Jazz Artists: Charlie Parker

 

Miles Davis once said, "You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis. Armstrong. Charlie. Parker."

Why is that?

 

Of course, Armstrong’s name really comes before any other, because he was the unprecedented musical genius who took this native New Orleans ensemble music and single-handedly turned it into a soloist’s art form. Before Louis Armstrong recorded his revolutionary records with his Hot Fives and Sevens in the 1920s, there was no dominant tradition or style that would give a basic reference point for what a jazz musician was or was supposed to play. It was Armstrong’s extraordinary skills as a creative soloist and his endless imagination that gave jazz music its distinguishing improvisational character. He also gave the music its style, and perhaps most important, he gave it its characteristic "swing."

All jazz musicians are the children of Louis Armstrong - they are his direct descendents. And that includes Charlie Parker. So why do we put Parker’s name up there alongside Satchmo’s?

Simple. Charlie Parker broke the history of jazz into two halves. His innovations, his unique style and approach to soloing, his attitude and his basic strategies for improvisation were so radical, so earth-shatteringly new and so fundamentally decisive for every jazz musician who came after him that we refer to the post-Parker era simply as "modern jazz." In other words, all jazz music, from his emergence in the mid-1940s up until the present day, is directly informed by the music of Charlie Parker, just as all of jazz is informed by Louis Armstrong. To play "modern jazz" of any form is simply another way of saying that one is playing a style that evolved from the mind of the man they called "Bird."

Charlie Parker is also one of the greatest cult figures in the history of modern Western culture, and for decades it has seemed impossible to cleanly divide the purely musical aspect of the man with the legend that looms so large in our collective consciousness. For Charlie Parker, sadly, also ensconced in stone the popular image that has so long been associated with the jazzman - a rebel, a junkie, a hipster, and ultimately, a symbol of (sometimes) romanticized self-destruction.

Fortunately, we have moved away from that rather shallow caricature over the last few decades to reach the core of the artist within the tortured life of the man. Because Charlie Parker was, very sadly, an unfortunate and sick individual, a victim partly to his own excesses, and partly to the rough and ragged struggle of the black musicians of his day to make their artistic statements in an often hostile and brutal world.

Yes, Charlie Parker was a heroin addict. And there’s nothing remotely romantic about it. Parker was using the drug as a teenager in his home town of Kansas City. Reportedly, he did not even realize that it was addictive until he felt the first horrible pains of withdrawal symptoms, pains to which he could never face returning again. For the rest of his short life, heroin would serve a double function. If it helped allow him to negotiate through a world often hostile to African-Americans, especially those who were intent on creating their art and culture on their own uncompromising terms, it also played on him as a demon in itself, blurring his picture of reality and sending him into a nightmarish downward spiral that would end with his tragic death at the age of 34. And no, there was nothing romantic about that either.

But the miracle of Charlie Parker is that somehow, in and through all the challenges and despairs of his life, he elevated America’s greatest music to a new level of unprecedented artistry and brilliance. Charlie Parker was a genius - his mind went where other people’s could not. And he revolutionized the music he inherited to such a thorough and profound degree that still, 60 years after his death, any important development in that music can be ultimately seen as a logical step from Parker’s vision. If Louis Armstrong was the Isaac Newton of jazz, Charlie Parker was its Einstein. He took his predecessor’s miraculous unification of all the basic principles of his subject and radically re-thought them in a way that would fundamentally change the world.

So what did Charlie Parker do that was so special? Like many things that have come to be commonplace over decades of use, it is sometimes difficult to imagine simply how radical they were at their inception. For the fact is that every modern jazz musician since Charlie Parker - no matter how different or idiosyncratic the approach - is fundamentally playing a variation on Charlie Parker’s original discoveries and vocabulary. We are still living in the world he envisioned.

That’s quite an accomplishment for any artist. Without Charlie Parker, jazz might have dried up and died; it could have remained simply a fascinating relic from another age. But Parker brought something to it that changed its dynamic fundamentally: he made jazz progressive by its very nature.

The challenge that Charlie Parker brought to the American music called jazz was not simply something that could be mimicked and adopted (though thousands of players tried). The real key of Parker’s vision, and its ultimate implication was that jazz, as seen though his eyes, was both fundamentally a self-conscious art music, but the implications of his innovations were such that jazz, to exist at all, demanded innovation to stay alive. And this, perhaps, is the greatest legacy that he left to the music he loved.

And jazz has paid a price for it. When Charlie Parker first came on the scene, jazz was still a popular music. The "swing age" was still in bloom, and all over the country, young people danced to the rhythms of large and small bands playing straight-ahead rhythms that would send swarms of both soldiers and civilians onto the dance floor. Charlie Parker’s music was not to dance to. You had to listen to it. You had to shut up and sit down.

After Parker, jazz was a thinking-person’s music. And not all people like to think. The more young musicians jumped upon Parker’s innovations and style, the smaller the audience became - and the smarter. Charlie Parker taught jazz to "grow up." But as in life, we lose something when we become adults, and jazz lost its mass following. From that day to this, it has remained what Parker made it - a special experience for the few: for those individuals everywhere that can take the time to listen, to listen hard and deep. And what is their reward? Any true jazz fan can tell you, but you won’t understand it unless you can hear it for yourself. What was the great reward for which such a high price was paid? How can you put it?

I just call it an experience of the sublime. It is almost (and in the case of John Coltrane, for example, there is not an "almost" about it) a religious experience.

How did we get there? Charlie Parker brought us. If there are those who didn’t follow, well I suppose it was their loss. Certainly the musicians followed. Bird was the pied piper. He changed more lives than anyone since Picasso or Joyce. But jazz’s big, enthusiastic audience dwindled away down to a hard-core center of true believers who lived for this music. And some still do.

There’s no way we’ll ever know for sure, but I believe that jazz as a popular music form was going away anyway. Even without Bird and the transformation he wrought, we would still have moved more to rhythm and blues and ultimately to rock ‘n’ roll. But I must confess that I feel sorry for those who didn’t have the patience to stick around and discover what the new breed were doing with the music. Actually, what saddens me most is the thought of so many potential lives that could still be profoundly touched by this most magic of this music, if they were only exposed to it in such a way that it could make sense to them, to affect them on a fundamentally basic human level. Perhaps rock is simply too loud to allow these instruments to be heard any longer.

I got lucky. I was in band as a kid, playing cornet in fifth grade (pretty well, too for a beginner). I had the unmitigated excitement of being drawn to the sound (and shiny glitter) of horns - both brass and woodwinds - long before my ears got caught up by guitars. Those "real" instruments remain my first love.

I can remember lying in bed at night, listening to public radio playing jazz late into the night. It always seduced me, brought me back closer to that world I saw in old black & white movies, the cool city sounds of New York, with all its hustlers, gangsters, gamblers and swank babes. It was like a cool and spacey dream - much cooler than anything in my world.

And then one night I heard a "musical documentary" about a legendary saxophone player. It was said that people spoke his name in reverent awe. He was known as "Bird." That was the first night I heard Charlie Parker, and believe me it sent chills down my spine. It still does. Yes, I got lucky.

I don’t know what other people hear while I’m listening to Charlie Parker, my soul floating free through time and space in blissful awe. I know they don’t hear what I hear because of the way they talk and behave. And I can’t explain them into it. To me it’s like a love for the moon - you either get it or you don’t.

But as to what is actually happening there - as to what Charlie Parker is playing? Wow, that remained an itching mystery for so long. Just what was modern jazz, anyway? How did these guys know what to play next? How did it all hold together?

Basically, I eventually had to hit some books. There’s a little switch somewhere, and maybe it’s different for everybody. But if you turn it a little bit, eventually whoever is looking in that direction will eventually go, "ah!" Not that they will understand everything. (Nobody will ever understand everything in music, especially where Charlie Parker is concerned, and believe me they’ve tried.)

The only thing I can tell you is that it’s kind of like when I watched football as a little kid. It was exciting, but I just didn’t get what was going on. And my dad, I think, just thought it was too complicated to try to explain. But somewhere along the way, I learned what a first down was. And everything started to click.

Now, I’ll never understand everything about football, any more than I’ll understand everything about music. I’m not smart enough to think on those higher levels. But I know what a first down is. So I can follow the game - everything flows from that. And whatever the equivalent of a "first down" is for you in music - especially jazz - once you get it, you’ll always be able to follow it, no matter how incompletely. But the more that you listen - like the more you watch football - the more you understand.

For me, the "first down" was recognizing the 32-bar AABA song pattern and its variations. Bam! Suddenly it made sense. For someone else, it might be some other phenomenon. Or it may be nothing. Some people just groove to the sound.

But Charlie Parker. Let me tell you a little about what Charlie Parker did. Even if I don’t understand it completely, perhaps I understand it enough to give a general idea of it. Kind of the same way I understand general relativity enough to know the universe isn’t like what Newton thought it was.

First of all, Charlie Parker wasn’t the only innovator. He was just the most brilliant. In the early and mid ‘40s, young jazz players used to meet at after-hour clubs where they could experiment and throw ideas off each other after their regular gigs were through. One was called Minton’s Playhouse. It was in Harlem. The house piano was a strange cat named Thelonious Monk. He was kind of like a mad professor of the piano and music theory. There was the hottest new trumpet player on the block, a kid named Dizzy Gillespie, who nobody could keep up with. There were horn players, bass players, drummers, all looking for something new. There was a lot of experimenting with harmony, playing over chords in new and different ways. Experimenting with speed, with shifting the beat around. Everything was getting faster and tighter. It was a real competitive hothouse and you had to play or get off the stand. It was a proving ground and a fertile reservoir for new and challenging ideas.

Charlie Parker told the story about how one night - even before he came to Minton’s - he made a discovery while playing a standard that everybody played called "Cherokee." Charlie knew those chord changes so well, and he was playing faster and faster, trying to reach notes that he could hear in his head, but he couldn’t figure out how. Then it hit him. Like a lightning flash. If you kept extending the intervals on the scale on which a particular chord is based, you would open up a virtually unlimited realm of notes that you could play over those chords and still make musical sense. You could play chromatically. Basically, what this means is that it involves a whole hell of a lot of math. But like I said . . . Charlie Parker was a genius.

So basically, what Charlie Parker did, in a single stroke, was to enormously enlarge a jazz musician’s vocabulary. As he began practicing with his new method, he extended it to more and more chord patterns and worked on it until he could apply it in any key. Once he had the basics of his system down, he worked on his speed, unusual configurations and groupings of notes, and wild experiments like playing asymmetrical phrases that often went "over the bar," carrying one musical idea and developing it far longer and more completely than jazz musicians had ever done with their solos.

It’s important to keep in mind, however, that no matter how brilliant Charlie Parker naturally was, it must have taken him countless hours of diligent practicing and experimenting in order to get to the extraordinary level of virtuosity that he was beginning to display at Minton’s by 1944. There is a kind of mythical aura that seems to surround jazz musicians - and Charlie Parker in particular - that they are somehow just "naturally gifted creatures" who can somehow simply play brilliantly whatever happens to float into their heads. People tend to not be aware of just how long and arduous the process is of learning to create melodic figures within the given parameters of a certain harmonic structure. They do not see the long days and nights of practicing scales, arpeggios, variations and creative patterns in search of a mastery of musical materials that few human beings have the will and stamina to attain. And yes, Charlie Parker was gifted with a great, remarkable brain and an extraordinary gift of imagination - I have said he was a genius, and many musicians and scholars will back me up on this. But that did not mean he did not have to fight and struggle long and hard to reach the extraordinary realm of range and power in the form of his new approach to musical expression.

Once his odyssey was near complete, of course, when he finally appeared leading a band in nightclubs and making records, it seemed to all and sundry that he had miraculously simply dropped down from heaven. No one could play what Bird played. No one could keep up with his amazing flow of ideas, which, as he continued to play, day by day, increased exponentially every time he picked up his horn. So his myth arose . . . and it continued to grow.

The real implications of the revolution that Charlie Parker brought about in his new approach to playing was the fact that every jazz musician - especially the younger generation - had to come to terms with it and learn to master it (if possible) for himself. This meant listening to Charlie Parker, analyzing Charlie Parker, constantly trying to play like Charlie Parker. The innovations that Parker introduced rapidly dispersed as they were uncovered and slowly digested by musicians everywhere, particularly in New York City, the unquestioned jazz capitol of the world. Parker’s revolutionary discoveries threw the jazz world into a schism. The Old Guard, who naturally felt challenged by all this complexity, speed and protean power, reacted negatively to the innovators, while the young Parker-worshippers dismissed their elders as "old school."

This fracture and fragmentation in the music world can naturally seem as unfortunate - and often unfair, especially to the great older musicians. But with such radical change, it was probably inevitable. Once Parker, and his great musical partner in the new movement, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, began playing together in the crowded nightclubs on 52nd Street, where seemingly all the jazz world congregated, everyone naturally had to choose up sides. And for most of the young, talented and ambitious musicians in the postwar world of the greatest city on earth, there was really no choice. You followed Charlie Parker or you got left behind. (Actually, many followed Charlie Parker and still got left behind - they simply could not keep up.)

Of the old masters, only the great Coleman Hawkins, the first great master of jazz saxophone, learned from the youngsters and followed the new sounds. Jazz was now split firmly into two camps, and those camps were defined by a generation gap just as clearly and completely as any cultural generation gap in history. This is what I mean when I say that Parker "broke the history of jazz into two halves." There was pre-Charlie Parker, and there was post-Charlie Parker. There was the old jazz and there was the new jazz. And if you wanted to play the new jazz - well, you had to play like Charlie Parker.

The media, particularly the music media that was set up to observe and report on jazz happenings, struggled to come to grips with what was happening. The Parker/Gillespie revolution was so powerful and unstoppable that they had to deal with it - even the ones who hated it (and there were many in those early years who did). The music eventually ended up with a handy musical handle that could be applied to its practitioners without the writers having to think or describe what they were hearing too analytically. It became "bebop." This was literally a nonsense term, and it derived from some syllables when singers and musicians began "scat singing" in the new style. Dizzy Gillespie, a great self-promoter, accepted the term and played with it comically. (He even recorded a song called "He Beeped When He Should Have Bopped.") He and many others embraced the new "bebop fashion": a snazzy French beret, a moustache with goatee. Basically any and everyone who imitated the natural dress and manner of the highly idiosyncratic Thelonious Monk was more or less officially in "bebop style." And then there was the language. "Hip" became the new language of the streets and cats who couldn’t cut the new lingo were quickly ostracized from the more fashionable followers of the cult.

None of this mattered to Charlie Parker, however. He hated the term "bebop," felt it demeaned what he simply called "the music." And for the next decade at least, Parker was the unquestioned king of this new world, despite (or perhaps even because of) his disdain for what was regarded as hip and fashionable. He dominated it simply because he was its embodiment where it truly counted - in music. For at least ten years, nobody on the street could touch Bird. Bassist and composer Charles Mingus wrote a tune called "Gunslinging Bird": its full title was, "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats." From 1945 on, learning to play jazz meant learning to play like Charlie Parker.

Then there were the drugs. Because Bird was an addict, it became cool to be an addict. For awhile, it almost became a necessity. It was actually believed that heroin fueled Charlie Parker’s muse, an assertion that the musician himself never tired of furiously denying. For the unfortunate fact was that this great musician, this artist, this genius - was a trapped and terribly troubled man. His habit quickly devoured his life, though amazingly it never seemed to get to his music, unless, according to cohorts, when Bird would get so loaded that he simply didn’t care.

Charlie Parker apparently, deep down, was a man living constantly on the edge. His drugs and his drinking destroyed him young, but ironically, they were probably the only thing that could help him keep it together as long as he did. But they also fueled his enormous ego and his appetites, and they pushed him to behavior that constantly crossed over the line into what in other people would have been called madness. But Charlie Parker could play what nobody else could play. And that bought him a ticket, a license to get away with murder.

We will never really know what all went on inside of this extraordinarily complex, brilliant and troubled individual. How could any of us possibly know, much less judge? As an artist, Charlie Parker knew precisely who he was and what he had done. He lived his life as a legend, hailed by the world, but tied to the streets, often desperate, always low on money, looking for a place to be the free and respected man he knew he should have been. And while he could blame many enemies, including a cutthroat music world where rich white entrepreneurs could still make a fortune off of exploiting helpless black musicians, he had to know that deep down inside, his biggest enemy would always be Charlie Parker.

On the evening of March 12, 1955, Charlie Parker finally found the freedom that had eluded him in life. He died at his friend’s hotel room, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter while watching television. The causes of death were multiple. The coroner estimated the 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years old.

This is part of the Charlie Parker myth as well: the jazz artist as self-destructive martyr. It is not a part of the myth that I like to embrace when I think of the man, but I don’t think we should ever completely dismiss and ignore it either. Because within all the complexities of this sad state of affairs that was romanticized for far too long, there lurks the heart of a great human tragedy. I cannot claim to understand it, but I cannot neglect it, if for no other reason that just out of simple human decency.

Hours after the news of his death leaked out to the clubs and bars, graffiti began springing up all over New York City. Nobody knows who started it, but soon just about everywhere you went, you could read the words: "Bird Lives."

Who knows what part of the myth these anonymous scribblers were celebrating? All of it, probably. But for me, the truth of the saying "Bird Lives" lies squarely in the music that he created and the celebration of both life and beauty that you can hear in his undying playing. And of course, he lives on in the work of every single jazz musician that has played since. And that is because before any one of those talented individuals can find their own voice, they must first begin with "Charlie Parker music," and then move on from there. There is simply absolutely no other way possible to go about it.

Bird lives, indeed.

 

 

 

Coming - The Charlie Parker discography: the essentials

 

- petey