On Charlie Parker

In the run-up to the Ike Age, somebody had to be a hero the hipsters, unthawing the culture’s frozen meanings and mores. It might as well have been Bird, nocturnal and narcotic, exemplifying a musical virtuosity that transcended virtuosity, he embodied an entire existential ethos. And it wasn’t just that he played the song fast. It’s that he played the song fast while maintaining the basic chord structure. And the way he maintained the basic chord structure was by piling the notes high on top of the chords. If it seems like an obvious solution now, it’s only because Bird made it that way. At the time, in the 1940s, it was nothing less than a revelation. He and Dizzy put their horns together and worked over the songs like problems until finally they felt they had their solution. The name that was given to that solution was bop—that’s what they called it then and that’s what it’s called still.

Music was the foundation upon which its appeal rested, but its appeal went way beyond music. One of Parker’s old producers at Dial, Ross Russell, writes about Parker’s standing as a cultural icon in his biography Bird Lives!:

The true jazz age was not the decade of Van Vechten, Fitzgerald and Paul Whiteman. It was the decade of the 1940s. Charlie Parker was the first, the real jazz age hero. His passionate feeling for the blues, pervading every note of his playing, his toughness and resilience, were expressive of the Afro-American ethos that has now become the archetype of the loneliness and alienation of modern man, its universal nature suggested by the odd, oblique confrontation between Parker and Jean-Paul Sartre in Montmartre in 1949, a passing of ships in the night. Parker’s message of alienation and his pained cries against the hypocrisy of the society in which he found himself, its false values, sentimentality, and absurd pseudo-nostalgia for innocence were already well understood by those oddly-dressed, long-haired hipsters, black and white, who followed Parker from Minton’s Playhouse to Fifty-Second Street in 1944, before the war had even ended. There was a new awareness of life and concern with society even then, even though it was part of a peripheral, emergent subculture articulated by an explosive music that few could grasp.

Without the music to outlast him, all his suffering would seem to have almost been in vain. When he took his notorious trip out to L.A. and the far side in 1946, he brought his heroin habit, his sax, the suit on his back, and a tightly bundled package of neuroses . Guess which two of those four would be coming back with him to New York.

He recorded “Lover Man” out there in L.A., and Russell was present for that one, too, on behalf of Dial. So much has been written about the session and the recording that resulted, the votes coming down solidly against it. All the admirers who cite the raw emotion emitted on that night as evidence of its brilliance will meet an emphatic argument from Russell, who has described the scene in terms that challenge any refutation:

There was a long, seemingly endless piano introduction as Jimmy Bunn marked time, waiting for the saxophone. Charlie had missed the cue. The alto came in at last several bars late. Charlie’s tone had steadied. It was strident and anguished. It had a heartbreak quality. The phrases were choked with the bitterness and frustration of the months in California. The notes passed in a sad, stately grandeur. Charlie seemed to be performing on pure reflexes, no longer a thinking musician. These were the raw notes of a nightmare, coming from a deep subterranean level. There was a last, eerie, suspended, unfinished phrase, then silence. Those in the control booth were slightly embarrassed, disturbed and deeply affected.

Later that night he was up in his hotel room still plenty drunk. Occasionally he would come down to the lobby buck-naked, demanding to use the phone, until finally he was confined by management to his room. A stray cigarette sent his mattress aflame, and he came running down naked again. This time, instead of being confined to his room, he was confined to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, which would get a bop anthem of its own when Parker cooked up his tune “Relaxin’ at Camarillo.” By then he was back in New York and recording strong again, but with some of the same personal problems and some new ones too. He made some of his best music during this period, and you don’t have to make the hard choice between raw emotion and technical proficiency—it’s a choice that Charlie Parker in his best work liberated you from ever having to make.