CHARLIE PARKER CENTENNIAL
1) Charles McPherson and Steve Coleman
2) Tom Harrell and Mark Turner
4) Bertha Hope
5) Live Bird is the Best Bird (by Mark Stryker)
6) Bird is the Word (five famous solos and commentary)
>>> 7) Words about Bird (reception history, featuring Hampton Hawes)
Any of the many books and articles about Charlie Parker have at least some value.
At the time of Bird’s centennial, his theoretical, technical, and historical content and context is being understood better than ever thanks to a team of researchers across the globe: Rémi Bolduc, Steve Coleman, Peter Losin, Henry Martin, Thomas Owens, Leif Bo Petersen, Phil Schaap, Yoichi Suzuki, Nicolas Trefeil, Carl Woideck, and surely others I don’t know offhand.
I doff my hat to DTM associate Kevin Sun, who’s many Ornithological musings on his own blog contain jaw-dropping events such as two Bird solos played simultaneously and every occasion Parker said, “Salt Peanuts.”
Sustained interest in “getting the details right” concerning Charlie Parker is a comparatively recent turn of events. Immediately after his death, Bird’s reception history was soiled by an over-emphasis on the sensationalist aspects of the man’s life.
An early corrective to that narrative is Ralph Ellison’s stunning 1962 essay, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz,” collected in Shadow and Act.
The first page of Google results for “Charlie Parker” does not return Ellison, but rather Whitney Balliett’s distressingly lurid 1976 New Yorker essay “The Life and Work of Charlie Parker.”
Ironically, neither Ellison nor Balliett truly loved modern jazz, and their disparate critiques of Bird are unified by a skepticism of Bird’s greatest followers.
Both the contemporary plethora of technical detail and the old-fashioned arguments about lifestyle might obscure another basic fact: In the end, Charlie Parker was also a working-class musician.
The plebeian side of Parker’s life can be discovered in Bird’s Diary by Ken Vail, which documents a long and detailed paper trail for the years 1945-1955, including many astonishing telegrams with promoters, the union, and his wife.
Naturally, what other great practitioners of the era said about Bird is of paramount importance. Dizzy Gillespie’s To Be or Not to Bop is essential. There are also striking passages in the Miles Davis autobiography.
Hampton Hawes’s wonderful Raise Up Off Me (written with Don Asher) is both unusually frank and unusually literary. While admittedly having sensationalist aspects, the chapter on Bird is also very musical.
A theme of Hawes’s memoir is religion, partly because his father Reverend Hawes was a pillar of the community. Setting up the pages about Parker, Hawes concludes his father, “….Had God in his heart, and I didn’t…I didn’t meet God, or a facsimile of him, till years later at the Hi-De-Ho club at 50th and Western, playing alto in the Howard McGhee band.”
[In 1947] I joined Howard McGhee’s Quintet at the Hi-De-Ho. Bird had worked his way back from the East Coast and joined us. When I had first heard him at Billy Berg’s in 1945, I couldn’t believe what he was doing, how anyone could so totally block out everything extraneous, light a fire that hot inside him and constantly feed on that fire.
Now at the time there were maybe ten people in the neighborhood of 50th and Western who knew there was a genius playing alto. Most people who had heard him thought he was crazy. His playing was too free and blazing and pure; it could be dissonant and harsh on the ears if you weren’t accustomed to the sound. He had already recorded those early classics with Dizzy but you couldn’t find the records on any jukeboxes….
…The only people in the vicinity of 50th and Western who were hip to him were a few of the street people, one or two chicks at the house where he was staying — the woman who owned it, a madame with a whorehouse on the east side, was a good friend of his and put him up whenever he was in town — and, of course, other musicians. When word got around where he was playing they came to check him out. Motherfuckers peeked and backed right up. Those of us who were affected the strongest felt we’d be willing to do anything to warm ourselves by that fire, get some of that grease pumping through our veins. He fucked up all our minds. It was where the ultimate truth was.
As with anyone that heavy and different, some people were awed or afraid of him and kept their distance. Others pursued him, would drop by his pad and hang out, figuring if they were around him long enough some of his shit was bound to rub off on them. I watched motherfuckers write down his solos note for note, play them on their own gigs and then wonder why they didn’t sound as good. And if they had to follow Bird’s solo with their own stuff, that would really leave them exposed — like standing naked and wet in a cold wind.
I never crowded or bothered him. I was busy trying to figure out my own life and I sensed that aside from his music it wasn’t going to do me any good to be spending a lot of time around Bird. But he was the best player in the game, and on the stand when he’d sometimes look around at me and smile I knew I had played something good.
He was a sad driver — when his two-year-old car fell apart he left it in the street; borrowed mine once and tried to shift without using the clutch — so I’d pick him up every night at the madame’s house in my ’37 Ford, take him to work and bring him back.
For two weeks he never said a word to me — going to the club, on the stand, or driving home. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence; he was either stoned, froze, or just off somewhere else, and I respected whatever trip he was on and whatever distant place it carried him to. It was never an ego trip. If someone were to ask him who he liked better on alto, Henry Prior or Sonny Criss — it was the sort of thing a young player starting to come up would ask — he’d shrug and say, Both. They’re both cool.
Sometimes I’d pull up in front of the club and he’d be too high to get out of the car. Howard McGhee would ask me where Bird was. I’d say, “Sittin’ in the car.” No point in trying to pull him out, he wouldn’t have been able to play anyway. After a while he’d get himself together, walk in and start blowing — even before he reached the stand, weaving his way through the tables playing in that beautiful, fiery way.
At the end of the second week of the gig he spoke his first words to me. It was close to three in the morning when I left him off at the madame’s house. He got out, started walking toward the house, then stuck his head back in the window and said, “I heard you tonight.”
His uncle was Bishop Peter E. Parker and maybe he was close to God. I know he was damn near like a prophet in his music.
Hawes went on to be an outstanding bebop pianist. An early session with alto saxophonist Sonny Criss in 1949 shows these tough young LA cats commanding the idiom, like on the uptempo rhythm changes of “The First One.”
This wonderful Criss-Hawes music wouldn’t exist without Charlie Parker, but, of course, there’s nothing unusual about that: Most modern jazz is unthinkable without Bird’s monumental contribution.
Words about Bird aren’t that important. One just needs to keep listening. After you learn to appreciate the subtleties, you’ll hear something of Bird in just about everyone of consequence since. As for the man himself, I maintain Dewey Redman said it best: “Charlie Parker sounds better every day.”
CHARLIE PARKER CENTENNIAL
1) Charles McPherson and Steve Coleman
2) Tom Harrell and Mark Turner
4) Bertha Hope
5) Live Bird is the Best Bird (by Mark Stryker)
6) Bird is the Word (five famous solos and commentary)
7) Words about Bird (reception history, featuring Hampton Hawes)
DO THE M@TH 