Bird Lives! — A Biography of Jazz Musician Charlie Parker
By: Steve Newman Writer
Tags: Books, Biography, History, Jazz, Music

Bird Lives! — A Biography of Jazz Musician Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker. Image: New York Daily News

Ross Russell’s 1973 biography of jazz musician, Charlie Parker, is as much a history of 1930s America, as it is post-war America. It is also the history of a nation seen from the point of view of not just Parker, but most working jazz musicians of those periods. And when writing about the post-war era, Russell (picking up on a riff from Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay, The White Negro) writes:

“ If the new language was exotic, by contrast behavior had become curiously circumspect. Loud voices were frowned down, as were hurried, headlong (frantic) actions…Dress tended to become neater and more conservative. The handshake gave way to the palm-and-finger brush. “ Yes, Daddy…I’m hip…wot happening?

“ The life jazzmen lived, the hours they worked, the large amount of time spent in rootless transit all set them apart from the workaday world. Jazz had always been anti-establishment, and jazzmen painfully beholden to their equivocal place in the entertainment world. Now came the hipsters, in revolt against the very jazz establishment. To hedonistic concepts of life prevalent among swingmen, the new lifestyle added a social awareness. The two-party system of government with its Humpty-Dumpty candidates was a hype. Its courts of law were an elaborate farce. The system was seen as a complex mechanism designed to oppress. World War II was a grotesque show staged by sick old men who had succeeded in turning America into a huge prison camp.”

It has to be said that during the so called Swing Era in the US, the place of the jazz musician was invariably only equivocal in the minds of a minority of those musicians, and for the simple reason that there had never been, as Russell hints, a time when so many musicians were employed by an ever increasing number of bands, groups, orchestras, record and radio producers. It paid well, very well, but those musicians probably knew it couldn’t last, especially, from 1945, when the thousands of musicians who had been drafted started to come home. I guess the men and women working in the munitions, aircraft, mining and shipbuilding industries probably felt the same. All lives and livings are, to a greater or lesser extent, equivocal. Who knew that Benny Goodman’s vibes player, Lionel Hampton, would earn enough to become a property developer and progressive landlord, ensuring tens of thousands of poor New Yorkers found good homes at affordable rents. I doubt if Hampton did.

With the end of the war in 1945, came the decline of the Swing Era, with the younger musicians, with new musical ideas, finding it hard to make a living. Only when the new clubs started up did they find a home. And it was their new sound the returning GIs wanted to hear, as did the British jazz musician and composer, John Dankworth, who played alto sax in the bands on the Atlantic liners in the late 1940s. Every time he arrived in New York he headed to 52nd Street to listen to Charlie Parker.

Musicians leaving the Downbeat. Image: pinterest

As Ross writes, when the clubs closed in the early hours, the:

“… musicians used to gather at the Stage Door Delicatessen, an all-night place on Sixth Avenue around the corner from Fifty-second, where they sat at marble-topped tables eating their multi-layered sandwiches. There they would listen to a drummer named Mouse as he invented an imaginary dialogue in which Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Haile Selassie, and Mussolini took part…”.

Once they’d lost interest in Mouse’s somewhat naive, and pot driven rap, those musicians talked about the latest players they’d heard, which, around 1944–45, was Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, with Parker the prime mover of the so-called new music that was replacing Swing ,especially Parker’s, which flowed with “… ideas mysterious…”, music of flight, of the birds, of an otherwordliness. It was a music that transported the listener (and the player) to another place, far from the reality of post-war New York and the horrors of D-Day and the Nazi Concentration Camps. Drugs helped: and by helping usually destroyed. Charlie Parker had been nicknamed ‘Yardbird’ back in Kansas City; later it just became ‘Bird’. It stuck.

I first came across Charlie Parker in the late 1950s on my grandparent’s pre-war radio, somewhere between Hilversum and Toulouse on the tuning dial. I’d lost the Voice of America, no doubt through Russian interference, and was trying to get it back when a French announcer mentioned the name Charlie Parker, followed a moment later by the title of a tune, Relaxin’ at Camarillo. The piece of music that followed blew me away.

Some years before that, when a young Californian sax player, Dean Benedetti, now resident in New York, first heard Parker he too was also blown away, but as a result of hearing Parker Dean, like many another sax player, went through a period of despair and disbelief, culminating in anger that he would never be able to achieve what the young alto sax player from Kansas City had achieved.

But Benedetti, once over the shock, decided to record whatever he could of the ‘Bird’s’ many appearances at the New York clubs. So, kitting himself up with a portable wire recorder, Dean blagged his way into the clubs, surreptitiously positioned the mic close to the piano, then, by trailing the wire to the lavatory he locked himself in (no doubt causing a great deal of consternation for patrons) and recorded as many of Parker’s solos as he could. Unfortunately he didn’t waste precious wire (this was before tape) on recording the other soloists, consequently his recordings of Parker are invariably, and annoyingly, out of context and often overpowered by the piano.

Record store owner, Ross Russell, first met and heard Parker in Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood in 1945, and as a direct result, in 1946, created Dial Records to simply record Parker’s work. It was something of a breakthrough for Charlie Parker (although his drug addiction was not helping his playing in the slightest)and his fellow musicians. It was something of a breakthrough for Ross Russell too, but probably less than he might have hoped at the time.

Parker with Russell. Image: Jazz Riffing on a Lost Worcester

Dean’s recordings only came to light in later years, and sadly, due to ill health, Benedetti gave up playing the sax, moving to Italy with his parents in 1953. He died there in 1957, aged 34, just two years after Parker’s own death at the same age.

Charlie Parker was born “…Charles Parker, Jr., August 29, 1920, of Afro-American parents in [a suburb of ]Kansas City…. His father was Charles Parker, Sr., a native of Memphis, more recently a resident of Kansas City, stranded there at the end of a vaudeville tour. He was a singer and dancer. Charlie’s mother, Addie Boyley, was a local girl whom the entertainer had married in her seventeenth year.”

Kansas City 1920s. Image: Shubert Theatre

Around 1929 Charlie and his family moved to 1516 Olive Street, close to the city centre and the bars and clubs, and like Louis Armstrong twenty years earlier in New Orleans, Charlie would often sneak out of the house and make his way to the clubs, listening to the bands outside the stage doors. Bands that would have included the Bennie Moten Band, an outfit made up of an earlier band called the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, that included bassist Walter Page, and pianist Count Basie. A fast, hard-hitting band with the blues at its core. By the early 1930s it had become the Count Basie Orchestra, an orchestra with the power of a freight train. That sound went deep inside the boy.

The early Basie Orchestra. Image:wikipedia

Charlie Parker did well at school, with a keen interest in literature, history and classical music; but he knew what he wanted to be and begged his mother (his father had fled the family home) to buy him a saxophone. And, although his mother had wanted Charlie to be a doctor, she did and, as Russell makes clear, Charlie Parker may have been one of the last great jazz musician to learn from other great players, certainly by listening to the likes of Lester Young, and others, in the clubs (inside at last) and on record. But added to that he also had the good sense to learn from disciplined musical instruction.

Charlie’s secondary school, Lincoln High (named after the president of course), had had some superb marching bands over the years, and as Russell writes:

“ An impressive number of Lincoln graduates had used Lincoln Bands as stepping stones to professional careers. Lamar Wright, cornetist with the Bennie Moten Orchestra, the first Kansas City band to record (for RCA Victor in 1923); Jap Allen, and early rival bandleader; [the aforementioned]Walter Page, leader of the formidable Oklahoma City Blue Devils and later bassist with the Count Basie Orchestra; alto saxophonist Eli Logan, and band leader Harlan Leonard were all Lincoln alumni and protégés of Major Smith [Major N. Clark Smith, a retired United States Army Bandmaster who started the Lincoln bands], as were many others who left no deep mark on jazz but pursued successful careers as sidemen…Lincoln undergraduates were aware of these successes, as today students are aware of eminent alumni in sports, arts, and sciences. Success in one of the few professions then open to black people represented a desirable, indeed one of the highest levels of achievement. When Charlie Parker entered Lincoln another generation of successful musicians was in the making.”

The first instrument Charlie was given at school was a tuba, quickly replaced by an old alto saxophone (made in Paris in 1898) bought for $45 (a lot of cash back then)by his mother. It was pretty much on its last legs, but Charlie, with tape and rubber bands) made it work, carrying it to school in a bag made by his mother out of blue and white stripe pillow ticking.

Russell writes:

“ On campus Charlie’s reputation escalated rapidly. At Lincoln High in the early 1930s owning one’s own saxophone was the equivalent of driving an imported sports today. The saxophone, his brashness, and the fact that he had grown to be a big, chunky boy for his thirteen years enabled Charlie to ingratiate himself with a group of juniors and seniors who were organizing an amateur dance band called the Deans of Swing.” It was the start of the eleven year journey toward the new music.

Although a good student when he started at Lincoln, Charlie let his grades slip (perhaps his father’s disappearance may have had something to do with it, plus a doctor had prescribed Charlie morphine after an accident)as the Deans of Swing took up more and more of his time.

It was also at this time that Charlie’s mother managed to get a better paid job working as a night cleaner at the main offices of the Western Union Telegraph Company in the city centre. Her hours were from midnight until eight in the morning. Who was to look after Charlie Parker the teenager?

By this time, around 1935, a new wave of sax players were coming and going in Kansas City — not least the aforementioned Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. Kansas City was now the saxophone player’s town. Charlie told his mother he’d spend her shift listening to the sax players in the clubs, and learning. It’s what he wanted to do. The musicians would look after him.

And they did, teaching him their language, their jargon: a cut was to get the better of another player, good things were solid, and better ones were out of the world. They called their saxophones axes, and a job was a gig. Alcohol was juice, and marijuana cigarettes were mezzirolls or sticks. The musicians ragged him, telling him he needed to come back when he was eighteen and a member 627, the ‘colored local’ of the Musicians’ Protective Association in Kansas City. “…then it would be time for him. And who bought them long-stem pants for you, son, your mama?” Charlie enjoyed the ribbing.

While his mother was working Charlie watched the musicians warm up for another busy eight hour shift, watched how they prepared themselves physically and mentally. He studied their fingering and breath control, and how they piled on more power and creativeness as the hours progressed.

Charlie would often move out onto the sidewalk and busk with a beggar who drummed along to Charlie’s playing with his feet. Most nights an old guy, a junk dealer called Virgil, joined in with his fiddle. The two guys then taught Charlie how to rummage the waste bins at the back of the clubs and restaurants. When the musicians came out of the clubs they’d wave at the ever smiling Charlie. Then he’d walk his mother home. Go to school, or not to go to school, that is the question. Not, was the usual answer.

Charlie would meet his hero Lester Young, and Count Basie, during the breaks, buying himself hot sauce chicken sandwiches with pocket money given him by his mother, and laugh at the Count’s jokes, and smile with Jesse Price, who had been Ma Rainey’s pianist, but was now the drummer with the Count Basie outfit who, one night, asked Charlie if he’d like to come and sit up on the balcony and watch the band. Which he did, and then he stayed for the floor show with the gorgeous dancing girls; then wait for his favourite tune, Basie’s One O’Clock Jump, followed by another piece that included a long solo by Lester Young on his tenor sax, with the fat, airy notes pouring out. Charlie would then take his horn out of its home made bag, and follow Lester’s fingering. The twenty-five year old Lester Young was his model, his god.

All the time Charlie’s confidence grew, and to such an extent that, one Sunday morning, during an all comers jam session at the High Hat Club, he asked if he could take part. Two old pals were in the band from his Deans of Swing days, who nodded, sure. The trouble was that Charlie had not kept up his lessons with his Lincoln tutor. He was rusty, and his fingering rustier still. But he got stuck into the first part of Up the Lazy River, with a same chord bridge to Honeysuckle Rose, followed by an improvisation based on the two. He got away with it, just. Without asking he then played a full chorus of Body and Soul (the pianist and drummer quickly cottoned on),followed by the same chorus at double the tempo. The drummer caught up in a beat, but Charlie’s fingering came unstuck, as did his sax — rubber bands and tape falling to the floor. He fled the stage in tears.

Charlie Parker didn’t ask for help, but told his mother that he had to figure it out for himself, somehow.

The somehow was Virgil, the old junk dealer and fellow busker, who caught Charlie contemplating larceny of a pack of alto sax reeds in a music store and, with some well chosen words instructed Charlie, in the manner of a sermon, that honesty was the only way forward. That he had to find his own way, by hard work. Do what you do best and find a good woman.

In 1938 Charlie hit the road and rails looking for work, and taking every opportunity he could to play. He was soon spotted, and in 1939 found himself in the sax section of the high profile Jay McShann band, with an expensive Selmar alto sax hanging like a medallion on his broad chest.

Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill at Minton’s Playhouse in New York, 1947. Image: Dizzy Gillespie (americaslibrary.gov)

As Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer remind us:

“ The development of bop took place almost entirely at a small Harlem club called Minton’s Playhouse — which surely makes it different to begin with, certainly the only time a specific address can be provided for the origins of a new jazz style. Obviously this does not mean that the style sprang into being overnight there, nor that no one had a new idea in this idiom before or outside of Minton’s. But the club was a musicians’ hangout, its small bandstand always open to those who wanted to sit in. And when Teddy Hill, a former swing-band leader, became its manager early in 1941, the ‘modern’ sound really began to take over…”

Trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, was undoubtedly at the forefront of the new music (probably because he lived longer than Parker), but because Dizzy was also a showman (styling himself on Cab Calloway) who tried hard, with his big band, to try and reinvent a new Swing Era with a hard boppy edge.

On the other hand, Charlie Parker had no interest in, or ability, due to his increasing drug habits, in doing that. Therefore, in retrospect, and because of his chosen instrument, he became the prime influence on just about every other jazz saxophonist post 1945. Charlie Parker was the revolutionary, in the same way Louis Armstrong had been back in the 1920s, and Duke Ellington in the 1930s. Parker’s music came from the same spirit as those earlier uprisings.

Charlie Parker’s musical career was always hampered by his drug and booze addiction, but he did find that “good woman.”

Beverly Dolores Berg was born in New York City in 1925. She was a dancer and jazz enthusiast who met Parker in the 1940s. Their friendship only became romantic in the early 1950s, and “…as it developed, their relationship had to surmount several obstacles, including Charlie’s drug and alcohol abuse as well as the interracial nature of their relationship at a time when American society was still largely segregated.”

Charlie Parker & Chan. Image: Pinterest.

Ross Russell describes Chan thus:

“ Chan was hip and beautiful. A dancer and ex-model, Chan had literally grown up on Fifty-second Street, where her mother, and ex-Ziegfeld Follies girl, had come during the Depression, following the death and financial ruin of her husband, a successful night club operator of the speakeasy era. Once mistress of a multi-roomed house set on a walled estate in Westchester, Mrs. Richardson had salvaged enough from the family wreckage to acquire the hat-check concession at the chic Cotton Club. Mother and daughter lived close by, in a fading, old, but still substantial three-story brownstone house at 7 West 52nd Street…

“ The Cotton Club concession was a lucrative one. Occasionally Chan helped her mother there…[and] at the age of nineteen Chan was one of Manhattan’s night people. A generation before, bobby soxers had grown up on In the Mood and Glenn Miller; Chan grew up on Ornithology and Groovin’ High. The prickly tunes the boppers played, to the confoundment of the squares, were as familiar to her as nursery rhymes…”

Chan also spoke the jargon, and like Dean Benedetti, she did all she could to promote the new music with the many editors and promoters she’d got to know over the years. She was one of the gang. She and her mother even redecorated their old brownstone in a hip style where the jazz musicians could congregate, eat and sleep. Charlie became a frequent visitor and fell for Chan. He couldn’t believe he’d found a girl who loved jazz, especially his kind of jazz. In time their relationship blossomed

In an interview for a documentary film made by Jan Horne, Chan speaks lovingly (from her French garden) of her relationship with Charlie, of his need for a home life with children (Chan already had a daughter who loved Charlie), where jazz had no part. The couple had two children of their own: a daughter called Pree, and later a boy called Baird. But things were often tough financially, making it hard to pay the medical bills when Pree was hospitalized and diagnosed with a heart defect and cystic fibrosis. There was little the doctors back then, and Pree died aged two and a half. As might be expected the child’s death was devastating for Charlie (he was in Los Angeles at the time trying to earn money to pay the medical bills), who attempted suicide twice in the following months.

After Pree’s death Charlie Parker sank further into mental and physical despair, dying (at a friend’s house watching TV), aged 34, in 1955. The coroner put his age at between 55 and 60.

Chan Parker eventually went on to marry the alto saxophonist, Phil Woods, who ‘inherited’ Parker’s saxophone. The Woods family moved to France in the 1960s.

Chan died in France, in 1999. Baird Parker, a talented musician, died in 2014, aged 62, with Phil Woods dying in 2015.

Image: WBUR

Parker’s music also created a new type of follower (cool cats wearing berets and dark glasses), amongst them many writers who ‘got’ what the players were doing, not least Ross Russell.

Russell was born in 1909, and in the 1930s wrote pulp fiction in the style of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He also worked as a journalist.

During World War II Russell served in the United States Merchant Marine in the deadly North Atlantic, where he was shipwrecked. His account of that ordeal appeared in Life, and a couple of other magazines. He served in the warmer, but no less dangerous water, of the South Pacific for the rest of the war.

With the demise of Dial Records, Russell ran a golf course for some years and started writing again, with his biography of Parker proving popular as was his novel, The Sound, based on Parker’s life.

Russell died in 2000.

My 1973 edition

Russell’s writing does have a touch of Chandler’s and Hammett’s easy going style about it. The book is also rammed with information, and a genuine love for its subject, which makes it a wonderfully readable adventure.

A big friend of Charlie Parker’s was the singer and bandleader Billy Eckstine, who has written of when he first saw and heard Charlie in a club in Chicago. The regular sax player was headed for the bar… :

And this cat gets up there, and I’m telling you he blew the bell off that thing! It was Charlie Parker, just come in from Kansas City on a freight train. I guess Bird was no more than about eighteen then, but playing like you never heard — wailing alto then. And that was before he joined Jay McShann…

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Bibliography: Ross Russell — Bird Lives! (Quartet Books, London, 1973); Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer, Jr. — A Pictorial History of Jazz (Spring Books, London, 1958); Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff — Hear me talkin’ to ya ( Penguin, London, 1962)