|
Brian Priestley, author of Chasin' The Bird : The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker
In Chasin' The Bird, Brian Priestley tells Parker's life story, from his Kansas City childhood to his final harrowing days in New York. Priestley offers new insight into Parker's career, beginning as a teenager single-mindedly devoted to mastering the saxophone, to his first trip to New York, where he washed dishes for $9.00 a week at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, a favorite hangout of the great pianist Art Tatum, whose stunning speed and ingenuity were an influence on the young musician. Priestley sheds light on Parker's collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Mary Lou Williams, and Thelonious Monk, and he illuminates such classic recordings as "Salt Peanuts" and "A Night in Tunisia" and Parker's own compositions "Shaw 'Nuff" and "Yardbird Suite" -- music which defined an era.
Priestley also gives us an unflinching look at Parker's
dark side -- the drug abuse, heavy drinking, and tangled relations with women
and the law. He recounts the death of Parker's daughter Pree, who was only
two-and-a-half years old, and Parker's own death at thirty-four, in such
wretched condition that the doctor listed his age as fifty-three.
In a February, 2006 Jerry Jazz Musician interview,
Priestley discusses the life of Charlie Parker.
First
understanding the importance of Parker's music
Parker's initial interest in
music
Lester Young's impact on Parker
Parker's time in Eldon,
Missouri
The comparison
of Buster Smith's sound to Parker's
Early criticism of Parker's
music
Being exposed to the music
of Art Tatum
Parker and Jay McShann in
Kansas City
Difficulty connecting
with Los Angeles audiences
On Gillespie's commercial
success
Charlie Parker and Gene Ramey, Kansas City, 1940
"Everything had a musical significance for him. He'd hear dogs barking,
for instance, and he would say it was a conversation -- and if he was blowing
his horn he would have something to play that would portray that thought
to us. When we were riding the car between jobs we might pass down a country
lane and see the trees and some leaves, and he'd have some sound for that.
And maybe some girl would walk past on the dance floor while he was playing,
and something she might have would give him an idea for something to play
on his solo. As soon as he would do that, we were all so close we'd all
understand just what he meant."
- Gene Ramey
*
KoKo
BP It is probably the case of more details.
For instance, there is some confusion concerning the chronology of some of
Parker's movements during the forties. It is still not clear even now, to
some extent, exactly when he left Jay McShann's band, and how long he had
been back in Kansas City after stopping off in New York, or when it was that
Billy Eckstine tried to reach him about joining his big band. Dates are a
bit hard to come by in that particular period.
JJM So when you suggest that things may have
been inaccurate in the book's first edition, you are saying these were fairly
trivial issues...
BP I think so, yes. I don't remember having
any major re-think about aspects of his career or achievements. There may
be slight differences in emphasis, but I wasn't aware of any major inaccuracy.
BP I suppose that was a process that came
to me during my late teenage years. As I also explain in the preface that
you quote me from, I wasn't aware of Charlie Parker until his death, when
I heard somebody play a track of his on BBC Radio. I am sure that was the
first time I actually heard him. If I heard anything of his before, it had
not gotten through to me. In the subsequent years, when I was a teenager,
I got to know other musicians in the Manchester, England area -- where I
grew up -- who tried to play the same sort of music Parker did. I knew someone
who played the alto saxophone, and he had a lot of Charlie Parker records,
so it gradually sank in that he was somebody who was not only good to listen
to, but who had been significant in the development of jazz music to that
point.
JJM Were you into Lester Young before Parker,
or, were there others you recall having an interest in?
BP I was born in 1940, and I had some background
in classical music, so the first things I could appreciate were post-bebop
west coast jazz, as well as some of the New York groups of the mid-fifties
like the Modern Jazz Quartet. I could get a handle on understanding this
music rather than just feeling it or being drawn to it in some way. It was
a slight step backwards chronologically to take on people like Charlie Parker
and Dizzy Gillespie, and then finding out about people before them like Lester
Young or Coleman Hawkins, and then again before them, Louis Armstrong. So,
I was learning about jazz backwards.
The Genius of Charlie Parker
*
"Life has many changes. Tomorrow it may rain, and it's supposed
to be sunshine 'cause it's summertime. But God's got a funny soul, he plays
like Charlie Parker."
- Charles Mingus
_____
Donna Lee
BP Not in public, and not apart from the
three syllables on the vocal to
"Salt Peanuts
JJM
One of his heroes was Lester Young, and stories are told about how
he would sneak into the Reno Club and hustle up the stairs into the balcony
to hear him play with Count Basie's band. What sort of impact did Lester
Young have on Parker?
BP He must have been impressed by the fact
that Lester was all about music. He had a personality, but it was a deliberately
reticent personality unless he was socializing around other musicians, whom
we have learned he was more open with. But it seems Lester didn't make the
time to relate to the general public -- even in the clubs where the early
Basie band was playing, or even with people who would be from the same social
background. That may have influenced Parker to some extent.
Regarding his musical influence, even as a very young man he must have realized
that Lester Young was a key musician on the Kansas City scene at the time,
and a key component of that early Basie band. He sounded different from any
other saxophonists Parker was hearing through records and radio broadcasts.
At one point in the late thirties he said that his favorite saxophonist was
Leon "Chu" Berry, who was the star player in the Cab Calloway band, and in
fact, Parker named his son after Berry. Because he was already listening
to music widely, he must have realized how special and how different Lester
Young was, and that may have inspired him to seek an equivalent level of
individuality.
Lester Young
*
"In Charlie's eyes, he was like a god -- a god who sometimes reached
over and passed him the marijuana cigarettes which circulated (perfectly
legal in 1937) in the alley behind the club. According to Charlie's observation
of him at work, 'Pres would sit on the bandstand with a joint between each
finger, and when he smoked one, he'd move each one up a finger'."
- Brian Priestley
Rudy Vallee
_____
Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
BP I have some reservations about how true
that is. The story is that the first music Charlie admitted to noticing on
radio broadcasts was that of Vallee, the white singer and saxophonist who
was very big in the late twenties and early thirties. I suppose it figures
that he would have heard him on the radio because he was one of the mainstream,
popular artists of the day. But it did strike me that in some other later
interview segments, Parker talked about having heard the saxophone playing
of the twenties by another white musician named Rudy Wiedoeft -- who it is
said Vallee changed his first name from Hubert to Rudy in his honor -- and
I wonder if Levin and Wilson may have possibly gotten those guys mixed up.
BP It is something that he talked about
specifically in a 1950 interview with Marshall Stearns and John Maher, and
it was also mentioned in Inside Bebop, a late-forties book by Leonard
Feather that featured some biographical information about musicians he was
writing about. The interview Parker did with Stearns and Maher seems to take
a lot of its cues from Feather's book because when they asked Parker about
his time in Missouri, one of the interviewers said, to paraphrase, that Leonard
Feather said you spent a summer season of three months playing in the Ozarks.
As far as we know, this time was spent with the Kansas City bandleader George
E. Lee, who was very popular in the early twenties. Lee's sister Julia played
in his original band, but I believe she had gone out as a solo by then, and
her brother was picking up local musicians for a particular engagement --
or in this case for a summer season. So, Charlie was working with other
comparative youngsters who knew what they were doing harmonically, particularly
the piano player and the guitar player. Up to that point he was probably
doing everything by ear, and because he had such a good ear had progressed
a long way, but, he may have run up against a brick wall if he didn't have
input from people who could actually show him how things worked on the piano.
At this time, apparently, Parker picked up some ability to work out his ideas
on the piano. While not much has been made of this, it has been confirmed
by people like Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach that Charlie knew his way around
the piano keyboard by this time in his life.
George E. Lee
*
"I was doing alright until I tried doing double tempo on 'Body
and Soul. 'Everybody fell out laughing. I went home and cried and didn't
play again for three months."
- Charlie Parker
_____
Buster Smith
*
"If you come on a band tense, you're going to play tense. If you
come a little foolish, act just a little foolish, and let yourself go, better
ideas will come."
- Parker to Jay McShann
_____
BP Dates are a bit hard to be absolutely
specific about, but one of the people that Charlie Parker worked with in
that period immediately following his return from the summer season in the
Ozarks was Buster Smith, a local alto saxophonist and arranger who had been
a member of the early Basie band. There are one or two short bits of Smith
on record in the late thirties and in 1940, playing with other Kansas City-based
musicians -- one of whom was the pianist Pete Johnson. Even though he only
played three or four short solos, Buster Smith's playing sounds like an early
version of what we associate with Charlie Parker.
JJM
Did he face much criticism while he was a member of McShann's band?
BP Because he was a member of a band that
played the popular big band style of the time, he was pretty well accepted
by the other band members -- as well as everybody who heard him. If you mean
criticism in the negative sense, I think that only came up later. The people
who heard him in the context of the Jay McShann band were all very impressed,
to the point where somebody compared him to what Lester Young had done for
the Basie band. So, he felt he was the equivalent of Young, and that he was
playing like Lester Young, but twice as fast.
JJM So, the criticism of his work didn't really
come until after he returned to Kansas City from New York?
BP I think that is the case, yes.
BP I wouldn't want to emphasize this too
much, but from what I gather, Dexter didn't get along well personally with
Parker, and he was an early example of the sort of person Parker himself
didn't have much time for because he felt Dexter had too high of an opinion
of himself. Parker made this clear to him and played practical jokes
on him, and forever after, Dave Dexter's comments about Charlie Parker were
fairly mean-spirited. But in the very early days, he wrote enthusiastically
about the Jay McShann Band, and didn't exclude Parker from his praise in
any way.
JJM
Parker left McShann's band -- and Kansas City -- for New York,
where he ended up working at a restaurant called Jimmy's Chicken Shack, where
Art Tatum played piano…
BP His motivation was to see what it was
like in New York. I don't think he was particularly dissatisfied about working
in Kansas City with McShann, although if you read some of the interviews
with McShann himself, he and some of those in his band were already having
problems with Parker because of his unreliability. So, it may be that
Parker felt it was time for a change of scenery, and New York and its music
offered that. He didn't do much playing while he was there, partly
because of the union restrictions for musicians who moved to New York, and
partly because he may have underestimated how high the level of musicianship
was there. As a result, on that very first New York trip of several
months, he didn't do very much playing.
Dave Dexter, John Hammond, Count Basie
*
"Unfortunately, Dexter did not like Charlie Parker. While he admired
him and his music, and wrote that he could charm the leaves off the trees,
he didn't like him personally. Evidently, they had a run-in where Parker,
according to local legend, gave Dexter a 'hotfoot,' and Dexter never forgave
him for it. But it may not have mattered anyway because Dexter didn't really
like bebop. He was kind of an old-school cat."
- Chuck Haddix, co-author of Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to
Bebop -- A History
_____
Art Tatum
"...Charlie took various non-musical jobs for the first and only
time in his life, eventually spending perhaps as much as three months washing
dishes, for $9.00 a week plus meals, at Jimmy' Chicken Shack. This
Harlem eatery, owned by bandleader Andy Kirk, employed Mrs. Smith in the
daytimes when it was managed by Kirk's wife Mary, while at night it was run
by saxophonist John Williams who'd recently left the Kirk band in order to
do so (and to separate from his own wife Mary Lou). There were jam
sessions here too, but the real attraction was that it was a favourite hang-out
of the great Art Tatum, the blind solo pianist whose harmonic ingenuity perhaps
exceeded Ellington's at this stage and whose speed of execution was so dazzling
that the ingenuity was lost on all but the more inquiring of his fellow
musicians. The influence of this regular exposure to Tatum can hardly
be overestimated..."
- Brian Priestley
_____
Nellie's Nightmare
BP Well, that depends. If he had come to
New York with a bigger reputation, he would have had more opportunities,
but I suppose he just went there on "speculation," and without having laid
any groundwork except having made sure that he could stay for free for awhile
at Buster Smith's apartment.
JJM When did he begin playing at Monroe's
Uptown House?
BP He did most of his sitting-in at Monroe's and Minton's during his
second visit, when he was in New York with McShann's band, although he may
have played at Monroe's a bit the first trip since it was already active.
But if he did so, he didn't make much of an impression except on a couple
of people, Bobby Moore, the former Basie trumpeter who had somewhat of a
drug problem, and the guitarist Biddy Fleet, who he worked out with on occasion.
JJM He worked as a dishwasher at Jimmy's Chicken
Shack, where Art Tatum played. Tatum had a huge influence on Parker,
didnt he?.
BP I think so, yes. Tatum was already will
established, especially among the circle of musicians, so they obviously
never played together -- and Tatum preferred to play solo anyway. If
he did play with other people, it is likely it would have been in an after-hours
session, and Charlie Parker wouldn't have been encouraged to sit in at that
early stage. What Tatum actually did on the keyboard during that period in
terms of harmonic changes and harmonic extensions must have come to Parker
at just the right time -- after he had learned his instrument, and after
he had input from people who could talk with him about the standard harmonic
methods. To hear what Tatum was doing above and beyond that must have been
quite a revelation.
BP Yes, and the timing turned out to be quite
fortunate. McShann had been leading a seven piece band -- including during
the time Parker played with him before leaving for New York -- and he was
being encouraged to enlarge his band. Since Parker had just recently
come back to town, he had a place for him. Parker spent about two years,
more or less continuously -- from quite early in 1940 to the summer of 1942
-- as a regular member of the McShann band, not only as a key soloist, but
also as a contributor to the arrangements. One in particular I am thinking
about was "The Jumping Blues," that includes some riffs in the arrangement
that, according to the bassist Gene Ramey, were actually put together for
the band by Charlie Parker in rehearsal.
JJM How did McShann and Parker coexist this
second time around, particularly in light of his drug use?
BP This became the theme of the remaining
years of Charlie Parker's life -- until 1955, when he died. Musicians working
regularly with him couldn't help but be aware of his heavy drug use, or of
the times he was trying to get off heroin, or of his alcohol abuse, which
probably had an even more adverse affect on him. They took as much as they
could from Charlie, and encouraged him as much as they could to be on the
job on time. People like Jay McShann and, a few years later Earl Hines and
Dizzy Gillespie, all had situations where they either found Parker not physically
present, or found him present and correct in terms of being in attendance,
but unable to play.
McShann complained sufficiently a couple of times and fired Parker from the
band. Gillespie did that as well around 1947, after Parker had been in the
hospital for six months -- he had come out drug free and healthy, but that
lasted only a period of days. By the time Parker was back in New York and
played a week with Gillespie's big band in early 1947, Dizzy decided that
he didn't want to keep Parker in the band.
Earliest Bird
*
"They just came to see the world's most famous junky."
- Charlie Parker, commenting about himself
_____
*
"'Not now,' I said. 'Later, man, tomorrow.' 'No,' Bird cried, 'I
won't remember it tomorrow; it's in my head now; let me in please.' From
the other room, my wife yelled, 'Throw him out,' and I obediently slammed
the door in Bird's face. Parker then took his horn to his mouth and played
the tune in the hallway. I grabbed a pencil and paper and took it down from
the other side of the door."
- Dizzy Gillespie, recalling a late-night visit to his apartment by
Parker
_____
Leap Frog
BP That is very well established now. It
is almost certain that they ran into each other in Kansas City the day after
a one-nighter of the Cab Calloway band in the summer of 1940, when Charlie
was a member of Jay McShann's band. One of the trumpeters in the McShann
band, Buddy Anderson -- who was interested in the new harmonic ideas, which
is why Gillespie was friendly with him -- introduced the two of them. Apparently,
the following day was spent with Parker and Anderson plahying together,
accompanied by Dizzy Gillespie on the piano. It may be because Dizzy was
on piano rather than trumpet that Parker, in a later interview, said he wasn't
sure whether he had really met Gillespie before New York in 1942.
JJM During the early-to-mid-forties era,
Gillespie, the pianist Thelonious Monk, the drummer Kenny Clarke and some
others were playing at Minton's Playhouse -- a Harlem nightclub on West
118th Street -- while Parker was found more often at Monroe's Uptown House
on West 134th Street. Did they frequently jam together, or were there
two separate things going on?
BP The impression I got from the musicians
themselves is that it was all part of a larger theme. Writers like Leonard
Feather emphasized the fact that there were slightly different themes at
each location. I suppose it is true that Parker probably spent more time
playing at Monroe's -- especially after he left the McShann band -- playing
at Monroe's, and being paid out of the salaries of the other musicians who
actually played in the house band there. But, there is not much evidence
of Parker and Gillespie playing together in jam sessions in either Minton's
or Monroe's, and nothing really until we know about them working together
in the touring band of Earl Hines. But, I imagine that they must have spent
time together in that period before going out with Hines.
BP Well, that begs the question of how do
you define bebop? One way of answering that is that the seeds of bebop had
already been growing through the jam session scene in Harlem that we were
just talking about, in Monroe's and in other places like Jimmy's Chicken
Shack. What happened on 52nd Street was more peopled by established musicians
and established small groups, covering a reasonably wide group of stars.
But that was midtown, which is where you came once you got your "thing" together.
The facts are that Gillespie was hired to work on 52nd Street in a group
where he eventually managed to bring in Parker as well. Whatever the music
that Dizzy Gillespie played was called, the fact is that it was important
enough for him to get a residency on 52nd Street.
JJM It seems as if bop and 52nd Street really
served one another…
BP Yes, that is true. But that was also the
period when the first criticisms about this new music being "too different"
began to be aired, because most of what was being heard on 52nd Street before
was straight-ahead swing of a very high standard, played by the likes of
Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Don Byas -- who were all above the level
of even the top New York- based musicians. It was pretty much straight-ahead
swing, and the rhythm sections especially reflected that, which were playing
at a straight forward rate, and the groovier the better. These players were
not thinking about breaking up the beat, whereas Gillespie and Parker were
-- and especially when they found drummers like Kenny Clarke originally,
and later the young Max Roach, who for awhile was in Monroe's house band.
They then realized that things would have to change in the rhythm section
as well, so piano players were playing differently, sometimes under the direct
tutelage of Dizzy Gillespie, who would tell them to not play that behind
me, play this behind me…
JJM It is clear that some of the musicians
were concerned about what was going on because it meant a potential shift
in how hard they would have to work to keep their livelihood, and how hard
they would have to work to keep up with Parker…
BP That's right. To paraphrase, Charles Mingus
said that people tried to resist Charlie Parker because they knew they would
have to change with him.
Frank Driggs Collection
52nd Street, New York City
_____
52nd Street Theme
*
photo Bob Parent
The Band Box and Birdland along 52nd Street, c. 1950's
_____
52nd
Street Theme
Frank Driggs Collection
Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker
*
"When Bird left New York he was a king, but out in Los Angeles
he was just another broke, weird, drunken nigger playing some strange music.
Los Angeles is a city built on celebrating stars and Bird didn't look like
no star."
- Miles Davis
_____
Shaw 'Nuff
BP I don't believe that was their intent.
Only a few years later, in the late forties, Dizzy was saying in print that
they didn't want to be known as the guys who play music you can't dance to,
and that it should be he and Parker's responsibility to make it danceable.
Right around this same time, Parker was beginning to make records with string
sections and with a Latin American rhythm section because he also was conscious
of wanting to stay in touch with the public, and attempted to do so by playing
standards where he kept pretty close to the melody.
JJM Why do you think he had such a hard time
connecting with audiences in Los Angeles?
BP That conclusion has come down from interviews
that were done pretty much at the time, when the band led by Dizzy Gillespie
-- including Parker -- played in Hollywood in the winter of 1945 and 1946.
The group was apparently accepted by the local musicians, some of whom would
have been been listening to things from people like Coleman Hawkins and Howard
McGhee, and were already attuned to the kind of music Parker was recording.
How the people of Los Angeles reacted to his music is not clear-cut. Apparently,
a few of the people who patronized the nightclubs were working in the film
industry and liked the music, but the average person who heard it may not
have been up-to-date with the developments of the music in New York. The
communications industry has changed a hell of a lot since this time, and
it figures that there would have been a time lag before new musical trends
reached the west coast.
BP Not a lot apart from what was said by
a couple of the women he was involved with, and who he subsequently spent
time living with. Doris, the woman he lived with in New York before he got
sent to Camarillo, came out to visit him. Also, Chan Richardson -- known
later as Chan Parker, although they were not officially married -- wrote
about this period because she had contact with Parker even before they lived
together. So, there are conflicting stories, even in the little bit of
information that we have about his time there. Apparently he was forced to
rest, and he may have done a little physical work like gardening, but it
seems that he got healthy and clean, because he was not able to get any drugs
while he was inside.
JJM He began using heroin again in Chicago
after he left Los Angeles…
BP Yes, and very rapidly, it seems. One question
behind all of this, which is also very difficult to answer, is whether or
not he was capable of kicking the habit on his own without suffering any
withdrawal -- or at least to the extent of others who come off of it. So
it is possible that because he was able to come off drugs, and having proved
it a couple of times, he saw no reason not to go back on it.
Chan Richardson
*
"Max Roach has said that 'We were all back there in the dressing
room at the Three Deuces, and we were telling him how much he meant to us,
how much he meant to black people, how much he meant to black music. And
for him to throw away his fucking life like that was ridiculous.' But when
Parker made his benchmark 'Now's the Time' recording date that same month
-- the first under his own name -- Miles Davis reported that "All these people
kept coming by and Bird would disappear into the bathroom with a dope dealer
and come out an hour or two later…But after Bird got high, he just played
his ass off."
- Brian Priestley
_____
Relaxin' at the Camarillo
Charlie Parker and Red Rodney, New York, c. 1947
*
"When I first knew Charlie, he was getting high on nutmeg.From
nutmeg Bird went to benzedrine inhalers. He'd break them open and soak them
in wine. Then he smoked tea [marijuana] and finally got hooked on heroin.
He was the only man I knew who could drink with heroin."
- Kansas City nightclub owner Tutty Clarkin
_____
Chasin' The Bird
BP I think that is true, yes, and it is very
sad, but it is also almost understandable. When he was a very young trumpeter,
Rex Stewart was bowled over by Louis Armstrong's playing, and he said that
he not only wanted to play like him, but he wanted to dress like him and
do everything else like him. So I suppose that a lot of people felt that
way about Charlie Parker as well.
JJM His influence reached the entire literary
community as well. Jack Kerouac and so many other writers of his generation
were moved by Parker's music, but also by the way he lived his life on the
edge.
BP That's right.
BP It is interesting you say that, because
I have never quite thought about it in that way, although I do think you
have a point. By the late forties, Norman Granz was becoming the big jazz
impresario. He had such a success at the Jazz at the Philharmonic that he
started his own record series through Mercury Records, enabling him to record
his favorite artists. I question whether he was hung up about the stylistic
niceties he preferred.
People have subsequently said that as long as you can play some blues, Norman
Granz was happy to use you, and some of his records reflect that. So the
fact that he had Charlie Parker on some of the early Jazz at the Philharmonic
concerts during Parker's first visit to Los Angeles -- before he got put
inside at Camarillo -- must have proven to him that Charlie Parker could
fit within his concert format. And I suppose also by the late forties, when
Parker was back in New York and Granz was going full-steam-ahead with his
recordings and concert series, he must have seen that Parker had become quite
a name artist -- and in the eyes of the musicians, if not the public -- may
have been a more significant musician than Dizzy Gillespie. So it may have
been a good move commercially on Granz's part to sign Parker, at a time when
he had no contractual obligations.
Jazz at the Philharmonic
*
"Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the
needle, or when he is juices, is a plain, straight liar. When I get too much
to drink, I can't even finger well, let alone play decent ideas. And, in
the days when I was on the stuff, I may have thought I was playing better,
but listening to some of the records now, I know I wasn't."
- Charlie Parker
_____
Perdido
Charlie Parker with Strings
*
"The lengthy tour with the strings during the first five months
of the year had underlined the anti-improvisation nature of the scores and
had necessitated using sometimes inferior local players to read the parts,
while the 'novelty' appeal of the group led to them being booked opposite
rhythm-and-blues vocalists such as Ivory Joe Hunter."
- Brian Priestley
*
"These transcriptions...offer considerable evidence that Parker
was well in advance of Gillespie as regards musical consistency, technical
poise, and cohesiveness of conception…Nothing quite like it had ever
been heard before on the saxophone, and, for that matter, in jazz."
- Critic Gunther Schuller
BP Charlie Parker always said that it was
his idea, and I suppose one could believe that. But, I also think that by
then, Granz was getting to know a bit about the record industry, and he must
have felt that whoever he signed needed to be "packaged," to some extent.
It was before that terminology was being used, but he was one of the producers
who started thinking in terms of how to sell records by his artists, rather
than whether or not they were just worthy of his interest. This was why he
began doing the songbook albums.
JJM Recording with strings seemed like a big
gamble artistically for Parker because, while they softened his sound, it
may have stifled the creative space in which he liked to play.
BP I think that was true when he started
performing live with string sections, from 1950 and onwards. He probably
didn't envision that problem when he made the first recording sessions --
he must have enjoyed that for the project that it was. But when a couple
of these records sold well, and when his producer and booking agents agreed
it would be good to do this live, Parker must have been faced with the inevitable
fact that the string players were not going to improvise, to stretch out
an arrangement, or to add another chorus if he wanted to go on longer. So
it was ultimately quite a restrictive format.
JJM Did this somehow dilute the impact of
bebop?
BP Yes, but since he came up during the period
when jazz was a popular dance music, I suppose that there was a commercial
side of Charlie Parker. Initially, Parker was enthusiastic about the idea
that he might sell more records by adding strings. It is a shame, really,
that it didn't appeal to more people at the time because they could have
had him play extended solos with the Latin American rhythm sections. One
of those records did enjoy some considerable success. According to what I
was told, his second biggest selling record after
"Just
Friends
JJM
On Dizzy Gillespie's success with a big band, Parker said, "A big
band slows anybody down because you don't get a chance to play enough. Diz
has an awful lot of ideas when he wants to, but if he stays with the big
band he'll forget everything he ever played." Was he jealous of Gillespie's
commercial success?
BP In the second half of the forties, he may have
been. But, by the early fifties, Gillespie was having similar problems, in
a way, of how to connect with a larger audience. He already abandoned his
big band, and I suppose if you look at the overall shape of his career, the
early fifties was probably a low spot for Dizzy Gillespie -- as it was for
Parker.
JJM The circumstances of Parker's early death are
well known, as is the fact that he had a huge influence on people beyond
the world of jazz…
BP That is very complex. There are many ways
in which the sound of his music entered the mainstream very gradually, and
by the time Parker died, the language he helped create was percolating
down to more commercial music. But that, in a way, doesn't speak to your
point. When people hear his music now, or if they happen to see a tiny clip
of him that exists on film, they are immediately knocked out by the way he
played his instrument. Once his music reaches their hearts, they are
not likely to ever be the same again.
Charlie Parker, posing at a dime-store photomat, Kansas City, 1940
"No wonder many who heard Bird play recoiled from his brilliant exposure
of human emotions and found his music too painful a mirror of their inner
selves. Yet those who listened more carefully found identification; they
found release in knowing their anxieties -- rage, even -- were shared; found
comfort in hearing their longing for love played back to them."
Your Winter garment of Repentence fling;
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter -- and the Bird is on the Wing.
Favorite lines of Parker's from a nineteenth-century poem, "The Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam"
Chasin'
The Bird : The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker
by Brian Priestley
About Brian Priestley
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
BP I guess the first music that really got
to me in a big way was the piano music of Chopin. As I was learning to play
the piano as a youngster of eight, my father was an amateur pianist who was
more or less self-taught. Eventually I discovered that I could play a lot
better than him, and Chopin's music is what somehow especially got to me.
*
Brian Priestley is the co-author of The Rough Guide to Jazz, now
in its fourth edition, and the biographer of Charles Mingus and John Coltrane.
He is also a noted jazz pianist, specializing in the Ellingtonian
repertoire, and has recorded several CD's. He is also a critic and
reviewer for numerous magazines, including Jazzwise, and a regular
broadcaster on BBC Radio 3.
Brian Priestley products at Amazon.com
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
# From the publisher
|
, by Charlie Parker
