Parker, Charlie
Charlie Parker, 1947.
© William P. Gottlieb; used by permission. William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress (LC-GLB23-0688 DLC).
alto saxophonist and jazz composer, also nicknamed “Bird” and “Yardbird,” was born Charles Christopher Parker in Kansas City, Kansas. His father, Charles Parker, Sr., toured black theaters as a singer on the TOBA circuit and later was a chef on the Pullman railroad line; his mother, Addie Boxley (surname uncertain), worked as a cleaning woman. Charles Sr. left the family sometime in the late 1920s, and Charlie saw him only a couple of times after that. In 1931, Parker moved with his mother to Kansas City, Missouri. Formerly a quiet, serious student, by the time he registered at Lincoln High School in 1932, he had become a chronic truant and uninterested in school. It was not for lack of love; his mother constantly doted on him.
When he was thirteen Addie bought Parker his first alto saxophone, but he quickly lost interest. Two years later he joined the high school’s marching band, led by the legendary teacher Alonzo Lewis, where he played alto and baritone sax before settling on the alto. Influenced by the more serious, older students in the band, he began to pursue his musical studies more conscientiously. By 1934 he had become attached to the master alto player Buster Smith, who became his first real teacher and a much-needed father figure, and who shaped the young Parker’s tone, attack, and linear conception of improvisation. Parker also joined a high school band called the “Deans of Swing,” a group that had rejected him earlier, and his mother bought him a used Conn alto in good condition. Soon after the “Deans” broke up, his best friend and musical idol, the young trombonist Robert Simpson, died, and Parker seems never to have recovered from the emotional shock; he quit school soon thereafter at the age of fifteen.
Kansas City was one of the most important centers of jazz at the time. During his teens, Parker was able to hear such players as Jay McShann, Budd Johnson,
Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, and
Johnny Hodges, and he was particularly influenced by
Lester Young with the Count Basie Orchestra and
Barney Bigard with Duke Ellington. In the spring of 1936, he was humiliated when he tried to jam with members of the Count Basie band and drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him to get him off the stand. That same year, he married Rebecca Ellen Ruffin, whose family Charlie’s mother had taken in as borders. To support his new family he began playing gigs with swing bands at resorts in the Ozarks. By this time he was also beginning to experiment with drugs, taking benzedrine capsules.
Despite his growing personal problems, Parker’s playing continued to improve. Most who heard him at this time, including the pianist and band leader Jay McShann in 1937, noted that he was already playing differently from other altoists. Two private recordings from 1938 or 1939 survive, one of “Honeysuckle Rose,” the first piece Parker ever taught himself, the other of “Body and Soul.” He was still struggling under the influential shadows of Chu Berry and Coleman Hawkins, but his solos were strong and imaginative.
While his musical life began to cohere, Parker’s personal life began to disintegrate. Rebecca gave birth to a son in 1938, and Parker played one-nighters to earn money; but his moods became erratic, and around this time he began to inject heroin. That summer he did land a job in Eldon, Missouri, with a group headed by
George Lee, and he learned a great deal about music from guitarist Efferge Ware; he also began to listen to records, memorizing Lester Young solos from the first Count Basie recordings. His first real break came that fall, when Buster Smith hired him as second alto for a job at the Reno. For a while Parker responded to Smith’s musical and personal guidance and rarely missed a rehearsal or even showed up late. But eventually he found himself on his own again; his physical and mental condition continued to deteriorate and his home life fell apart. He went on working in local clubs until he fled to Chicago in 1938 after nicking a cab driver with a knife.
When he arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1938, Parker walked into the 65 Club, borrowed a horn, and simply blew everyone away. Shortly thereafter he took a bus to New York City and got a job as a dishwasher at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, where Art Tatum was the house pianist: too shy to introduce himself to Tatum, Parker soaked in the master’s influence, particularly the pianist’s harmonic approach to improvisation. He sat in on jam sessions at Monroe’s Uptown House and made friends with the guitarist Bill “Buddy” Fleet, who also taught him a great deal about harmonic structures. He practiced constantly, and it was not long before he experienced what is certainly one of the most famous “revelations” in music history. Working on Cherokee, his favorite practice warhorse, Parker said that “as I did I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive” (Giddins, p. 56). There is no reason to doubt Parker’s account, and it is worth noting that his explanation should lay to rest, once and for all, the notion that he was an intuitive “folk” genius, a condescending conception of popular artists that has cursed jazz musicians for decades.
From 1940 to 1942 Parker toured the Southwest, Chicago, and New York City with McShann. Though he made his first official recordings in Dallas in April 1941, transcription recordings for the Wichita, Kansas, radio station KFBI, intended for later broadcast and never commercially released, are particularly revealing. They show that he was still rooted in his major influences—“Body and Soul” follows the Chu Berry version but includes a quote from the Hawkins version, and “Lady Be Good” is a tribute to Young. But “Honeysuckle Rose” is individual and original, and Parker’s playing throughout is unique in conception and execution. The Dallas recordings confirm this impression.
Parker continued to work with various bands around New York, but when he received word of his father’s death he returned to Kansas City and briefly played with Harlan Leonard’s group. However, he soon joined McShann’s latest band, and he played with McShann regularly for the next three-and-a-half years. About the same time he divorced Rebecca. With McShann, he rehearsed the reed section, soloed, and lightened the atmosphere with his humor. His playing by now was completely assured. He began to frequent jam sessions at Monroe’s and Minton’s in New York, the two principal venues for the emergence of bop, and his reputation among musicians began to grow. A stint with the
Earl Hines band in which Parker played tenor began in December 1942 and was particularly crucial. Here Parker began to establish the critical relationship with the trumpeter
Dizzy Gillespie, his partner in the development of bop, and impressed Hines himself with his general musical skills—his ability, for instance, to memorize an arrangement at a single reading. February 1943 jam sessions in a room at the Savoy Hotel, privately recorded, show the beginnings of the unique Parker-Gillespie relationship on “Sweet Georgia Brown,” as well as the first of Parker’s endlessly creative versions of “Embraceable You.” Audiences still did not appreciate what they were hearing; it was during this time that Parker’s personal problems began to worsen. He appeared at a concert in Detroit with no shoes, lost in a drug haze, and frequently missed gigs.
In April 1943 Parker married the dancer Geraldine Marguerite Scott, and shortly thereafter he and several modernists left Hines and joined a new group led by Hines’s former vocalist
Billy Eckstine. The Eckstine band served as an incubator both for bop and for the extraordinary creative relationship between Parker and Gillespie. Recordings of a Gillespie-led quintet from the Three Deuces club in 1944 show an intuitive interaction between the two unmatched by jazz musicians since the 1920s. Parker made his first important studio recordings with the Tiny Grimes Quintet in September 1944, followed by two sessions with Gillespie with Guild Records in February and May 1945 that produced the first bop classics: “Groovin’ High,” “Salt Peanuts,” and “Shaw ’Nuff.” Parker’s playing already incorporates the beautiful melodies, extended solos, propulsive rhythms, and off-beat accents (most famously in “Salt Peanuts”) that were to become his trademarks.
In November 1945 Parker recorded for the first time as a leader for Savoy Records. The session included his classic “Ko Ko,” based on the chords to “Cherokee”; it opens with “a blistering eight-bar unison theme of daunting virtuosity, coupled with improvised eight-bar arabesques by Parker and Gillespie” (Giddins, p. 88). These sessions, together with others that he recorded for Savoy in 1947 and 1948, are among the most creative both in Parker’s career and in the history of twentieth-century music. Along with rotating accompanists—Gillespie,
Miles Davis, Tommy Potter, Curly Russell, Max Roach, Duke Jordan,
John Lewis—Parker broke with the swing tradition once and for all. His innovations began with a starkly beautiful tone that abandoned vibrato altogether. He brought to fruition harmonic developments that had been explored for years in the work of Art Tatum, Charlie Christian, and Coleman Hawkins. After Parker, bop musicians routinely replaced the existing chords of a tune with related but different ones, in essence recomposing the song. While they may have done this in part to discourage the “unhip” swing musicians, the musical impact was profound. Many of Parker’s compositions in this vein became standards: “Anthropology,” based on the chord changes of “I Got Rhythm”; “Ornithology,” on those of “How High the Moon”; and “Scrapple from the Apple,” on “Honeysuckle Rose.” Finally, Parker’s most revolutionary contribution was his aggressive approach to rhythm. He placed his notes on heavy beats, weak beats, or anywhere in between, creating the asymmetrical, shifting rhythmic structures so characteristic of the bop revolution.
Two weeks after his first Savoy sessions Parker opened with Gillespie at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood. However, Parker’s dramatically worsening personal problems, his absenteeism, and the hostility of conservative critics and fans prevented him from following up his artistic breakthrough with success as a performer. Parker himself, contracted for sessions with Dial Records, came apart before he could complete the recordings. One night in June 1946 he wandered naked into the lobby of the Civic Hotel and then fell asleep while smoking, setting his mattress on fire. He spent the next six months in Camarillo State Hospital.
When he was released in January 1947 Parker responded with an amazing burst of creativity. The next two years (1947–1948) were easily the most productive ones of his career, and from 1947 to 1951 he laid down over half of his recorded legacy: The sessions that he recorded for Dial are legendary, jazz artistry taken to the pinnacles of music. In one twelve-month period, with a small core of rotating musicians that included Davis, Jordan, Potter, Roach,
J. J. Johnson, Red Callender, and others, he recorded definitive versions of such tunes as “Moose the Mooche,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology,” “Embraceable You,” “Klacktoveedestene,” and “Scrapple from the Apple.” On the two takes of “Embraceable You,” he plays hauntingly beautiful solos. In ballads, Parker disassembled the song and put it back together in a structure far more complex than the original. His own playing lagged behind the beat, floating along or leaping ahead as the mood struck him. In his faster pieces, critic Whitney Balliett noted, “His runs exploded like light spilling out of an opened doorway. … He crackled and roared” (Balliett, p. 186). Parker placed accents on either the first and third (strong) beats or on the second and fourth (weak) beats or anyplace in between, such rhythmic innovations dramatically changing the music’s flow. Finally, his solos, bursting with imaginative ideas, were models of order and alternating bursts of “brief, rhythmically terse phrases … with long, flowing busts of melody” (Williams,
Smithsonian, p. 21).
Parker returned to New York City in April 1947. By now musicians worshipped him, and many memorized his solos note for note. But for the most part jazz fans and critics continued to ignore or criticize him. This lack of public acceptance undoubtedly contributed in some way to Parker’s unalleviated personal problems. His drug habit worsened. He tried to warn young musicians not to emulate him, but many believed that his creative genius would rub off on them if they copied his lifestyle. The result was a generation of musicians devastated by heroin addiction. Yet most accounts suggest that Parker’s personality remained warm and open and that he provided considerable personal guidance and professional advice to young musicians, even while neglecting his own responsibilities.
The year 1949 was memorable for Parker. He embarked on his first European tour, the jazz club Birdland was opened in his honor, and he continued to play at a high level. But his personal life never ceased to be in disarray. He had by now divorced Geraldine, and that summer he left Doris Sydnor, with whom he had lived off and on since 1945, and moved in with Chan Richardson. The couple had two children, and Parker made a brief attempt at bourgeois respectability (which he always craved) by moving to New Hope, Pennsylvania. But he was soon back in New York City.
The last few years of Bird’s life were an unpredictable mix of tragedy and continued genius. In July 1951 the New York narcotics squad had his cabaret license (his license to perform) revoked; it would not be reinstated until the autumn of 1953. Forced to seek work elsewhere, he toured with local pick-up groups and found himself as a guest soloist with strange pairings—for instance, with Woody Herman in 1951 and with Stan Kenton in 1954. But he did enjoy frequent musical reunions with Gillespie and other bop pioneers, resulting in a significant number of club and concert recordings that affirm the genius of his playing until the very end. The best-known of these is the 1953 concert at Massey Hall, in Toronto, Canada, with Gillespie, Roach, Powell, and Charles Mingus on bass. But equally important musically are a 1950 gig at St. Nick’s Arena, the 1952 concert at Rockland Palace, 1951 and 1953 sessions at Birdland, and a 1953 concert in Washington, D.C. Still more significant are a series of recordings he made for Norman Granz on Verve records, highlighted by 1952 sessions released under the title
Swedish Schnapps that included classic later Parker solos on “Au Privave,” “She Rote,” and “K.C. Blues.” The Granz recordings also included controversial sessions with strings. Parker himself had always yearned to be taken as a serious musician, of equal stature with European, “classical” composers, and these sessions reflect, to some extent, this desire. The results vary, but there are many moments of beautiful melodic playing.
While his playing could still astonish, the last months of Parker’s life saw the culmination of the personal devils that had beset him for most of his life. The death of his daughter Pree in 1953 at the age of two, of congenital heart disease, seemed to break him. He attempted suicide in 1954 by swallowing iodine after a fight with Chan and after being fired from a job at Birdland. He voluntarily committed himself to Bellevue. At the end of 1954 he separated from Chan. He began to play in dives and even had a public fight at Birdland with Bud Powell. He made his last appearance at his namesake club on 5 March 1955. He died in the Manhattan apartment of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the sister of Lord Rothschild.
Parker’s position in jazz history is undisputed, surpassed only by that of Louis Armstrong. His innovations demanded a complete reassessment of the art. Bop was more asymmetrical and more dissonant, and it was played at much faster tempos and with greater rhythmic contrast. The standard performance practice consisted of a group statement of melody, several choruses of improvised solos based on chord substitutions, and a concluding melodic refrain. The bassist now became the timekeeper, the drummer and pianist responsible for adding harmonic and rhythmic accents. Bop became the dominant musical form until the introduction of modal jazz in the early 1960s, and it experienced a widespread revival in the late 1980s and 1990s. Parker himself influenced almost every altoist who followed and even tenor players like Sonny Rollins and
John Coltrane. Finally, jazz now demanded to be taken seriously, a music to be listened to on the same level as European concert music.
Parker himself was a highly intelligent person, who possessed a truly impressive vocabulary and could converse knowledgeably on almost any topic. He yearned to be taken seriously as a musician, and he admired certain classical composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók. Towards the end of his life he sought lessons from the composer Edgard Varèse and openly spoke of his desire to write orchestral scores, frustrated at being hemmed in by the single, albeit highly creative, voice of bop. Yet the significance of his contributions remained unrecognized by the general jazz public during his lifetime. At the peak of his influence,
Life magazine ran an article on bop without even mentioning him;
Time, in a story on the “new jazz,” put Dave Brubeck on the cover. Only one author of a newspaper obituary got his birth date right, and two did not even know his first name. In many ways, he remains a symbol of the successes and failures of jazz in the United States—a true musical genius ignored by the larger American culture.
Annotated Bibliography
•There is a vast literature on Parker and the bop era, but there are few works that stand out. The best place to start, and the closest we have to a definitive full biography, is Gary Giddins, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (1987). Excellent analyses of his music can be found in Thomas Owens, Bebop: The Music and Its Players (1995); Frank Tirro, Jazz: A History (1993); Lewis Porter and Michael Ullman, with Edward Hazell, Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present (rev. ed., 1993); Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (1993), and The Smithsonian Collection of Jazz (rev. ed., 1987). More personal assessments are in Nat Hentoff, Jazz Is (1976), and Whitney Balliett, New York Notes: A Journal of Jazz in the Seventies (1977). Still worth consulting are Robert George Reisner, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (1962), and Ross Russell, Bird Lives! (1973).
Bibliography
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Giddins, Gary
. Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (1987).
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Owens, Thomas
. Bebop: The Music and Its Players (1995).
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Tirro, Frank
. Jazz: A History (1993).
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Porter, Lewis, and Ullman, Michael, with Hazell, Edward
. Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present (rev. ed., 1993).
-
Williams, Martin
. The Jazz Tradition (1993).
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Williams, Martin
. The Smithsonian Collection of Jazz (rev. ed., 1987).
-
Hentoff, Nat
. Jazz Is (1976).
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Balliett, Whitney
. New York Notes: A Journal of Jazz in the Seventies (1977).
-
Reisner, Robert George
. Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (1962).
-
Russell, Ross
. Bird Lives! (1973).
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