| Charlie Parker | |
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Charlie Parker with Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, and Max Roach at Three Deuces, New York, NY |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Charles Parker, Jr. |
| Also known as | Bird, Yardbird, Zoizeau (in France)[1] |
| Born | August 29, 1920 Kansas City, Kansas, U.S. |
| Died | March 12, 1955 (aged 34) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Genres | Jazz, bebop |
| Occupations | Saxophonist, composer |
| Instruments | Alto saxophone, tenor saxophone |
| Years active | 1937–1955 |
| Labels | Savoy, Dial, Verve |
| Website | Official Site |
| Notable instruments | |
| Buescher, Conn, King and Grafton alto saxophones. | |
Charles Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), famously called Bird or Yardbird,[2] was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Parker, with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, is widely considered to have been one of the most influential jazz musicians.[3][4][5] Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career[6] and the shortened form "Bird" remained Parker's sobriquet for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology", "Bird Gets the Worm" and "Bird of Paradise."
Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuoso technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker's innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. Several of Parker's songs have become standards, including "Billie's Bounce", "Anthropology", "Ornithology", and "Confirmation". He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines – such as "Ko-Ko", "Kim", and "Leap Frog" – he was also one of the great blues players. His themeless blues improvisation "Parker's Mood" represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz. At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the conception of the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than just a popular entertainer. His style — from a rhythmic, harmonic and soloing perspective — has made a significant impact on musicians of all kinds.
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Charlie Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of Charles and Addie Parker. Charlie attended Lincoln High School.[7] He enrolled in September 1934 and withdrew in December 1935 about the time he joined the local Musicians Union.
Parker displayed no sign of musical talent as a child. His father Charles was an alcoholic who was often absent but presumably provided some musical influence; he was a pianist, dancer and singer on the T.O.B.A. circuit, although he later became a Pullman waiter or chef on the railways. Charlie's mother Addie worked nights at the local Western Union. His biggest influence however was a young trombone player who taught him the basics of improvisation.
Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11 and at age 14 joined his school's band using a rented school instrument. One story holds that, without formal training, he was terrible, and thrown out of the band. Experiencing periodic setbacks of this sort, at one point he broke off from his constant practicing.
It has been said that, in early 1936, Parker participated in a cutting contest that included Jo Jones on drums, who tossed a cymbal at Parker in impatience with his playing.[8] However, in the numerous interviews throughout his life, Jones made no mention of this incident. At this time Parker began to practice with great diligence and rigor, learning the blues, "Cherokee" and "rhythm changes" in all twelve keys. In this woodshedding period, Parker mastered improvisation and developed some of the ideas of be-bop. In an interview with Paul Desmond, he said he spent 3–4 years practicing up to 15 hours a day.[9] It has been said that he used to play many other tunes in all twelve keys. The story, though undocumented, would help to explain the fact that he often played in unconventional concert pitch key signatures, like E (which transposes to C# for the alto sax).
Groups led by Count Basie and Bennie Moten were the leading Kansas City ensembles, and undoubtedly influenced Parker. He continued to play with local bands in jazz clubs around Kansas City, Missouri, where he perfected his technique with the assistance of Buster Smith, whose dynamic transitions to double and triple time certainly influenced Parker's developing style.
In 1938, Parker joined pianist Jay McShann's territory band.[10] The band toured nightclubs and other venues of the southwest, as well as Chicago and New York City.[11][12] Parker made his professional recording debut with McShann's band. It was said at one point in McShann's band that he "sounded like a machine", owing to his highly virtuosic yet nonetheless musical playing.
As a teenager, Parker developed a morphine addiction while in hospital after an automobile accident, and subsequently became addicted to heroin. Heroin would haunt him throughout his life and ultimately contribute to his death.
In 1939, Parker moved to New York City. There he pursued a career in music, but held several other jobs as well. He worked for $9 a week as a dishwasher at Jimmie's Chicken Shack where pianist Art Tatum performed. Parker's later style in some ways recalled Tatum's, with dazzling, high-speed arpeggios and sophisticated use of harmony.
In 1942, Parker left McShann's band and played with Earl Hines for one year. Also in the band was trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, which is where the soon to be famous duo met for the first time. Unfortunately, this period is virtually undocumented because of the strike of 1942–1943 by the American Federation of Musicians, during which no official recordings were made. Nevertheless, it is known that Parker joined a group of young musicians in after-hours clubs in Harlem such as Clark Monroe's Uptown House and (to a much lesser extent) Minton's Playhouse. These young iconoclasts included Gillespie, pianist Thelonious Monk, guitarist Charlie Christian, and drummer Kenny Clarke. The beboppers' attitude was summed up in a famous quotation attributed to Monk by Mary Lou Williams: "We wanted a music that they couldn't play"[13] – "they" being the (white) bandleaders who had taken over and profited from swing music. The group played in venues on 52nd Street including the Three Deuces and The Onyx. In his time in New York City, Parker also learned much from notable music teacher Maury Deutsch.
According to an interview Parker gave in the 1950s, one night in 1939, he was playing "Cherokee" in a jam session with guitarist William 'Biddy' Fleet when he hit upon a method for developing his solos that enabled him to play what he had been hearing in his head for some time, by connecting harmony using the diminished relationship of dominants. Still with McShann's orchestra, Parker at this time realized that the twelve tones of the chromatic scale can lead melodically to any key, breaking some of the confines of simpler jazz soloing.
Early in its development, this new type of jazz was rejected by many of the established, traditional jazz musicians who disdained their younger counterparts with comments like Eddie Condon's putdown: "They flat their fifths, we drink ours."[14] The beboppers, in response, called these traditionalists "moldy figs". However, some musicians, such as Coleman Hawkins and Benny Goodman, were more positive about its development, and participated in jam sessions and recording dates in the new approach with its adherents.
Because of the two-year Musicians' Union recording ban on all commercial recordings from 1942 to 1944 (part of a struggle to get royalties from record sales for a union fund for out-of-work musicians), much of bebop's early development was not captured for posterity. As a result, the new musical concepts only gained limited radio exposure. Bebop musicians had a difficult time gaining widespread recognition. It was not until 1945, when the recording ban was lifted, that Parker's collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell and others had a substantial effect on the jazz world. One of their first (and greatest) small-group performances together was rediscovered and issued in 2005: a concert in New York's Town Hall on June 22, 1945. Bebop began to grab hold and gain wider appeal among musicians and fans alike.
On November 26, 1945, Parker led a record date for the Savoy label, marketed as the "greatest Jazz session ever." The tracks recorded during this session include "Ko-Ko" (based on the chords of "Cherokee"), "Now's the Time" (a twelve bar blues incorporating a riff later used in the late 1949 R&B dance hit "The Hucklebuck"), "Billie's Bounce", and "Thriving on a Riff".
Shortly afterwards, the Parker/Gillespie band traveled to an unsuccessful engagement at Billy Berg's club in Los Angeles. Most of the group returned to New York, but Parker remained in California, cashing in his return ticket to buy heroin. He experienced great hardship in California, eventually being committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital for a six-month period.
Parker's addiction to heroin, which began in his late teens, caused him to miss gigs and to be fired for being intoxicated. To satisfy his habit, he frequently resorted to busking on the streets for drug money, receiving loans from fellow musicians/admirers, pawning his own horn and borrowing other sax players' instruments as a result. Parker's situation was typical of the strong connection between drug abuse and jazz at the time.
Although he produced many brilliant recordings during this period, Parker's behavior became increasingly erratic due to his habit. Heroin was difficult to obtain after he moved to California for a short time where the drug was less abundant, and Parker began to drink heavily to compensate for this. A recording for the Dial label from July 29, 1946, provides evidence of his condition. Prior to this session, Parker drank about a quart of whiskey. According to the liner notes of Charlie Parker on Dial Volume 1, Parker missed most of the first two bars of his first chorus on the track, "Max Making Wax." When he finally did come in, he swayed wildly and once spun all the way around, going badly off mic. On the next tune, "Lover Man", producer Ross Russell physically supported Parker in front of the microphone. On "Bebop" (the final track Parker recorded that evening) he begins a solo with a solid first eight bars. On his second eight bars, however, Parker begins to struggle, and a desperate Howard McGhee, the trumpeter on this session, shouts, "Blow!" at Parker. McGhee's bellow is audible on the recording. Charles Mingus considered this version of "Lover Man" to be among Parker's greatest recordings despite its flaws.[15] Nevertheless, Parker hated the recording and never forgave Ross Russell for releasing the sub-par performance (and re-recorded the tune in 1951 for Verve, this time in stellar form, but perhaps lacking some of the passionate emotion in the earlier, problematic attempt).
During the night following the "Lover Man" session, Parker was drinking in his hotel room. He entered the hotel lobby stark naked on several occasions and asked to use the phone, but was refused on each attempt. The hotel manager eventually locked him in his room. At some point during the night, he set fire to his mattress with a cigarette, then ran through the hotel lobby wearing only his socks. He was arrested and committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where he remained for six months.
Coming out of the hospital, Parker was initially clean and healthy, and proceeded to do some of the best playing and recording of his career. Before leaving California, he recorded "Relaxin' at Camarillo", in reference to his hospital stay. He returned to New York – and his addiction – and recorded dozens of sides for the Savoy and Dial labels that remain some of the high points of his recorded output. Many of these were with his so-called "classic quintet" including trumpeter Miles Davis and drummer Max Roach.
A longstanding desire of Parker's was to perform with a string section. He was a keen student of classical music, and contemporaries reported he was most interested in the music and formal innovations of Igor Stravinsky, and longed to engage in a project akin to what later became known as Third Stream Music, a new kind of music, incorporating both jazz and classical elements as opposed to merely incorporating a string section into performance of jazz standards. On November 30, 1949, Norman Granz arranged for Parker to record an album of ballads with a mixed group of jazz and chamber orchestra musicians.[16] Six master takes from this session comprised the album Charlie Parker with Strings: "Just Friends", "Everything Happens to Me", "April in Paris", "Summertime", "I Didn't Know What Time It Was", and "If I Should Lose You". The sound of these recordings is rare in Parker's catalog. Parker's improvisations are, in comparison to his usual work, more distilled and economical. His tone is darker and softer than on his small-group recordings, and the majority of his lines are beautiful embellishments on the original melodies rather than harmonically based improvisations. These are among the few recordings Parker made during a brief period when he was able to control his heroin habit, and his sobriety and clarity of mind are evident in his playing. Parker stated that, of his own records, Bird With Strings was his favorite. Although using classical music instrumentation with jazz musicians was not entirely original, this was the first major work where a composer of bebop was matched with a string orchestra.
Some fans thought this record was a sellout and a pandering to popular tastes. It is now seen to have been artistically as well as commercially successful. While Charlie Parker with Strings sold better than his other releases, Parker's version of "Just Friends" is regarded as one of his best performances. In an interview, Parker said he considered it to be his best recording to that date.
By 1950, much of the jazz world had fallen under Parker's spell. Many musicians transcribed and copied his solos. Legions of saxophonists imitated his playing note-for-note. In response to these pretenders, Parker's admirer, the bass player Charles Mingus, titled a tune "Gunslinging Bird" (short for "If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats") featured on the album Mingus Dynasty. In this regard, he is perhaps only comparable to Louis Armstrong: both men set the standard for their instruments for decades, and few escaped their influence.
In 1953, Parker performed at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada, joined by Gillespie, Mingus, Bud Powell and Max Roach. Unfortunately, the concert clashed with a televised heavyweight boxing match between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott and as a result was poorly attended. Thankfully, Mingus recorded the concert, and the album Jazz at Massey Hall is often cited as one of the finest recordings of a live jazz performance, with the saxophonist credited as "Charlie Chan" for contractual reasons (Chan being his common-law wife).
At this concert, he played a plastic Grafton saxophone (serial number 10265);[20] later, saxophonist Ornette Coleman used this brand of plastic sax in his early career. A story recounts that Parker had sold his alto saxophone to buy drugs, and at the last minute, he, Dizzy Gillespie and other members of Charlie's entourage went running around Toronto trying to find Parker a saxophone. After scouring all the downtown pawn shops open at the time, they were only able to find a Grafton, which Parker proceeded to use at the concert that night. This account however is disputed, especially because Parker in fact owned two of the Grafton plastic horns. At this point in his career he was experimenting with new sounds and new materials. Parker himself explains the purpose of the plastic saxophone in a May 9, 1953 broadcast from Birdland and does so again in subsequent May 1953 broadcast.
Parker was known for often showing up to performances without an instrument, necessitating a loan at the last moment. There are various photos that show him playing a Conn 6M saxophone, a high quality instrument that was noted for having a very fast action[21] and a unique "underslung" octave key.[22][23]
Some of the photographs showing Parker with a Conn 6M were taken on separate occasions.[24][25][26] because Parker can be seen wearing different clothing and there are different backgrounds. However, other photos exist that show Parker holding alto saxophones with a more conventional octave key arrangement, i.e. mounted above the crook of the saxophone[27] e.g. the Martin Handicraft[28] and Selmer Model 22[29] saxophones, among others. Parker is also known to have performed with a King 'Super 20' saxophone, with a semi-underslung octave key that bears some resemblance to those fitted on modern Yanagisawa instruments. Parker's King Super 20 saxophone was made specially for him in 1947.
Parker died in the suite of his friend and patron Nica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City while watching The Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show on television. The official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer but Parker also had an advanced case of cirrhosis and had had a heart attack. Any one of the four ailments could have killed him.[30] The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker's 34-year-old body to be between 50 or 60 years of age.[31]
It was well known that Parker never wanted to return to Kansas City, even in death. Parker had told his common-law wife, Chan, that he did not want to be buried in the city of his birth; that New York was his home and he didn’t want any fuss or memorials when he died. At the time of his death, though, he had not divorced his previous wife Doris, nor had he officially married Chan, which left Parker in the awkward post-mortem situation of having two widows. This complicated the settling of Parker's inheritance and would ultimately serve to frustrate his wish to be quietly interred in his adopted hometown. Dizzy Gillespie was able to take charge of the funeral arrangements[32] that Chan had been putting together and organised a ‘lying-in-state’, a Harlem procession officiated by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and a memorial concert before Parker's body was flown back to Missouri to be buried there in accordance with his mother's wishes. Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemetery on Blue Ridge Boulevard at East Truman Road just outside Kansas City, Missouri, in an unincorporated area known as Blue Summit.
Charlie Parker was survived by both his legal wife, Doris (née Doris June Snyder, August 16, 1922 – January 17, 2000), and his partner, Chan; a stepdaughter, Kim, who is also a musician; and a son, Baird; their later lives are chronicled in Chan Parker's autobiography, My Life in E Flat.[33]
Parker's estate is managed by CMG Worldwide.
Parker's style of composition involved interpolation of original melodies over pre-existing jazz forms and standards, a practice still common in jazz today. Examples include "Ornithology" ("How High The Moon") and "Yardbird Suite" ("What Price Love"). The practice was not uncommon prior to bebop; however, it became a signature of the movement as artists began to move away from arranging popular standards and began to compose their own material.
While tunes such as "Now's The Time", "Billie's Bounce", and "Cool Blues" were based on conventional 12-bar blues changes, Parker also created a unique version of the 12-bar blues for his tune "Blues for Alice". These unique chords are known popularly as "Bird Changes". Like his solos, some of his compositions are characterized by long, complex melodic lines and a minimum of repetition although he did employ the use of repetitive (yet relatively rhythmically complex) motifs in many other tunes as well, most notably "Now's The Time".
Parker also contributed a vast rhythmic vocabulary to the modern jazz solo, one in which triplets and pick-up notes were used in (then) unorthodox ways to lead into chord tones, affording the soloist with more freedom to use passing tones, which soloists would have previously avoided. Within this context, Parker was admired for his unique style of phrasing and innovative use of rhythm. Via his recordings and the popularity of the posthumously published Charlie Parker Omnibook, Parker's uniquely identifiable vocabulary of "licks" and "riffs" dominated jazz for many years to come. Today his ideas are routinely analyzed by jazz students and are part of any player's basic jazz vocabulary.
| Charlie Parker Grammy Award History[34] | |||||
| Year | Category | Title | Genre | Label | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1974 | Best Performance By A Soloist | First Recordings! | Jazz | Onyx | Winner |
Recordings of Charlie Parker were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance."
| Charlie Parker: Grammy Hall of Fame Awards[35] | |||||
| Year Recorded | Title | Genre | Label | Year Inducted | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1945 | "Billie's Bounce" | Jazz (Single) | Savoy | 2002 | |
| 1953 | Jazz at Massey Hall | Jazz (Album) | Debut | 1995 | |
| 1946 | "Ornithology" | Jazz (Single) | Dial | 1989 | |
| 1950 | Charlie Parker with Strings | Jazz (Album) | Mercury | 1988 | |
| Year Inducted | Title | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | Jazz at Lincoln Center: Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame | |||
| 1984 | Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award | |||
| 1979 | Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame | |||
In 2002, the Library of Congress honored his recording "Ko-Ko" (1945) by adding it to the National Recording Registry.
| Year Issued | Stamp | USA | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | 32 cents Commemorative stamp | U.S. Postal Stamps | Photo (Scott #2987)[36] |
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Charlie Parker Residence
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(2011)
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| Location: | 151 Avenue B Manhattan, New York City |
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| Built: | c.1849 |
| Architectural style: | Gothic Revival |
| Governing body: | private |
| NRHP Reference#: | 94000262 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP: | April 7, 1994[38] |
| Designated NRHP: | April 7, 1994 |
| Designated NYCL: | May 18, 1999[37] |
From 1950 to 1954, Parker and his common-law wife, Chan Richardson, lived in the ground floor of the townhouse at 151 Avenue B, between East 9th and 10th Streets across from Tompkins Square Park in the Alphabet City section of the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The Gothic Revival building, which was built c.1849,[39] was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994,[40] and was designated a New York City landmark in 1999. In addition, in 1992, Avenue B between East 7th and 10th Streets was renamed Charlie Parker Place in 1992.
