[Dixielandjazz] Bird Lives

[Steve Barbone]

CAVEAT - Not OKOM & LONG. - Delete Now if narrowly focused on trad jazz.

However, for those who trace the evolution of Bird from his Blues Roots, to
NYC and his fascination with Art Tatum, to his frequent quotes of the first
several bars of the Picou solo on "High Society", this is a good read.

Note that it falls into a "Music" category in the Times, not jazz. Hmmm. For
those in NYC this weekend, there is some "music" to be heard. Both at Marcus
Garvey Park in Harlem, and Tompkins Square Park in Greenwich Village.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Music
NY TIMES - August 24, 2007 - By NATE CHINEN

Charlie Parker, Uptown and Down

In ³Bird Alone,² one of the terse and symbolically charged songs Abbey
Lincoln chose to revisit on her recent album ³Abbey Sings Abbey² (Verve),
there are no specific references to Charlie Parker. But any jazz fan would
recognize this alto saxophonist and bebop progenitor, whose sobriquet was
Bird (or Yardbird), in Ms. Lincoln¹s lyrics. The airborne creature of the
title is untouchable and inscrutable, ³Sending mournful soulful
sounds/Soaring over troubled grounds.² After gliding high and swinging low,
it vanishes, leaving only a song.

That image provides an apt tribute to Parker, whose mercurial genius
galvanized jazz in the 1940s and ¹50s, and whose influence endures more than
half a century after his death. An equally fitting homage is offered by the
15th annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, which takes place this weekend at
Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem and Tompkins Square Park in the East Village,
places that bear some relevance to the life Parker led in New York.

Ms. Lincoln, who turned 77 this month, is scheduled to make a rare
appearance ‹ two in fact, one at each location ‹ as is the veteran drummer
Chico Hamilton, 85, who will perform a new composition for sextet inspired
by Parker and commissioned by the festival.

And each of the concerts will surely entail a memorial to Max Roach, the
pioneering drummer and close Parker associate who died last week at 83. Mr.
Roach set an inventive percussive precedent that Mr. Hamilton adopted and
personalized. Mr. Roach¹s connection to Ms. Lincoln was more direct: In 1960
they worked together on his landmark album ³We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,²
and in 1962 they were married. (They divorced in 1970.)

On a fundamental level, though, the festival pays homage to Parker and his
footprint in the city. In many ways he was the quintessential New York hero:
a maverick and bon vivant, a subject of notoriety and myth. He loved the
city, and he toasted it outright with a tune called ³Scrapple From the
Apple² that was recorded in a New York studio 60 years ago this fall and
almost immediately became popular with musicians. (Along with a catchy
melody, it had a familiar harmonic progression, with elements of Fats
Waller¹s ³Honeysuckle Rose² and George Gershwin¹s ³I Got Rhythm.²)

³Charlie Parker became a New Yorker,² said the jazz historian Phil Schaap,
whose Parker-fixated weekday radio program, ³Bird Flight,² has been heard in
its current form on WKCR (89.9 FM) since 1981. ³That was important to him,
and he felt great about it, and he enjoyed New York nightlife as well as he
dominated it for a while.²

Like so many celebrated New Yorkers Parker came from somewhere else. He was
born in Kansas City, Kan., on Aug. 29, 1920, and began his musical career
across the state line in Kansas City, Mo., during the waning days of its
biggest nightlife boom. The depth of that experience will be a principal
subject of ³Kansas City Lightning: The Life and Times of the Young Charlie
Parker,² a long-gestating biography by the critic Stanley Crouch due out
from Pantheon next year.

Parker made his first foray to New York in 1939, on the heels of Buster
Smith, his fellow saxophonist and Kansas City mentor. While crashing at Mr.
Smith¹s apartment, he hit jam sessions at Harlem spots like Clark Monroe¹s
Uptown House on West 134th Street.

³The only place he could really meet musicians who were going to help him
realize his goals would have been New York, and specifically Harlem at that
time,² the saxophonist and historian Loren Schoenberg said recently by phone
from the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, where he is executive director. The
museum¹s August programming has been pointedly Parker-centric; next Tuesday
the final lecture of the month takes place at the Harlem School of the Arts.

Lore has it that Parker¹s initial Harlem sojourn included toiling as a
dishwasher at Jimmy¹s Chicken Shack, where the fearsome pianist Art Tatum
held court. At another uptown spot, Dan Wall¹s Chili House, Parker had what
he later described as an epiphany, during one of many sessions with a
guitarist named Biddy Fleet.

In an interview a decade later with Down Beat magazine, Parker recalled that
he had tired of the stereotypical chord voicings then in use. ³I kept
thinking there¹s bound to be something else,² he said. ³I could hear it
sometimes, but I couldn¹t play it.² One night in 1939, improvising over the
Ray Noble tune ³Cherokee,² he brought his idea to life. ³And bop was born,²
Down Beat added, putting the kicker on a story so irresistible that Thomas
Pynchon slipped it into his epic novel ³Gravity¹s Rainbow.²

But bebop was no more traceable to a solitary bolt of inspiration than
Parker¹s complex style was. And bebop¹s infancy had to wait a while as
Parker returned to Kansas City, where he resumed ties with the pianist Jay
McShann. For the next couple of years he worked in the Jay McShann
Orchestra, playing ³Cherokee² as a solo feature.

Among the earliest known recordings of Parker is a broadcast of the McShann
band¹s debut at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem on Feb. 13, 1942. The
engagement, effectively Parker¹s first big splash in New York City,
attracted the notice of many local musicians, including a few, like the
trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who were invited to sit in.

Later that year, after erratic behavior earned him an unceremonious
dismissal, Parker set himself up in New York, eventually joining Gillespie
in the ranks of a band led by the pianist Earl Hines. Because of a recording
ban imposed by the musicians¹ union at the time, there is little
documentation of this group. Nor is there much recorded evidence of Parker
and Gillespie¹s occasional forays to Minton¹s Playhouse, the so-called
laboratory of bebop. Or of Parker¹s work at Monroe¹s, where he enlisted a
whip-smart Max Roach, still in his teens.

The innovations of this period happened in spite of Parker¹s rapacious
vices, including a heroin addiction that began in Kansas City. His peers in
the Hines and McShann bands would later recall his penchant for nodding off
onstage. He spent the first few months of 1944 back in Kansas City, missing
bebop¹s first incursion onto swing-centered 52nd Street, between Fifth and
Sixth Avenues: a Gillespie-spearheaded engagement at the Onyx Club.

But when Gillespie headlined another serious run on 52nd Street ‹ at the
Three Deuces, beginning in March 1945 ‹ Parker joined him. By then most
insiders knew about his characteristic unreliability. When the
Gillespie-Parker quintet appeared at Town Hall that June, the radio host
Symphony Sid Torin began his broadcast with what may have been a reflexive
disclaimer: ³I don¹t know whether Charlie has come in yet.²

The fearless brilliance of the music Parker was making ‹ at the Town Hall
concert, a recording of which was issued two years ago, and contemporaneous
studio sessions, especially the one that yielded ³Koko,² his masterpiece
elaboration on ³Cherokee² ‹ may explain why so many musicians copied his
excesses, and so many loved ones put up with his manipulative abuses.

Probably no one endured more than the two women who were pulled into his
orbit. Doris Sydnor, who had an apartment on Manhattan Avenue near 117th
Street, became Parker¹s third wife. Chan Richardson, who was living in an
apartment with her mother on 52nd Street, came to be considered his wife
even though they never married. Both women happened to be working as
nightclub checkroom attendants in 1945. A decade later both grieved as
widows, competing for the claim.

A harbinger of Parker¹s death came in 1946, during a visit to California: He
was arrested and committed to a state hospital. After six grueling months he
gratefully returned to New York, moving with Doris into the Dewey Square
Hotel in Harlem. He had kicked heroin, but only momentarily, and he had
started drinking heavily.

³At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America,² Jack Kerouac
later wrote in ³On the Road,² invoking Parker. But the madness was most
acute in Kerouac¹s New York City, where fanatical followers began cataloging
Parker¹s solos and a downtown bohemian subculture claimed him as its
existential hero. 

³Charlie Parker was really the only person who could unite in his experience
the downtown avant-garde scene, with painters and self-conscious artists,
and the Harlem jazz scene, which has always been more in harmony with the
functional roots of the music,² Mr. Schoenberg of the Jazz Museum said. That
partly explains the duality of the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, which
attracts a different audience for each of its free afternoon concerts.

It also jibes with the recollection of the great drummer Roy Haynes, 82, who
in a phone conversation last week described not only working uptown with
Parker in the 1950s but also visiting the apartment on Avenue B where Parker
was then living with Chan.

³We opened Birdland together,² Mr. Haynes added, referring to the defunct
nightclub on Broadway near 52nd Street, rather than the current club of the
same name on West 44th Street. ³Bird was very excited about that. I remember
on opening night there were lines of people outside, waiting in bad
weather.² 

Parker did not own Birdland ‹ that distinction belonged mainly to the
infamous music-business operator Morris Levy ‹ but the club¹s name confirmed
the height of his celebrity. ³In 1946,² Mr. Schaap said, ³Parker was under
arrest, he was institutionalized, he was depressed, relatively few people
knew him, his future was in grave doubt, even his life expectancy was in
grave doubt. Three years later, arguably the best-known nightclub in New
York City history is named for him using his nickname alone, in the
diminutive.² 

More recognition followed. By the 1950s Parker was finally winning jazz
polls, and he had some popular success with ³Just Friends² (from his
sessions with strings) and ³My Little Suede Shoes² (from a Latin-themed date
that included Mr. Haynes). According to Mr. Schaap, Parker was enjoying the
amenities of the city, from taxicabs to municipal swimming pools.

But when, in the summer of 1951, Parker¹s state-issued cabaret license was
revoked, he was barred from working in New York. As his condition
deteriorated and the jazz world grew crowded with his imitators, he was
forced to seek work on the road. And in 1954, when Chan sent word that their
2-year-old daughter, Pree, had died of pneumonia, the shock sent Parker into
a tailspin.

His final descent was brutal: botched engagements, a suicide attempt,
confinement at Bellevue, lurid tabloid speculation. Days after a ruinous
last stand at Birdland, Parker stopped at the Hotel Stanhope, home of the
Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a jazz patron with aristocratic pedigree. He
stayed a few days, under some supervision by her doctor, and died there on
March 12, 1955. The technical cause was pneumonia, but his 34-year-old body
was so thoroughly ravaged that the doctor estimated his age as 53.

In seemingly no time the defiant inscription ³Bird Lives!² began appearing
on otherwise unmarked subway station walls. The poet Ted Joans eventually
owned up to starting the trend, but he could hardly account for its
proliferation. This weekend¹s festivities convey precisely the same message,
and it will still feel more or less true, perhaps because both the music and
the city have conspired to keep it that way.