Charlie Parker

Charles Parker Jr. was born on August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, Kansas, and grew up mostly across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, then one of the liveliest music towns in America ^[1]. His father, Charles Sr., worked as an entertainer and later as a Pullman porter and was rarely present; his mother, Addie Parker, raised the boy largely on her own and worked nights as a cleaner to support the household ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Charlie Parker before the fame finds an unremarkable student with one consuming interest. He played baritone horn in the school band at Lincoln High School, then switched to the alto saxophone his mother bought him around age eleven. By his mid teens he had left school to pursue music full time, sitting in at the clubs along 12th Street and 18th and Vine, where the Kansas City scene run under the political machine of Tom Pendergast kept bands working into the early morning ^[1].

The apprenticeship was harsh. At a jam session at the Reno Club in 1936, the drummer Jo Jones is said to have signaled his contempt for the teenager's faltering solo by tossing a cymbal to the floor, a humiliation Parker later described as a turning point ^[2]. He spent the following summer at a resort in the Ozarks practicing obsessively, learning Lester Young solos from records and drilling scales and chords in every key. When he returned to Kansas City, older musicians noticed the difference ^[3].

Parker's first significant professional job came with the band of pianist Jay McShann, which he joined in 1938 and rejoined in 1940 after a stretch scuffling in Chicago and New York ^[1]. With McShann he made his first commercial recordings for Decca in 1941, and his brief solos on sides such as Hootie Blues circulated among musicians who wondered who the alto player was ^[3]. It was during these years that he acquired the nickname Yardbird, soon shortened to Bird, an alias whose exact origin was disputed even by people who were there ^[2].

New York changed everything. Parker had first washed dishes at a Harlem chili house in 1939, within earshot of the pianist Art Tatum, and by his own account he had a breakthrough that December while playing Cherokee: he realized he could build melodies from the upper intervals of chords, and the music he had been hearing in his head finally came out of the horn ^[3]. After leaving McShann in 1942 he worked in the big bands of Earl Hines and then Billy Eckstine, ensembles that also carried the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and served as incubators for the new style ^[1].

After hours, the real laboratory was Harlem. At Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House, Parker, Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and a small circle of younger players tested fast tempos, altered chords, and rhythmic phrasing that broke from the swing era's dance beat ^[4]. A recording ban by the musicians' union between 1942 and 1944 meant much of this ferment went undocumented, so when the new music finally reached records, it struck many listeners as arriving fully formed ^[1].

The recordings Parker made in 1945 announced bebop to the wider world and remain the core of any account of Charlie Parker achievements. Sessions with Gillespie for the Guild label produced Groovin' High, Salt Peanuts, and Hot House, and in November 1945 Parker led his own date for Savoy Records that yielded Ko-Ko, a ferocious transformation of the Cherokee chord sequence, along with Now's the Time and Billie's Bounce ^[3]. The Savoy session has often been described by critics as one of the most important single dates in jazz history ^[1].

Parker composed prolifically, though almost always in the same compact way: new melodic lines written over the harmonic frameworks of the blues or standard popular songs. Ornithology drew on How High the Moon, Anthropology on the chords of I Got Rhythm, and Ko-Ko on Cherokee ^[4]. Pieces such as Confirmation, Scrapple from the Apple, Donna Lee (whose authorship has also been credited to Miles Davis), and Parker's Mood entered the permanent repertoire and are still required study for improvisers ^[3].

Between 1947 and 1948 Parker led what many historians consider his finest working group, a quintet with the young Miles Davis on trumpet, Duke Jordan on piano, Tommy Potter on bass, and Max Roach on drums, recording for Savoy and for Ross Russell's Dial label ^[1]. In 1949 the producer Norman Granz recorded him with a string section; Charlie Parker with Strings, including his celebrated reading of Just Friends, became the best selling record of his career and the project he reportedly valued most ^[3]. That same year a Broadway nightclub opened under the name Birdland in his honor, and in May 1949 he performed at the Festival International de Jazz in Paris, evidence of a reputation that had crossed the Atlantic ^[2].

Parker married young and often. He wed Rebecca Ruffin in Kansas City in 1936, when he was still in his teens, and the couple had a son, Leon, before separating. A second marriage to Geraldine Scott in 1943 was brief. In 1948 he married Doris Sydnor, and though that marriage also dissolved in practice, he spent his final years in a common law relationship with Chan Richardson, with whom he had a daughter, Pree, and a son, Baird ^[2].

Heroin shadowed nearly all of his adult life. Parker became addicted in his Kansas City teens, reportedly after a car accident in 1936 left him with injuries treated by narcotics, and the habit followed him through every professional triumph ^[1]. In the summer of 1946, strung out and drinking heavily in Los Angeles, he broke down during a Dial recording session and later that night was arrested after a fire in his hotel room; he was committed to Camarillo State Hospital, where he spent six months. On release he recorded Relaxin' at Camarillo, and for a period his health and playing rebounded ^[3].

Friends described a man of quick intelligence and wide curiosity who listened to Stravinsky, Bartok, and Hindemith and spoke of studying formal composition ^[4]. The death of his two year old daughter Pree from pneumonia in March 1954, while he was on tour in California, devastated him; the telegrams he sent to Chan that night survive as a record of raw grief. Within months he attempted suicide and was twice admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York ^[2].

The early 1950s brought professional honors and personal unraveling in roughly equal measure. Parker toured internationally, visiting Scandinavia in 1950, and Down Beat magazine's readers repeatedly voted him the top alto saxophonist ^[3]. Yet his New York cabaret card, the police issued license required to work in clubs that served liquor, was revoked in 1951 because of his narcotics record, cutting off much of his livelihood for nearly two years ^[1].

There were still remarkable nights. On May 15, 1953, Parker appeared at Massey Hall in Toronto with Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach, a one time gathering of bebop's principal architects. The concert was recorded and later issued as Jazz at Massey Hall, sometimes billed as the greatest jazz concert ever, even though Parker, whose horn was in pawn, played a borrowed plastic alto ^[4].

By late 1954 his life had contracted to borrowed rooms and unreliable bookings. An engagement at Birdland in March 1955 ended in an onstage dispute with Bud Powell. Days later, on March 12, 1955, Parker died in the Manhattan apartment of his friend and patron the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter at the Hotel Stanhope, while watching television. The official causes included lobar pneumonia; the examining physician, misled by the wreckage of addiction, estimated the 34 year old's age at more than 50 ^[2]. Against Chan's wishes, his body was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Missouri ^[1].

Within days of his death, the graffito Bird Lives began appearing on walls in Greenwich Village, an early sign that Parker had become something more than a musician to his admirers ^[2]. Any serious Charlie Parker biography has to account for that afterlife: he was mythologized by Beat writers, mourned in Charles Mingus's elegy Goodbye Pork Pie Hat era circle, and portrayed by Forest Whitaker in Clint Eastwood's 1988 film Bird, which won the Golden Globe for best director and a prize for Whitaker at Cannes ^[4].

The musical influence is easier to measure. Parker's harmonic vocabulary, his phrase shapes, and his rhythmic placement were absorbed by saxophonists from Sonny Stitt and Cannonball Adderley to John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and by players of every other instrument; transcriptions of his solos, collected in the widely used Charlie Parker Omnibook, remain standard teaching material in conservatories ^[3]. Grammy organizers gave his recordings a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984, and Ko-Ko and Charlie Parker with Strings were added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry ^[3].

Among the more durable Charlie Parker facts is the reach of his memory in physical places: his Kansas City hometown holds an annual celebration around his August birthday, the American Jazz Museum there displays one of his plastic saxophones, and his final residence at 151 Avenue B in Manhattan is listed on the National Register of Historic Places ^[1]. A century after his birth, orchestras, rappers, and film composers still borrow from a body of work created in barely fifteen years ^[4].