Charlie Parker never achieved stardom, at least not by the standards of the music business. He never had a gold record to hang on the wall or enjoyed a significant radio hit. He never had a contract with a major record label. His face didn’t appear, even in a bit role, in a Hollywood film. If you measure a musician’s worth at the cash register—the ultimate arbiter of talent nowadays, or so it seems—Parker can only be called a minor figure, operating at the fringes of the entertainment industry.
But within the subculture of modern jazz, Parker was more than a star. He was a legend. Even before his death at age 34, 60 years ago this month, Parker had assumed the status of a demigod among those who followed the most progressive currents in jazz—as well as among hipsters, beatniks, and various practitioners of what passed for “alternative lifestyles” during the Eisenhower era. And even now, with 60 years of perspective since his untimely passing, we still struggle to separate the man from the myth.
Charlie Parker came of age in Kansas City at a time when the city enjoyed a scandalous renown for jazz, uninhibited nightlife, and easy access to illegal intoxicants. The Parker mythos was built on the same ingredients: His nickname, Bird, perhaps referred to his free-flying alto saxophone lines, which darted and flowed with a mesmerizing unpredictability. But his life was similarly unconstrained, almost in free-fall.
The two sides of Parker, virtuoso musician and haunted victim of personal demons, often seemed to go hand in hand. I still encounter musicians who tell me that Bird’s visionary music was inspired, at least in part, by heroin. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, this view was even more prevalent, and Parker’s example had too many followers who could justify their self-destruction by pointing to his rare artistry.
They could call attention to the amazing 18-month run leading up to Parker’s July 1946 arrest and subsequent institutionalization at Camarillo State Hospital in California. Parker was clearly in a state of dissolution and chemical dependency during this period, yet it was when he made many of his most influential recordings—pathbreaking tracks such as “Ornithology,” “Night in Tunisia,” “Ko-Ko,” “Salt Peanuts,” “Hot House,” “Yardbird Suite,” and “Billie’s Bounce.” These recordings invented the bebop vocabulary and defined the course of modern jazz for years to come.
When I was a teenager, I studied this music as if it were holy writ, a source of arcane wisdom for those desiring initiation into the inner sanctum of jazz improvisation. Parker had died before I was born, but he was ever-present in my own coming-of-age as a musician. I listened over and over again to everything Parker recorded during the mid-1940s—even the alternate takes and false starts. I studied transcriptions of Parker’s solos and made marks in the margins to call attention to especially striking licks and phrases. And around the time of my 20th birthday, I bought a turntable that allowed me to play records at half-speed. I delighted in my ability to hear in slow-motion Bird songs that previously had flown by at breakneck pace.
This is the side of Charlie Parker that I cherish, analytical and almost mathematical in its purity. It’s not as sensational as the tales of the desperate addict, pawning his sax to get a fix. It isn’t suitable for a made-for-TV biopic. It’s not tawdry or glamorous. But the secret to Bird’s ability to swoop and soar resides here, in his manifold ways of combining the 12 notes of our tempered scale.
So forgive me if I wax rhapsodic over Parker’s bold use of chromaticism—which went far beyond anything done previously in jazz. The same goes for his placement of rhythmic accents and subdivisions of the beat. I simply can’t talk about Charlie Parker without acknowledging these remarkable achievements. I learned as much about melody construction from Bird as I did from Bach and Beethoven, and I still apply his teachings every time I sit down at the piano and improvise. Parker never wrote a textbook, but he really didn’t need to—his records present the results of a long process of synthesis and codification, available to anyone with open ears and a willingness to put them to the test.
Yet I note with some sadness that Parker’s contributions aren’t as widely recognized, or even understood, as they once were. After his untimely death, bebop acolytes proclaimed “Bird Lives,” which served triple duty as graffito, mantra, and shibboleth for the cognoscenti. But sometimes I wonder how much vitality Parker’s spirit still possesses in the context of the current music world. His former sideman Miles Davis is much better known, among both the general public and up-and-coming musicians. If you were to ask sax players under the age of 40 to name the artist who most influenced them, you would probably hear the names of John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, and maybe even Michael Brecker before Parker got acknowledged.
Sixty years is a long time, and the revolutions of the 1940s must seem like grandpa’s tea party to a new millennium audience. Also, young jazz fans show a marked preference for artists who recorded albums with the superior high-fidelity technology that emerged in the late 1950s. If Parker had lived to his 40th birthday, he could have taken advantage of this aural leap forward. But as it stands, the jazz albums of 1959 (Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um) are cherished by contemporary jazz fans, who see them as part of an ongoing cultural dialogue, while the jazz milestones of the 1930s and ’40s are mostly forgotten.
But it’s no coincidence that John Coltrane’s first recordings show him slavishly imitating Charlie Parker. Or that Miles Davis grew to maturity as a musician by studying Bird’s example. Or that Charlie Mingus and Thelonious Monk also developed their skills while working alongside Parker. By my measure, he is one of the three most influential figures in the history of jazz—along with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Yet of the three, Parker is by far the least well-known.
Ah, but just when I fear that Parker is becoming a footnote to music history, someone comes along to restore my faith that Bird does still live. One of my favorite saxophonists, Rudresh Mahanthappa, just released a Parker tribute album called Bird Calls. And not long ago, Joe Lovano, one of the greatest living masters of the tenor sax, released his Bird Songs. Saxophonist Steve Coleman, awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” last year, also draws frequent inspiration from Parker’s oeuvre.
A few jazz writers have kept Parker’s flame burning. Stanley Crouch recently released the first volume of his long-awaited biography of Parker, Kansas City Lightning. As a result, we now know more than ever about the formative years of this musical master, and we can finally see the flesh-and-blood person behind the murky legend. Crouch casts light on the dark side of the altoist’s lifestyle but refuses to glamorize it; above all, he never lets us forget that Parker’s greatness transcends the tawdry details that so many others have emphasized. This is, I am convinced, how Parker would want to be remembered.
For my part, I know how I will celebrate the anniversary of Parker’s death. I will turn again to the music, especially those recordings from the mid-1940s that captivated me as a teenager and that still excite me today. That’s my fix, maybe even my addiction. And I see no reason why, all these years later, I should break the habit.
Ted Gioia is the author, most recently, of Love Songs: The Hidden History (Oxford).
