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Parker, Charles Christopher ("Bird") or Charlie Parker (b. August 29, 1920, Kansas City, Kans.; d. March 12, 1955, New York, N.Y.), masterful alto saxophonist who, along with Dizzy Gillespie, founded bebop, or modern jazz.Together with trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, Charlie Parker was the primary creator of bebop, or modern jazz. His musical innovations profoundly influenced other alto saxophonists, as is evident in the playing of Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Eric Dolphy, Lou Donaldson, Charles McPherson, and Frank Morgan. Indeed, Parker's influence extended well beyond jazz to popular music and film and television scores. Despite his musical brilliance, however, Parker led a troubled life that included the use of heroin at an early age, an addiction that contributed materially to his death and was deeply intertwined with his musical mystique.Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas, across the Kaw River from the much larger Kansas City, Missouri. His father, Charles Parker, Sr., was a singer and dancer from Mississippi and Tennessee who abandoned the family when his son was about 11 years old. His mother, Adelaide Bailey Parker, was originally from Oklahoma. Between 1927 and 1931, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, the jazz capital of the Southwest.Under the corrupt reign of Democratic boss Thomas Pendergast, Kansas City was a wide-open town, and its bars, honky-tonks, and night clubs remained open until dawn, featuring live music and often no-holds-barred jam sessions. Kansas City gave birth to a freewheeling, stripped-down form of swing music that was deeply grounded in the blues and was epitomized by the Count Basie band. Parker soon developed an interest in music. Lawrence Keyes, a musician and friend of Parker's at Lincoln High School remarked, "If he had been as conscientious about his school work as he was about music, he would have become a professor, but he was a terrible truant."During 1935 and 1936, when Parker was about 15, his life changed dramatically. He dropped out of school, married Rebecca Ruffin, began playing with the Deans of Swing — a band led by Keyes — and had his first experience with heroin. Within a year he was addicted. Periodically throughout his life Parker would try to limit his heroin use, generally by substituting large quantities of alcohol, which was no less debilitating. In 1938 his first son, Francis Leon Parker, was born. Over the next few years, Parker concentrated on his music and learned from older players musicians in Kansas City and at resorts in the Ozarks. In 1939 Parker decided to hazard a trip to New York City, the nation's jazz center. There he took part in jam sessions, most notably at two Harlem nightspots, Clark Monroe's Uptown House and Dan Wall's Chili House.While jamming at the Chili House one night in December 1939, Parker had a profound musical breakthrough. He recalled:
Although it took Parker several years to consolidate the full implications of this discovery, his achievement heralded a new era in jazz. In early 1940, however, Parker left New York for Kansas City to join Jay McShann's big-band. Parker would stay with McShann about two and a half years. During the swing era, big-bands provided the majority of job opportunities for jazzmen, but musicians such as Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, then playing in Cab Calloway's orchestra, rankled at their lack of artistic freedom. Parker's job with McShann did bring him back to New York City in late 1941 or 1942. Soon he began collaborating with Gillespie, who had independently achieved comparable harmonic breakthroughs.The musical sparks Parker and Gillespie struck while playing together created modern jazz, initially known as bebop or simply bop. Parker clearly recognized the musical symbiosis between the two and regarded Gillespie as "the other half of my heartbeat." They worked together during 1943 and 1944 in Earl Hines's big-band, an important bop incubator. But they perfected their music in jam sessions, especially at Monroe's Uptown House and Minton's. The new music offered richer harmonic textures, with more varied tempos — both much faster and, on ballads, much slower than typical swing era jazz — and a subtler rhythmic pulse.Besides his advanced harmonic approach, Parker attained a previously unheard of rhythmic subtlety with his elliptical and fluid melodic lines. His technical mastery allowed him continuously to reinvent melodies, including rapid double-time passages, over the chord sequence of a given song. He was also at ease playing in every key, at a time when many jazz musicians were far more limited. In 1943, while in Washington, D.C., with the Hines band, Parker married Geraldine Scott without bothering to divorce his first wife. Parker's heroin habit worsened, and fellow musicians pressured him to quit hard drugs. Instead Parker quit the band and returned to Kansas City, ending his relationship with Geraldine. The Hines band broke up soon after, and a number of its more modernist players regrouped around a new leader, singer Billy Eckstine, with Gillespie as musical director. The Eckstine band was the first bop big-band and included, besides Gillespie, drummer Art Blakey, vocalist Sarah Vaughan, and, soon, Parker. Yet once again Parker quickly left an environment he found stifling. With few exceptions, the rest of his career involved playing in small groups.Parker's first significant recording sessions came in late 1944 and 1945, for Savoy and, under Gillespie's leadership, for Musicraft. The latter produced a number of particularly fine recordings, including "Salt Peanuts" and "Shaw 'Nuff." Gillespie and Parker also played an extended gig at the Three Deuces, which Gillespie later described as the "height of perfection of our music." But Parker's subsequent career was increasingly erratic. Gillespie asked Parker to join him on a trip to California, to play at Billy Berg's, a Los Angeles nightclub. For Parker, the decision to go was a fateful one. In California, Parker made his first classic Dial recordings — including "Moose the Mooche," "Yardbird Suite," and "Ornithology." Yet the arrest of his drug dealer, Emery "Moose the Mooche" Byrd, resulted in Parker's having a nervous breakdown on July 29, 1946, while recording "Lover Man." Parker spent several months in Camarillo State Hospital, and Ross Russell, the owner of Dial Records, released his tortured "Lover Man." Although the record was acclaimed by Parker's many followers, Parker insisted that it was "a horrible thing that should never have been released." Beginning in 1947 Parker made New York City his home base. There he formed his great quintet, which included Miles Davis and Max Roach, and recorded a number of sessions for Dial, highlighted by the superb ballads "My Old Flame," "Embraceable You," and "Don't Blame Me." In 1948 Parker began recording with Norman Granz's Verve label, including groundbreaking sessions with strings. However, the greatest moments of his later career took place in concert. Two of these were recorded, a 1949 appearance at Carnegie Hall and a 1953 reunion with Gillespie at Toronto's Massey Hall. During these years, Parker regularly won the annual Downbeat magazine readers' poll as best alto player, and his fame extended to Europe, taking him to Paris in 1949 and to Scandinavia the following year.But Parker's personal life became increasingly troubled. In 1948, he married his third wife, Doris Sydnor, but left her two years later to enter a relationship with Chan Richardson, with whom he had a daughter, Pree, and a son, Baird. Due to a drug conviction, he lost his "cabaret card," required of all musicians playing in New York City nightclubs, from 1951 to 1953, seriously limiting his ability to work. The physical cost of Parker's heroin and alcohol abuse was also clearly mounting. Besides making his performances increasingly erratic, it gave him stomach ulcers, liver problems, and at least one heart attack. When he died in 1955 the attending physician estimated Parker's age at between 50 and 60 years. In fact, he was only 34. Yet despite his early death, Parker's uncompromising and innovative musicianship have assured his immortality. Indeed soon after his funeral, graffiti began appearing around New York City proclaiming, "Bird Lives!" |
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