Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker: The Chord Changes That Broke Open

In early 1936 a fifteen-year-old alto player stood up to solo at a Kansas City jam session with members of the Count Basie band, lost the chord changes, and kept going anyway. The drummer, Jo Jones, lifted a cymbal off his kit and dropped it at the boy's feet — the signal to leave the stand. Charlie Parker went away and practised. Nine years later he recorded "Ko-Ko," and the music he had failed at no longer existed in the form he had failed at.

Kansas City, and a Thrown Cymbal

He was born on August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, Kansas, to Charles Parker Sr., a Pullman waiter and sometime musician, and Addie Bailey, of Choctaw and African-American descent. The family crossed into Kansas City, Missouri in 1927; his parents separated in 1930, his father's drinking and the Depression between them. He went to Penn and Sumner schools and then Lincoln High, took up the saxophone at eleven, and joined the school band under Alonzo Lewis.

The city was the right accident of history. Tom Pendergast's political machine kept the nightclubs open and effectively unpoliced, and the music never stopped. Parker began playing professionally in 1935, at fifteen, and quit school that December.

Woodshed

Late in 1936 a car crash on the way to a resort in the Ozarks broke three of his ribs and fractured his spine. A doctor prescribed morphine. The addiction that killed him started there, at sixteen, as pain management.

It also bought him time. Convalescing and then working through 1937, he did the thing the cymbal had demanded: he learned every chord progression he could find, at every tempo, until the harmony was not something he followed but something he inhabited. He joined Jay McShann's territory band in 1938, recorded professionally with it in 1940, and picked up the nickname Yardbird, later shortened to Bird.

The Chili House

The breakthrough arrived in New York, where he had moved in 1939, washing dishes and listening to Art Tatum. Working over the changes of "Cherokee" with the guitarist William "Biddy" Fleet, he found what he had been reaching for, and described it afterwards with unusual precision: 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."

That sentence is the door into bebop. Instead of building melodies from the obvious notes of a chord, Parker built them from the upper extensions — the intervals other players treated as decoration — and then re-harmonised underneath to justify them. Because all twelve semitones could be made to lead melodically into any key, nothing was off-limits any more.

Bebop

He left McShann in 1942 for Earl Hines's orchestra, where Dizzy Gillespie was also playing, and spent the war years in Harlem after-hours rooms like Clark Monroe's Uptown House with Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian and Kenny Clarke. The musicians' union recording ban of 1942–44 meant the crucial period went almost entirely undocumented. Gillespie began writing Parker's improvised lines down as melodies, which is how "Ko-Ko," "Anthropology" and "Confirmation" came to exist as tunes.

In late 1944 they formed a small racially integrated group — Al Haig on piano, Curley Russell on bass, Stan Levey on drums, and pointedly no guitar — and took a residency at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, where the style acquired the name bebop. Other musicians found it threatening, which it was.

On November 26, 1945, billed as Charlie Parker's Reboppers, with Gillespie, a teenaged Miles Davis, Russell and Max Roach, he cut "Ko-Ko," "Billie's Bounce" and "Now's the Time" in a single session. "Ko-Ko" runs on the chords of "Cherokee" at a tempo that dares the listener to keep up.

Camarillo

In December 1945 the band went to Billy Berg's in Los Angeles. Parker stayed behind and cashed in his return ticket for heroin. When the supply failed he substituted whisky, and at a Dial Records session in July 1946, after most of a quart, he came apart: the "Lover Man" take from that day is a document of a man in collapse. He set his hotel bedsheets alight, ran through the lobby naked, and was committed to Camarillo State Hospital for six months.

He came out clean and healthy, recorded "Relaxin' at Camarillo," made fine sessions with Erroll Garner's trio, returned to New York in 1947, and started using again.

Strings, Birdland, Massey Hall

Norman Granz gave him the thing he had always wanted. On November 30, 1949, Parker recorded ballads backed by a chamber ensemble; six masters became *Charlie Parker with Strings*, including "Just Friends" and "April in Paris." Purists called it a sell-out. It sold.

A New York club was named Birdland for him in 1949, and George Shearing wrote "Lullaby of Birdland" three years later. In May 1953 he played Toronto's Massey Hall with Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Roach — on a borrowed white plastic Grafton alto, before a half-empty room, because Marciano was fighting Walcott on the radio. Mingus taped it, and *Jazz at Massey Hall* became the most celebrated live record in bebop.

The end came fast. His three-year-old daughter Pree died in March 1954 of cystic fibrosis and pneumonia; he attempted suicide twice that year and was hospitalised again. Birdland fired him in September. His last performance there, on March 4, 1955, disintegrated into an argument when Powell refused to play.

Why Charlie Is Called a Genius

Of everyone the word gets attached to, Parker has the cleanest claim, because the innovation is technical, specifiable and datable. He reorganised the relationship between melody and harmony in Western improvised music. Taking the upper intervals of a chord as melodic material and re-harmonising beneath them opened a set of moves that had not previously existed, and he added to it a rhythmic freedom — triplets and pickups placed to displace the beat, phrases beginning and ending where nobody expected — executed at tempos most players could not physically manage. He did all this in real time, without notation, night after night.

The testimony is not hedged. Miles Davis: "You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker." Harold Bloom put Parker's "Parker's Mood" and "I Remember You" on his shortlist of the twentieth-century American Sublime. Mingus thought even the catastrophic "Lover Man" was among his greatest records.

The counter-case is not about the music but about what was made of it. Parker improvised most of his masterpieces over other men's chord progressions — "Cherokee," "How High the Moon," "I Got Rhythm" — and left comparatively few original harmonic structures behind. His unreliability wrecked bands and bookings. Worst, the myth of the addicted genius that formed around him persuaded a generation of younger musicians that heroin was part of the equipment, a belief that destroyed careers and lives. He was not a genius because he was destroyed; he was destroyed while being one.

Legacy

He died on March 12, 1955, in Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter's suite at the Stanhope Hotel, watching television, of lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, with advanced cirrhosis behind them. The coroner estimated the body at between fifty and sixty years old. He was thirty-four.

Gillespie paid for the funeral. Graffiti reading "Bird Lives" appeared across New York. The Library of Congress added "Ko-Ko" to the National Recording Registry in 2002; his Avenue B apartment is a New York landmark on the National Register, and the street outside is Charlie Parker Place. Kerouac wrote him into verse, Baldwin into fiction, Basquiat into paint. Every improvising musician since has worked inside a harmonic space he opened in a chili house arguing over "Cherokee."