Section from chapter 1955: Disaster at Birdland   [ return to introduction ]

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By Mervyn Cooke • 325 illustrations,
82 in full color • 256 pages • 8-1/2 x 8-1/2"
Cloth • ISBN 0-7892-0399-5 • U.S. $45.00
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Charlie Parker in full melodic flight at Birdland in 1950. [ view larger image ]

The famous club named after Parker, seen here in 1956, was opened on Broadway in December 1949 (• p. 122). [ view larger image ] (Copyright Herman Leonard/The Special Photographers Library)
Bird

The year 1955 witnessed the sad final days of one of jazz's most revered and legendary figures, Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. Parker (whose nickname derived from his penchant for fried chicken) began to develop his career in 1939 when he moved from Kansas City to New York. There he sought to escape the clichés of the swing style by cultivating a novel kind of improvisation in which dissonant notes were deliberately emphasized. Under the influence of guitarist Charlie Christian (• p. 98), Parker combined this approach with an intelligent use of licks to create a new style of playing known as "formulaic improvisation," in which lengthy melodic paragraphs were constructed using a handful of basic note-patterns, while subtle dislocated rhythms and angular leaps kept the listener guessing about the music's direction.

From 1942 to 1945 Parker played alongside Dizzy Gillespie (• p. 219) in successful big bands led by Earl Hines (• p. 124) and Billy Eckstine. When Parker and Gillespie joined forces with Kenny Clarke and Thelonious Monk at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem for a series of jam sessions (• p. 97), Parker's musical experiments became absorbed into the new bop style as one of its essential ingredients. His music gained more widespread exposure in 1945, both in New York and Los Angeles, but most of the following year was spent in a sanatorium, and his professionalism was continually compromised by escalating drug addiction and alcoholism.

In 1951 he lost his cabaret card, and three years later he attempted suicide (• p. 135). Even when sober, his behavior was pathologically adolescent. Miles Davis described Parker's deterioration toward the end of 1948: "I didn’t like whites walking into the club where we were playing just to see Bird act a fool, thinking that he might do something stupid, anything for a laugh . . . It was embarrassing." One musical consequence of Bird's boyish high spirits was his habit of quoting well-known melodies in incongruous musical contexts, as with the sudden intrusion of the jaunty English folk song "Country Gardens" at the conclusion of his 1951 recording of the otherwise lyrical "Lover Man."

In spite of the commercial success of his recordings with saccharine string accompaniment in the period 1947-52, the roots of Parker's innovation remained controversial. He regarded bop as a fundamental departure from the techniques of earlier jazz, although many (including Gillespie) hotly disagreed and preferred to view the new style as a logical continuation of traditional musical values. For all his self-conscious modernism, Parker's compositions were mostly based on the twelve-bar blues and tended to use a limited range of harmonies. At his peak in 1947—48, his ensembles provided a bop schooling for several major talents, such as Miles Davis, and no subsequent saxophonist--or, indeed, other instrumentalist--could escape entirely from his colossal influence.

In 1988, serious jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood directed Bird, a moving film portrayal of Parker's final years, using the saxophonist's original recordings as the basis for his soundtrack (• p. 211).