Charlie Parker started playing as a boy, when his mother gave him a saxophone to cheer him up after his father left. He went on to spearhead a musical revolution.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, scholar and author Stanley Crouch tells the story of Parker's early years and his rise to prominence. But Crouch says he didn't want to tell the same old story of young black musicians overcoming obstacles.
"These guys, they thought about life," he says. "Oh yes, they thought about being colored, but they also thought about life. And people came to hear you because you played life. It wasn't because you played, 'Oh, I'm just a poor colored man over here, just doing some poor colored things. I'm thinking about my poor colored girl and how the white man is not going to let us blah blah.' That wasn't what they were playing."
'I Put Quite A Bit Of Study Into The Horn'
Crouch's book opens with a triumphant moment in Parker's career. It's February 1942 and the 21-year-old alto player is on the bandstand at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, performing with the Jay McShann Orchestra for a live radio broadcast. He steps up to solo and Crouch explains what happens next:
When the band started throwing up stock riffs behind him, Parker sidestepped the familiar shapes, issuing his responses from deep in left field.
... Each chorus was getting hotter; it was clear, from the position of his body and the sound of his horn, that Charlie Parker was not going to give in. All the nights he had worked on it, the flubs, the fumblings, the sore lips, mouth, and tongue, the cramped fingers — they all paid off that afternoon. Suddenly, the man with the headphones was signaling McShann, Don't stop! Don't stop! Keep on playing!
In 1980, the late pianist and bandleader Jay McShann described how Parker's sound grabbed him the first time he heard it.
"One particular night, I happened to be coming through the streets and I heard the sound coming out. And this was a different sound, so I went inside to see who was blowing," he said. "So I walked up to Charlie after he finished playing and I asked him, I said, 'Say man,' I said, 'where are you from?' I said, 'I thought I met most of the musicians around here.' Well, he says, 'I'm from Kansas City.' But he says, 'I've been gone for the last two or three months. Been down to the Ozarks woodshedding.' "
All that woodshedding — practicing in isolation, running through every tune in every key — took Parker's playing to the next level. In a 1954 radio interview, Parker told fellow alto player Paul Desmond that that was his goal from the beginning.
"I put quite a bit of study into the horn, that's true," he said. "In fact, the neighbors threatened to ask my mother to move once when we were living out West. She said I was driving them crazy with the horn. I used to put in at least 11 to 15 hours a day. ... I did that for over a period of three or four years."
Crouch says Parker was intense about everything. When he was researching Kansas City Lightning, Parker's friend Bob Redcross told him that Parker had a deep intellectual curiosity.
"They read history books. They went to museums," Crouch says. "Redcross told me, once he said, 'Yes, Charles and I, we would sit and we would discuss Sherlock Holmes, or we would talk about history. We were always reading magazines. We were always doing stuff that people don't think that we did.'"
Finding Redemption In 'Beautiful Notes'
Then there are the more well-known stories about Parker: He dropped out of high school and picked up a heroin habit; he married his teenaged sweetheart, then abandoned her and his child; he missed rehearsals and didn't show up for gigs. In 1942, McShann fired him.
"We told Bird to take a little vacation because we were in Detroit, and he got feeling pretty good there, you know," McShann remembered. "And so we says, 'Why don't you take a little vacation, Bird, and just cool it. And so he did."
Parker may have neglected his personal and professional relationships, but Crouch says he was never unfaithful to his music.
"The thing to me that's most inspirational about Charlie Parker is that he felt that you could only redeem yourself for bad things by doing something that was beautiful," he says. "He felt that he could give the world beautiful notes."
Crouch is currently writing the second volume of his Parker biography, which will cover the saxophonist's New York career, the 1940s bebop revolution and Parker's death in 1955 at the age of 34.
Excerpt: Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
Before sunrise, the news was on the streets: a fresh bunch of Kansas City musicians was in town — Jay McShann and his orchestra — and Lucky Millinder was taking a beating. It was a familiar kind of tale, part of the excitement of living in Harlem. Somebody would show up with a new way of doing it, or would do the classic stuff with such heat it felt brand-new. "It was a shock to everybody, because we had been holding our own with the other bands," said Panama Francis.
The next morning, McShann had a visitor at the Woodside hotel: Lucky Millinder himself.
"C'mere, you little son of a bitch. I want you to go with me this morning so we can sit down and talk."
Over drinks and food, Millinder told McShann, "You know, you dirty sumbitches run us out of there last night."
"Oh, no," McShann demurred, "you know better than that."
"Yes, you did. I was going to send you back to the sticks, but you motherfuckers run us out of there. Look, you're in the club now. I'm going to take you around town and show you what's what. Here's my card. You ever need to know about something, you call me."
McShann was shocked. "I never met anybody like you."
"Well, that's the way it is in New York. When you bust your way in, you're in. Let's get out of here and spend some money."
McShann went along, but that didn't mean a truce; no form of friendship came before music.
In the Kansas City jam sessions, you had to be able to play either brilliantly or boldly. The following night, McShann's organization did both. They played at just the right tempos, an essential element of swing. Half the audience was at the bandstand's edge, listening and snapping their fingers; the other half took to the dance floor, becoming what Dizzy Gillespie called "the mirror of the music." But the notes and rhythms that caught the dancers inspired more than a reflection. There were so many different variations going on out there that the musicians were prodded into new ideas as they looked at those Negro bodies improvising on the music in time.
With their confidence all the way up, the McShann Orchestra had the corner on that dialogue. They were changing their title from western dogs to western demons.
"Jay's band was very special because we could play a waltz, a schottische, or whatever," observed Orville Minor. "Somebody in the band could fit it, and the brass section could sit up and play some harmony behind anybody. The reed section got to where it was that way, too. A cat would know what particular part of the chord to build his notes from. Got to be so good at it you couldn't tell what was written and what wasn't."
So McShann could send Walter Brown out there with Piggy Minor growling behind him; then Bird would step up a chorus later, slipping arabesques of musical freshness into the gutbucket. Hibbler's sepia ballads would push the men and women together. Then Charlie would rise again, from the romantic cushion of brass and reeds, to manufacture gooseflesh with an improvised melody, a veil of transparent lyricism, in bursts as brief as eight bars that made the dancers hold each other even closer and caused his fellow musicians to share their heads. And so the McShann band proved it could swing, Kansas City style, lolling into power, trailing behind the beat a little bit, gradually lifting the gear a notch, just a little more, until all within hearing distance knew it was on. Building, is you ready? 'Cause we gonna tear you down!
On Sunday, at 4:30 P.M., a local radio show broadcast a quick fifteen-minute set from the Savoy Ballroom. The producers allowed in thirty or forty people to give the musicians an audience, to make it more than a brief rehearsal. When they got the signal, McShann's band kicked off a blues. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, from the home of happy feet, the Savoy Ballroom, we proudly present the Jay McShann Orchestra, all the way from Kansas City! Take it, Jay."
They loped through the blues, then went into a medium-tempo song that swung nicely. They intended to take it out with "Cherokee," Charlie's feature.
But Charlie wasn't there.
Well, that was Charlie Parker. Everyone was disappointed in a familiar way, the way that those who must do business with drug addicts become accustomed to — starting with suspense, as all wonder if this will be another one of those times, then leading eventually to an exaggerated apology or one hell of a story about what made it impossible for him to get there. The men all felt this burden of potential disappointment, and the resentment that came with it. Why did this have to be the guy with all the talent? Why couldn't he be like the other guys who had it — Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge — able to have his fun while keeping his professional image shining? Why did his private life have to mess up everybody else's plans so often? That was the way it was, and it could seem so pitiful sometimes, make you so angry.
But then there he was, moving across the floor, case in hand.
From Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch. Copyright 2013 by Stanley Crouch. Excerpted by permission of Harper.
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