Few musical legends loom as large over jazz history as that of Charlie Parker. Before burning out at the age of 34, a victim of his own addictions and excesses, the alto saxophonist known as Bird helped blaze a path in the 1940s that took jazz in new directions. He didn’t just influence his fellow saxophonists, but changed the way everyone playing jazz approached the music.
Born August 29, 1920 in Kansas City, Parker was among a generation of adventerous young musicians bored and frustrated with toiling away as sidemen in the big swing bands of the late 1930s and early 40s. Parker was playing with pianist Jay McShann’s Kansas City-based band in 1940 when trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie came through town with Cab Calloway’s orchestra. They discovered they shared the same restless spirit and had similar new musical ideas.
After Parker moved to New York City, their musical collaboration grew during late night jam sessions at the Harlem nightclubs Minton’s Uptown and Monroe’s Playhouse where they played with other daring young modernists such as pianist Thelonious Monk, bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Kenny Clarke. They shared and learned from each other and developed a new form of jazz that was given the onomatopoeic name “bebop.”
In his autobiography To Be or Not to Bop, Dizzy Gillespie writes that his style had already developed before he met Parker, but the saxophonist showed how to get from one note to the next. “Charlie Parker definitely set the standard for phrasing our music.”
In some discussions of jazz history, the innovation of the boppers is cited as improvising over chord changes instead of basing solos on the melody like swing musicians did. However, there are many recorded examples of earlier jazz musicians soloing on the changes too. What Parker, Gillespie and others did was expand harmonic possibilities by opening up the chords and allowing more freedom to play a wider variety of notes that would still fit within a song’s structure. They also loosened the rhythm by accenting different beats and even stressing the spaces between beats. They created melodic phrases in odd lengths, beginning and ending anywhere, unlike the structured two, four and eight measure segments of swing.
Along with introducing advanced harmonies and a new rhythmic flexibility, Parker and Gillespie brought a heightened level of virtuosity. Bop was often played at rapid, blistering tempos with complex, angular melodic themes leading to torrents of fiery, improvised notes. Unlike swing, bop wasn’t for dancing. If you tried, you’d probably break a leg or at least twist an ankle. Jazz would no longer be popular entertainment, but serious art music.
More than seventy years later, it’s easy to understand that Parker and Gillespie’s music was just part of jazz’s evolution, but at the time it was seen as revolutionary. Bop faced an often hostile audience of musicians, critics and listeners who thought it was weird and dissonant. Popular swing bandleader Tommy Dorsey said bebop set music back 20 years. King of Swing Benny Goodman dismissed boppers as fakers. “I could play a lot of weird notes if I wanted to,” he said in 1946. “But I don’t want to.” Others like bandleader Woody Herman and pioneering tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins embraced the new music and hired young modernists, even though they never really played bop themselves.
Bop rose out of the counterculture and seemed like such a break with the jazz tradition because it progressed out of the public spotlight. Although Dizzy Gillespie’s short solos with Cab Calloway revealed hints that something new was brewing, a recording ban from 1942-44 kept the new sounds off discs during the time of bop’s greatest development. World War Two was also preoccupying people.
So, when the first bop records like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker’s “Shaw ‘Nuff“ were unleashed in 1945, they were shocking and seemed to have come out of nowhere, fully formed. Trumpeter/composer Thad Jones was on Guam with an army band and listening to the radio with his fellow musicians when “Shaw ‘Nuff” came on. “We went out of our minds!” he remembered years later. “It was the newness and impact of that sound, and the technique. It was something we were probably trying to articulate ourselves and just didn’t know how. And Dizzy and Bird came along and did it. They spoke our minds.”
After making his initial recordings with Gillespie, Parker led his own studio dates for the independent Savoy and Dial labels with bands featuring a young MIles Davis, pianist Erroll Garner, drummer Max Roach and others. These incalculably influential records codified the basic modern jazz format and approach that persists to this day. Classic sides include original tunes like “Ko-Ko,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology,” and “Scrapple from the Apple” and popular standards, most notably Gershwin’s “Embraceable You.”
Parker also brought new life and artful sophistication to the blues. Coming out of Kansas City, a city with a strong blues tradition, all of Parker’s music was steeped in what Gillespie called “sanctified soul.” Gillespie said that because of Parker’s innate ability to play the blues, he was able to transcend experiments in harmony to produce a finished and convincing new way of playing. One of Parker’s greatest recorded performances is the blues “Parker’s Mood,” which finds the saxophonist at the peak of his lyrical and expressive power.
Although he never received the public acclaim of Dizzy Gillespie, who was one of jazz’s great entertainers along with being a serious musician, Parker’s reputation and influence as the most important musical talent of his generation was complete by the end of the 1940s. Young Bird wannabes were everywhere as they tried to play like their idol. Bassist Charles Mingus fired musicians who were Parker imitators and titled a composition “If Bird Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.”
Unfortunately, Bird’s influence also extended to his addiction to narcotics. A generation of post-war jazz musicians fell to the plague of heroin because of the misguided idea that it would help them play like Bird. Parker was dismayed that so many followed his bad habits. He was a great and innovative musician in spite of his debilitating dependence on heroin and alcohol, not because of it. His achievements were the fruits of discipline, study and practice.
Eventually bebop became predictable and cliched just as swing had a decade earlier. The blowing format of head-solos-head was a dead end and what was once revolutionary became commonplace and familiar. In the 1950s bop gave way to cool jazz, hardbop and the avant-garde as musicians, many who played with Parker, built upon the saxophonist’s innovations.
Although still capable of great music, Parker became more erratic as he spent the last five years of his life fighting his demons. Determined to achieve the public acceptance that eluded him, he also pushed further into new musical territory. He recorded with strings, big bands, and Machito’s Afro-Cubans, but the results were often disappointing. He was intrigued with modern composition. Not long before he died, Parker asked French composer Edgard Varese to take him on as a student. His lifelong quest for musical fulfillment continued to the end.
When Parker died on March 12, 1955 at the age of 34 (the coroner estimated his age was 53), his passing was little noted by newspapers. But Parker’s legend was already building as “Bird Lives” was scrawled on Greenwich Village walls. His disciples, family and hagiographers all contributed to the Parker legend as his myth grew in stature in the years following his death. The Parker legend probably reached its apotheosis with Clint Eastwood’s muddled 1988 film, Bird.
Parker remains something of the underground cult artist he was during his lifetime. He isn’t as well-known as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or his compatriot Dizzy Gillespie and I’m guessing most people are unfamiliar with his name. But at the time of Parker’s death, writer and critic Gary Giddins argues, “his innovations could be heard everywhere: in jazz, of course, but also rock and roll, country music, film and television scores and symphonic works.”
Parker’s innovations are still at the core of jazz today. Saxophonist Vincent Herring was born nine years after Parker’s death. In the liner notes to the album “Bird at 100” he recorded with fellow saxophonists Bobby Watson and Gary Bartz, Herring says that even if you’re not directly influenced by him, so many people are in his language that it becomes a part of you anyway. “We’re still dissecting Bird’s music,” Herring says. “As people grow and the vocabulary changes, the roots are still there.”
Bird Lives.