Jazz fans still flock to Charlie Parker 50 years later
By JENNIFER ODELL
For the Houston Chronicle

When Clint Eastwood was making his 1988 biopic Bird, he needed a player who could compose on the spot in the style of pioneering alto saxophonist, Charlie "Bird" Parker. For Charles McPherson, who has devoted much of his professional career to studying Parker's work, the music came naturally. But he says that meeting the late jazz legend was more difficult.

"Everything he said was in poetry," says McPherson, now 66.

McPherson was 15 when he met Parker after a ballroom show in Detroit. "I asked him questions," he recalls, "Do you have kids? What does your father do? It was like talking to some actor who had so much dialogue in his brain. I think he knew too much."

March 12 is the 50th anniversary of Parker's death. A life of excess caught up with him at age 34, but Parker's too-brief recording career remains among the most celebrated in jazz.

In a way, everything Parker created was in poetry. His music certainly suggests someone with a lot more to say than his predecessors. Parker built scaffolding around the architecture of swing, sometimes adding layers of notes where no one thought they would fit.

There are moments in the history of any art when a genius changes the way that art form is conceived, realized and remembered. Parker was such an artist; he opened the door for contemporary jazz.

"Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were bebop," says Von Freeman, 84, who played with Parker in the '50s. "The music was devastating, bright, beautiful."

Fifty years later, bebop and its legacy remain bright and beautiful. It's a style of jazz that continues to find new blood. And as Eastwood endeavored to illustrate, Parker, perhaps its greatest practitioner, was a devastating figure.

It's easy to categorize giants of the past, particularly the deceased. Parker is usually painted as one of two things: a genius and an addict. Of course he was both. But in the shades of gray between the two, there are qualities that often get overlooked, like his clever wit, the way he carried himself, or how unfazed he was by the glare of the public eye. Characteristics like these fed into the music that has become Parker's legacy. "Roy talks about how clever Bird (Parker's nickname) was with his music," says bassist Christian McBride, who will be part of a Kennedy Center tribute to Parker in Washington, D.C., Saturday, led by veteran drummer Roy Haynes, who recorded several times with Parker. "If a pretty girl walked into the club while they were playing, Bird would quote something like The Prettiest Girl in the Room."

Born in Kansas City in 1920, Parker first learned to play the baritone saxophone, then tried tenor before settling on the alto. Parker dropped out of school at 14 but was as erudite in conversation as he was virtuosic on the sax. His first major gig was with Jay McShann's big band, where he earned his nickname "Bird." According to lore, Parker's vehicle ran over a chicken en route to a gig, and the saxophonist took the "yardbird" along to cook at their destination.

Parker's first record as a bandleader was with a group dubbed the Reboppers that included Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis on trumpets and Max Roach on drums. People were used to big bands, swinging, accessible rhythms, hummable melodies. That's not what they got with Reboppers. And not everyone liked what they heard.

People often left, complained, even threw chairs when he first started playing.

"You have to understand that to hear a jazz saxophonist play real slick and fast today is not a big deal," McBride explains. "Absolutely no one played like that before him and many people did not like what he played. He was a renegade."

"The music itself was growing so fast," explains vocalist, Kurt Elling, 42. "You can imagine people being mad, thinking he's wrecking the sound. Actually, he was building on it. Bebop wasn't new, it was the natural evolution of the music."

Listeners eventually warmed to that evolution.

In 1945, Parker worked extensively with Dizzy Gillespie, playing major venues in New York City like Town Hall and the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, where their pay was almost doubled after the overwhelming audience response of the first week on stage. Slowly, audiences came to understand what they were doing and a bebop culture was born.

The albums on the Savoy and Dial labels until 1948 are considered by some to be the most important recordings of the bebop era. But their back story is troubled. In 1946, Parker and Gillespie played in Hollywood, but drugs were scarce, the reception was spotty, and Parker started missing dates. By the time the band was ready to head back home, he was falling off track. By 1947, alcoholism landed him in Camarillo, a psychiatric facility in California. After his rehab, Parker returned to recording and touring.
In 1949, Norman Granz invited him to sign with Verve, offering him the chance to record with a string section, a huge vote of confidence in the jazz world and something Parker had wanted since 1945, according to Ken Druker, Senior VP of Verve Catalogue. "Granz was just the first to put up the money," Druker says.
The ballads on those sessions are tight yet fluid, one note dripping almost imperceptibly into the next.
In 1953, Parker joined Gillespie at Toronto's Massey Hall in what was dubbed, "The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever," with Charles Mingus on bass, Max Roach on drums and Bud Powell on piano.

Parker remained a figure of sharp dichotomies. McPherson remembers his strong charisma. "He carried himself regally, never seeming to change his face for others."

Freeman noticed a commitment to craft; he practiced like he was playing for an audience, rather than simply running through scales.

But there was a darker side, too.

"He was an intellectual," Miles Davis wrote in his biography. "He used to read novels, poetry, history. But he had this real destructive streak in him that was something else."

Parker attempted suicide twice in 1954 before overdosing on heroin in March of 1955 in a friend's apartment on Fifth Avenue.

"I was working upstairs at the Pershing (Ballroom) when Bird passed," Freeman recalls. "It was a sad day. Some guys just openly cried."

Parker's professional career didn't even span two decades, but his output still resonates today. He's a musician that all jazz enthusiasts can agree on.

By the time of his death, an entire culture had grown out of the music he helped pioneer. Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg prided themselves on being beboppers. An entire generation of musicians came to base their music values heavily on what Parker played.

One rabid fan followed Parker around, recording his solos. "He would drill a hole through the floor or ceiling," says Gary Smulyean, saxophonist in the Dave Holland Big Band. "He would just record the solos, some would only be eight seconds long." The result was an invaluable resource for students of the music.

Today, aspiring jazz musicians still transcribe Parker solos, studying his music, learning to play his songs. An annual Charlie Parker Festival commemorates his innumerable contributions to music, and new albums are constantly appearing that borrow from his ideas.

"As improvisers, we're acting as composers in front of people," says Elling. "Because improvised music is all about composing over a common history of music, Parker's influence today is almost too pervasive to break out and qualify. It must be a hellish thing to know what's possible in music, to be hearing things all the time and not have an appropriate outlet for them. If you think of it that way, maybe Bird really did know too much."