-turvy world of his art. It was a tragedy played out along a dangerously complex front of culture and politics, something far more intricate than the crude hipster mythology of [Clint] Eastwood's [movie] Bird. It was a fully American story of remarkable triumphs, stubborn misconceptions, and squandered resources which tells us as much about the identity of this country as it does about the powers of jazz.