The Charlie Parker Centennial

Jazz great Charlie Parker (1920-1955) was born 100 years ago today.

It’s an oversimplification, of course, but there’s truth to Miles Davis’s formulation that the entire history of jazz could be boiled down to two lightning rod figures, Louis Armstrong, and Parker. The claim isn’t that they were the only ones who made great music. It’s about what they discovered, Armstrong as the most accomplished of the early jazz pioneers, and Parker as the guy who blasted through all of the popular music conventions of his time to the avant-garde universe known asbe bop.

Your correspondent has so much awe for the cosmic head-space that sort of music taps into that out of over 8,000 posts on this blog, fewer than two dozen deal much with it, and not very deeply. It’s out of respect, more than anything else. I don’t possess the vocabulary, and music critics (one of whom I emphatically am not) are most exacting. Ask me about visual art, cinema, theatre, even to a certain extent dance, and I have a certain command or can at least respectably fake it. And I can certainly do the same with popular music forms (folk, rock, blues, tin pan alley). But when you get into SERIOUS music, as much pleasure as I take in listening to it, the technical language it requires is well outside my toolkit, as it is for 99.99% of the population. (Chord substitution? I’m doing good when I can hit the RIGHT chord!)

But this gets at the nature of Parker’s contribution. He practiced and studied his saxophone so much, and so hard, that he broke through to the kind of musical knowledge previously considered the province of classical composers and musicians, beyond the twelve western keys, and the accustomed pop music chord progressions, to a command of his saxophone so total that he could take a musical number anyplace. He went from the arithmetic most of us apply, to advanced mathematics. Sorry, not literally true (some will protest) but metaphors, and imperfect ones at that, are all I’ve got.

Parker came out of the Kansas City jazz scene, and believe it or not, once again there’s a vaudeville angle to the story! His father sang, danced and played piano on the TOBA (black vaudeville) circuit, prior to later working for the railroads. He began playing sax at age 11, and by the time he was in his middle teens he was so good he dropped out of high school and joined the musicians union. He was only 16 when he was touring with one of the local bands and a bad car accident broke several of his bones, including his spine. This is when his heroin habit started. Yet throughout this time and until the end of the decade, Parker played in local bands, participated in jam sessions with older musicians, and practiced up to fifteen hours a day. It was during this period that he was nicknamed “Yardbird”, often shortened to “Bird”,

It was shortly after moving to New York in 1940 that he blasted through into the terra incognita we call be bop, helped along by his constant contact with peers Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, Billy Eckstine, Miles Davis,Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Erroll Garner, et al. He played on scores of albums throughout his short life, helping to spread his fame beyond the small set lucky enough to have witness his live performances. By 1949 he was held in such esteem that the still extant new York jazz club Birdland was named in his honor. Jack Kerouac wrote poems about him. Later Alvin Ailey created a dance in his honor, and Basquiat painted paintings inspired by him. And let’s not forget the British rock/ blues band The Yardbirds, a band of guys certainly admiring of Parker’s epic devotion to practice.

Parker famously died while staying at the hotel room of jazz patron Baroness Pannonica, a member of the Rothchild Family.  At the time of his death, he was watching the The Dorsey Brothers’ tv variety program Stage Show. The cause of his decease was recorded as a combination of pneumonia, a bleeding ulcer, cirrhosis of the liver, a heart attack, and a seizure triggered by all of his organs giving out at the same time. And surely he was weakened by years of drug abuse. Though only 34 at the time, many assumed he was 20 years older.

In 1988 jazz buff Clint Eastwood directed Bird, the Charlie Parker bio-pic starring Forest Whitaker. (It’s pretty much what made a star out of the actor, after supporting roles in things like Platoonand Good Morning Vietnam).

Here in New York there is an annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival every August, held in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, and Tompkins Square Park on the LES, right across from where the Bird lived for several years. His hometown Kansas City (also home of the American Jazz Museum) hosts Spotlight: Charlie Parker every August as well.