on his horn. He knew nothing about playing in different keys, for example, but when the realisation began to dawn, he did not go out and master the three or four most common keys used in jazz, but learned to play with equally dazzling facility in all twelve. His gradual assimilation of the rudiments of harmony from a succession of informal teachers – pianist Lawrence ‘88’ Keyes, clarinettist Tommy Douglas, altoist Buster ‘Prof’ Smith, guitarist Efferge Ware and pianist Carrie Powell – as well as the long hours spent wearing out recordings studying Lester Young brought about a remarkable metamorphosis in his playing. He began to pick up jobs around town with Buster Smith (an important early influence) and pianist Jay McShann, who described his recollections of first meeting Bird to Ross Russell.
I first ran into Charlie in November or December of 1937 at one of those famous Kansas City jam sessions. Charlie seemed to live for them. I was in a rhythm section one night when this cocky kid pushed his way on stage. He was a teenager, barely seventeen, and looked like a high school kid. He had a tone that cut. Knew his changes. He’d get off on a line of his own and I would think he was headed for trouble, but he was like a cat landing on all four feet. A lot of people couldn’t understand what he was trying to do, but it made sense harmonically and it always swung.
Musical ideas, that is what jam sessions were really about. Charlie was able to hold his own against older men, some of them with years of big-band experience. He was a strange kid, very aggressive and wise. He liked to play practical jokes. And he was always borrowing money, a couple of dollars that you’d never get back. He was trying to act like a grown man. It was hard to believe those stories about what a poor musician he’d been. That fall when he came back from the Ozarks he was ready.
As the decade drew to a close, though, Kansas City was changing. Pendergast had been tumbled (he was tried and convicted of tax evasion, the same charge which had brought down Al Capone in Chicago), and the city had moved into a clean-up phase which destroyed the nightclub scene. The geographical focus on jazz itself was also shifting again. The Count Basie Band had broken out from Kansas to become a nationally-known outfit with their powerful riff-based style (the riff, a pervasive figure in black music, is a short melodic phrase, usually of four or eight bars’ length, either repeated literally or varied to accommodate a harmonic pattern, which formed the cornerstone of the south-western swing style), and the drift of top musicians away from the city – particularly to New York – became a haemorrhage in the wake of their success. Parker, too, had made his initial move out of Kansas when he hopped a ride on a freight train to Chicago in 1938 or, more probably, early in 1939, by which time he was already using heroin. Again, accounts vary on when he actually started using drugs, but the likely year seems to have been 1935. That first scuffling trip subsequently took him to New York, where he worked as a dish-washer at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Harlem for three months (the only non-musical job he would ever take). It was grinding, dirty work for poor pay, but his compensation lay in being able to absorb resident pianist Art Tatum’s harmonic genius night after night.
Parker’s style at that point was already showing evidence of the expanded harmonic awareness which would underpin the development of bebop. Exposure to Tatum’s playing (according to Russell, he was never able to pluck up the courage to speak to the blind piano genius when Tatum would slip into the kitchen to take a hit from the bottle of Scotch he kept there) further expanded his harmonic horizons, and in the few opportunities he did get to play, he worked on developing his still inchoate ideas. By his own testimony, the final revelation took place in the back room of an establishment named Dan Wall’s Chili House, where he was practising with guitarist Bill ‘Biddy’ Fleet on one of his favourite improvising vehicles, ‘Cherokee’. The famous ‘quote’ which follows is given as a verbatim one in Shapiro and Hentoff’s Hear Me Talkin to Ya, but is actually a paraphrase of a section of a Down Beat interview from 1949, in which Parker’s direct speech and the words of the writers, Michael Levin and John S. Wilson, have been combined as if it was a direct quotation. As Woideck points out in his study of the saxophonist, ‘the effect is to make the account more vital than the original’, and since no damage is done to the meaning of what Bird was telling the interviewers in the process, we will let it stand in the first person.
I remember one night before Monroe’s I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December 1939. Now I had been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used at the time, and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night I was working over ‘Cherokee’, and as I did I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing.
What Parker had discovered was that a new and radically different-sounding melody line could be conjured up through moving away from the obvious melody notes within a given chord sequence, and instead using less familiar notes made up from intervals further away from the chord root. He began to extend his use of the upper intervals, the ninths, elevenths and thirteenths beyond the octave (intervals falling within a given octave are known as simple, and those beyond it as compound), and concentrated on the challenge of not simply using those notes to create a new melody line, which was difficult enough in itself, especially given his highly original rhythmic accentuation and increasingly fit-to-bust tempos, but of making their natural tendency toward dissonant effects (the ‘wrong’ notes which so many musicians of the older school heard in bebop harmony) reach an appropriate resolution within the harmonic fabric of the tune. There are strong hints of that direction in his first studio recordings, made with the Jay McShann Band in 1941, notably in ‘Swingmatism’ and his solo on ‘Hootie’s Blues’, which Russell suggests was ‘a Pandora’s box of things to come’. In his fine study Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, Gary Giddins encapsulates those developments at this point in his career.
Parker was achieving the kind of fluency that only the greats can claim: complete authority from the first lick, and the ability to sustain the initial inspiration throughout a solo, so that it has dramatic coherence. His tone became increasingly sure, waxing in volume despite the deliberate lack of vibrato. It was candid and unswerving, and it had a cold blues edge unlike that of any of his predecessors. The musicians in New York had tried to intimidate him into aping the clean, pear-shaped sound of Benny Carter or the rhapsodic richness of Johnny Hodges. His contemporaries in McShann’s band knew what he was after. They were amused, too, by how fast his mind worked, as he imitated sounds echoing in from the streets – engines backfiring, tires, auto horns – and worked them into musical phrases. He not only mastered Tatum’s trick of juxtaposing discursive melodies in such a way that they fit right into the harmonic structure of the song he was playing, but took it another step: he quoted melodies that had lyrical relevance to the moment. He might nod to a woman in blue with a snippet of ‘Alice Blue Gown’, or a woman in red with ‘The Lady In Red’, or comment on a woman headed for the ladies’ room with ‘I Know Where You’re Going’. He had a ripe eye for women.
The full fruition of those ideas was still some way off, however. He remained with McShann until 1942, but chose to stay in New York rather than swing back on another southern tour with the band. He continued to develop both his ideas and his facility in executing them in a way that was entirely new to jazz, playing in the jam sessions at Minton’s and Monroe’s, and in the seminal swing-into-bop transitional big bands of Billy Eckstine and Earl Hines (where he occupied the tenor saxophone chair and is said to have perfected the art of sleeping on stage with his horn in playing position to fool his leader).
A 1944 session with guitarist Tiny Grimes is usually seen as the first of his mature recordings, but it is also something of a preface to the major achievements which were now just around the corner. The session’s two instrumentals, ‘Tiny’s Tempo’ and ‘Red Cross’, both feature cogent contributions from the altoist, and he was back in the studio on several occasions as a sideman in 1945, with pianist Clyde Hart (featuring very odd vocals by the singer Rubberlegs Williams, allegedly under the influence of coffee which Parker had spiked with Benzedrine to liven up a miserable session), the self-styled Sir Charles
