of narcotics, but that combination of hard drugs and hard drinking killed him well before his time. Russell, though, has more to say on the subject.
Drugs allayed the pressure he suffered from the lack of steady work, the public indifference to his music, his contradictory, indeed ridiculous role – a creative artist composing and improvising in a night club. Drugs screened off the greasy spoon restaurants and cheap rooming houses with their unswept stairs and malodorous hall toilets. Drugs kept him out of the military draft: an army psychiatrist had taken one look at the needle marks on his arm and immediately classified him as 4-F. Heroin became his staff of life. The monkey on his back kept the outside world off it. Like all who meddled with drugs, Charlie believed that he could kick the habit at his own convenience. He experimented with goof balls (phenobarbital) to decelerate the highs and alleviate withdrawal symptoms. The score became the most urgent task of each day. He learned the trick of borrowing small amounts of money, a dollar or two, sums too small to be remembered. His lifestyle was hardening into a mold he would never succeed in breaking. Except for a single factor, there was nothing to distinguish Charlie from hundreds of other Negro youths who had been drawn to New York City and were drifting aimlessly about the streets of Harlem, in imminent danger of being swallowed by the underworld. That factor was the saxophone.
The pressures of living and creating in a society where both your art and your humanity are devalued by your skin colour was emphasised for Parker by his experiences of Europe in 1949 and 1950. Like many black musicians, he found a more respectful environment for his music and his person there than in his homeland, and did not encounter the kind of routine racism, both implicit and overt, which was the everyday fabric of life back home. However, Angelo Ascagni, who met Bird through Dean Benedetti, is quoted in Robert Reisner’s Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker as saying that the saxophonist did not succumb as much as he is reputed to have done to the welcome, but rather saw ‘a sort of subtle prejudice’ at work in the European attitude, and refused to fit himself into ‘the mold of an African genius, an uninhibited primitive spirit, or any of the idolizations which the European opposes to the American abuse of the Negro’. Reisner’s collection of reminiscences was the first book on Bird, and has been a source of a great many much-repeated quotes, but the unreliability of oral testimony, and the great number of contradictory statements in it, make it a dubious witness at best, and readers should take that ‘legend’ in the title literally.
Nonetheless, some jazz historians, led by the redoubtable James Lincoln Collier (see, for example, his provocative essays in Jazz: The American Theme Song) and Gene Lees, have attempted to argue that our view of such matters has become distorted. While it would be foolish to pretend that racism was purely an American phenomenon, or love and respect for jazz uniquely European, generations of jazz musicians have provided overwhelming subjective evidence to back up the point.
Of course, the use of narcotics in music was never limited to black musicians – indeed, the classic account of that subject comes from the white saxophonist Art Pepper in his harrowing autobiography, Straight Life. If they were shielded from some of the worst consequences of casual and institutional racism, however, the low regard in which jazz – and especially the new jazz – was held rubbed off on white as well as black artists, and they occupied the same bandstands in the seedy club-land underworld, with its ongoing ugly parade of pushers, pimps, gangsters and conmen. Pepper not only chronicles his drug use, but also the effects of reverse racism, the so-called ‘Crow Jim’ principle in which white jazz musicians were designated second-class citizens, not only by society at large but by some of their fellow black musicians, who saw them as interlopers on a black art form.
Nor can all responsibility rest with the world through which the saxophonist moved. Others – and Dizzy is a notable example – succeeded far better in combating the perils of the jazz life as it existed at that time, and some – possibly much – of the stimulus for Bird’s all too willing slide into addiction has to be rooted in his own personality. Whatever the combination of inner weakness and outer temptation, private demons and public devils, it proved a lethal one in the end, and drove one of the great musical geniuses of the twentieth century to a tragically early demise.
Astonishingly, despite constant police harassment, he was apparently only arrested once for possession, when he received a three-month suspended sentence in 1951, leading to the loss of his cabaret card, a statistic which says a great deal for his astuteness and street-cunning. His use of drugs inevitably left many other musicians, black and white, facing the burning question: to play like Bird, do I have to turn on like Bird? Did that little spoonful of white powder hold the keys to the kingdom of improvisational greatness? The answer seems obvious: no, it did not, and Bird always said the same thing. His argument – essentially ‘do as I say, not as I do’ – lacked conviction in the eyes of those under his powerful spell, and a long line of jazzmen turned on to heroin on the back of his example. Even more, however, were inspired by his musical example. Perhaps more than any other single figure in the history of jazz, Parker’s influence was all-pervasive, affecting not just alto saxophonists, or even saxophonists in general, but players on every instrument. After Bird, there was only one flight-path to follow.
Charles Parker, Jr was born in Kansas City on 29 August 1920, on the Kansas side of the Kaw River which divides that state’s portion of the city from the Missouri one. By the time he started to develop a serious interest in music, the Missouri side of the city (where the family now lived) was reaching its peak as one of the crucial musical centres in jazz history. The town was effectively run by the notorious Tom Pendergast, and the wholesale corruption of his regime had encouraged a thriving hotbed of rackets – gambling, prostitution, extortion, narcotics – all carried on largely untroubled by the police, who kept out of the way other than to collect their pay-offs. As in other cities, the gangster-run clubs provided a dubious working environment for musicians, but the dingy drinking dens which sprang up around the city’s Twelfth Street also provided the well-springs of the Kansas City sound. The legendary jazz sessions would carry on through the night, and occasionally round the clock. Clubs like the Harlem, the Hey-Hey and the Reno attracted the best musicians of the day, who either took up residence in KC – the New Jersey-born Count Basie ran the city’s number one band – or sat in on the jam sessions when passing through on road tours with nationally known outfits like the Duke Ellington or Cab Calloway orchestras.
According to Russell, and the testimony of Bird’s friends at the time, as a teenager Parker ingratiated himself with local musicians, and they would sneak him into the quiet balcony above the stage at the Reno. There, he would absorb hour after hour of music, and try to apply the sounds he heard to his own battered alto, bought by his hard-working, doting mother and barely playable. Instruments did not seem to matter much to Bird – he got his first decent instrument, a brand new Selmer, with the insurance pay-off following a car accident on the way to a gig in 1936 – but a good horn was useful for its pawn value as much as its sound. Since he replicated his distinctive sonority on a whole succession of borrowed instruments over the years, and played a plastic alto from England for a time in the 1950s with equally positive results, it is reasonable to assume that he regarded tone production as a function of the player rather than the horn.
Like the later sessions at Minton’s and Monroe’s, the Kansas City jam sessions were merciless affairs for anyone who did not have their chops and their musical ideas together. As a tyro musician, Parker endured some famous humiliations, firstly in attempting a double-time passage on ‘Body and Soul’ with some of his peers at the Hi-Hat, and subsequently in an even more humiliating breakdown at the Reno, when he was ‘gonged-off’ by an irate Jo Jones, the great drummer of the Basie band. The flying cymbal provided a tiresomely repeated leitmotif in Clint Eastwood’s well-intentioned film of Parker’s life, Bird (1988), but it also provided the stimulus for further advancement in the altoist’s playing.
A summer spent working with singer George Lee’s band at the summer resort of Lake Taneycomo in the Ozark mountains in 1937 provided an intensive wood-shedding experience which did much to set him on the right course following that humiliating night at the Reno in 1936. Parker
