Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker: "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people beside him ⏳🌊
- FamilyAddie Parker
His mother. Raising him alone, she bought him his first saxophone.
- MentorJay McShann
The bandleader who took him in during his Kansas City years.
- FamilyRebecca Ruffin
His first wife. She bore him a son, Francis Leon.
- ColleagueDizzy Gillespie
The trumpet comrade with whom he created bebop.
- InfluenceLester Young
His supple tone shaped his early playing.
- FamilyChan Parker
His common-law wife. She bore him a daughter, Pree, and a son, Baird.
I. A Kansas City boy · 1920–1935 (age 0–15)
(Kansas City) He was born in August 1920 in Kansas City, Kansas. His father, Charles Parker Sr., was a railroad dining-car waiter and an itinerant vaudeville entertainer who left home while his son was still small. The family soon moved across the river to Kansas City, Missouri, and settled there, and that city became the home ground of his life and his music. (Mother) His mother, Addie Parker, worked as a night cleaner and raised her only son alone. However late she came home from work, she doted on him, and she is said to have scolded him little even when he often skipped school. It was she, too, who bought him a battered alto saxophone from a pawnshop when he was around eleven. (12th Street) Kansas City in those days was a town whose entertainment district ran all night under the protection of political boss Tom Pendergast, all but ignoring Prohibition. From the clubs around 12th and 18th Streets the music of the Count Basie band and tenor saxophonist Lester Young poured out until dawn, and the boy, too young to be let in, would stand outside the club doors listening in secret. He spent a short time in the school band, but he learned music mostly by ear, and Lester Young's light, supple tone left a deep mark on his playing in later years.
II. An apprenticeship in the streets · 1935–1939 (age 15–19)
(Dropping out) In 1935, at about fifteen, he left school to devote himself to music. Drifting from one local band to another, he had already let his attendance slide, and his mother no longer tried to stop him. Money was so tight that, unable to afford new reeds, he taught himself to moisten them with his breath and make them last. (Marriage) In 1936, at sixteen, he married Rebecca Ruffin, who was the same age. Two years later, in 1938, their son Francis Leon was born. But a life of playing club after club through the night could not long coexist with the duties of a teenage head of household, and within a few years the couple separated. (Humiliation) The story is told again and again of a jam session at the Reno Club in his teens, when drummer Jo Jones, after he lost the beat, hurled a cymbal to the floor and drove him off the stand. Consumed by shame, he took a job with a resort band in the Ozark Mountains that summer and, as he later recalled, threw himself into practice, spending hours a day memorizing scales and the complete harmonies of tunes. (Drugs) Around the same time, it is said, he began using drugs after being prescribed painkillers while hospitalized following a car accident. By his late teens he was already dependent on heroin, a shadow that followed him all his life and shook his career, his health and his finances alike.
III. New York and the birth of bebop · 1939–1945 (age 19–25)
(To New York) In 1939 he went to New York for the first time. To cover his living expenses he washed dishes at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, a Harlem restaurant, and he later recalled that hearing up close the harmonic sense of pianist Art Tatum, who played there every night, opened his ears. (Breakthrough) One night that same year, while playing Cherokee at Dan Wall's Chili House, he is said to have realized that by lifting the upper chord tones, such as the 9th, 11th and 13th, into the melody, he could draw out new lines no one had heard before. He counted this as the moment he first found the sound he had been searching for. (Minton's) In the early 1940s, young players such as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Thelonious Monk gathered for the after-hours jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House in Harlem. Working in bandleader Jay McShann's orchestra and shuttling between Kansas City and New York, he too became a regular, and in Gillespie he found a lifelong colleague with whom, trading ideas back and forth, he shaped the new idiom called bebop. (Turning point) He joined Earl Hines's band in 1942 and Billy Eckstine's in 1944, sharing the bandstand with Gillespie, singer Sarah Vaughan and others as he refined the new harmonic language on a larger stage. It was a grueling life of making the rounds of jam sessions all night and standing in big-band rehearsals by day, but within it the framework of bebop grew steadily clearer.
A contrafact laying a new melody over the harmonies of Cherokee, recorded at a session where Dizzy Gillespie played both trumpet and piano, it stands as something like a manifesto announcing bebop to the world.
- After the 8-bar opening theme, the solo launches straight in, vaulting over the fast chord changes of Cherokee with scarcely a breath, and reaches its climax midway in phrases built up from triplets.
- Rather than marking the beat squarely, Max Roach's drums trail the soloist with finely subdivided rhythms on the cymbals, sharing his breathless pace (interplay).
- Within the head-solo-head structure, Dizzy Gillespie's support of the fast tempo with piano accompaniment is singled out as an unusual lineup.
- It is said to have been finished in a single take, and its rough, unpolished texture is judged to have captured the tension all the more vividly.
A 12-bar blues recorded at the same session, it won wide affection for a melody that stays simple and songlike amid the intricacies of bebop harmony.
- The theme is built from just a handful of notes, simple enough for anyone to hum, but the improvisation laid over it is full of intricate chord alterations.
- The solo moves freely in and out of the bent notes peculiar to the blues (blue notes), and the passage in the second chorus where he builds up a repeated figure is especially talked about.
- Each time around the 12-bar blues form, the rhythm section tirelessly upholds the same harmonic frame, leaving the soloist free to venture as far as he likes.
IV. The peak on 52nd Street · 1945–1949 (age 25–29)
(52nd Street) Around 1945 the narrow clubs lining New York's 52nd Street became the stage of bebop. Leading small groups under his own name, he played alongside young musicians such as the young trumpeter Miles Davis and drummer Max Roach, and the tunes he cut at a 1945 session for the Savoy label remain the record that introduced bebop to the world as a style. (Hardship) For all his fame, he was always short of money. Club fees were low, his label contracts were unfavorable, and again and again he pawned his own saxophone to pay for drugs. At times, lacking an instrument, he took the stage on a borrowed horn or a plastic saxophone. (Los Angeles) At the end of 1945 he went out to Los Angeles with Gillespie's group, and after the group left he stayed behind alone, scrambling for work. The “Lover Man” session he recorded for the Dial label in July 1946 took place while he was suffering from withdrawal and survives in a wavering, cracking tone; a few hours later he set fire to his hotel room, was arrested and was committed to Camarillo State Hospital for nearly half a year. (Recovery) “Relaxin' at Camarillo,” recorded after his release in January 1947, carries in its very title his state of mind on coming through that time. Then, with the so-called classic quintet of Miles Davis, pianist Duke Jordan, bassist Tommy Potter and drummer Max Roach, he entered his most prolific creative period.
Recorded in Los Angeles while he was in the grip of withdrawal, the session's wavering tone and unsteady time bear unvarnished witness to the state he was in.
- From the first bars of the theme, the pitch wavers and his breath can be heard growing short, which is often cited as a candid revelation of his physical condition at the time.
- At a slow ballad tempo, phrasing more broken and halting than usual conveys a desperate emotion all the more.
- He himself is said to have been so ashamed of this take that he later opposed its reissue, but the Dial label released it to the world as it was.
Recorded just after his release from Camarillo State Hospital, the piece carries the relief of recovery in its very title.
- Unfolding over a medium-tempo blues, the solo, unlike on “Lover Man,” shows him having regained a clear, forceful tone.
- His phrases traded with trumpeter Howard McGhee push and pull lightly at each other, moving like a conversation (interplay).
- It is said to have been completed after take upon take, and each slightly different take invites comparison of the form he was steadily regaining.
Taking a Gershwin ballad as raw material, it is counted among the performances in which he all but abandons the original melody and spins out new lines at length in improvisation.
- Famous for its solo opening, which merely hints at the theme before plunging straight into free variation, it is counted among the most frequently transcribed and analyzed improvisations in jazz history.
- Even within a slow tempo, his phrasing fills the space with an unceasing stream of notes, revealing his technique and his breath control at once.
- Two takes survive, allowing a side-by-side listening in which entirely different melodic choices unfold over the same chord progression.
V. Unsteady days · 1949–1954 (age 29–34)
(Birdland) In 1949 a club named after his nickname, Birdland, opened on Broadway, and he played on its opening bill. That same year, invited to the Paris International Jazz Festival, he appeared before a European audience for the first time, and he is said to have been deeply struck by an atmosphere far freer of racial discrimination than in America. (Family) He lived with the dancer Chan Richardson in New York's Greenwich Village. Though a complicated divorce meant they never formally married, they regarded each other as husband and wife and together raised Kim, Chan's daughter from an earlier relationship; a daughter, Pree, was born in 1951 and a son, Baird, in 1952. Kim later worked as a jazz vocalist. (Cabaret card) After his 1951 arrest for drug possession, New York City revoked his cabaret card. It meant losing the right to play in clubs that served liquor, and with the loss of the New York club stage, which made up a large share of his income, his livelihood was badly shaken. Around this time he also tried to widen his popular appeal with recordings backed by strings, such as “Bird with Strings.” (Loss) In March 1954 his three-year-old daughter Pree died of complications from pneumonia. He fell apart, and that year he attempted suicide and was admitted to Bellevue Hospital. The weight of this loss cast a long shadow over the rest of his life and his playing.
The signature track of the “Bird with Strings” series, recorded against a string orchestra, it was aimed at a popular audience beyond the bebop clubs.
- Wrapped in string arrangements, the solo flows in phrasing more lyrical and songlike than usual, and he is said to have counted it among the recordings he was most satisfied with.
- A 32-bar tune in ABAC form, four sections of 8 bars each; listen for the moment the harmony shifts in the second eight bars (the B section), when the color of the melody shifts along with it.
- Unlike a jazz club lineup, the soft texture peculiar to strings sets off the sharp tone of the saxophone.
A 32-bar tune of his own composition, it displays both the harmonic and the melodic sense of bebop at its full maturity.
- The theme melody itself already carries intricate harmonic movement, so it becomes natural material for improvisation as the tune passes into the solos.
- Even at a fast tempo, his rhythmic sense (swing) comes through clearly, stretching or pulling the ends of phrases ever so slightly to build tension and release.
- It is counted among the tunes later generations of players most often transcribe and practice as a study piece.
VI. The final year · 1954–1955 (age 34–35)
(Decline) Between 1954 and 1955 his body was visibly ravaged. Stomach ulcers, liver damage from years of drinking and repeated drug use compounded one another, yet he still took the stage. (Last at Birdland) In early March 1955 a performance at Birdland with pianist Bud Powell and bassist Charles Mingus ended in disarray. Powell was too far gone to hold himself together, and after an argument over him, Parker left the stage. It would be his last public performance. (Death) A few days later, on March 12, 1955, he died while watching television in the New York apartment of his devoted patron, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The official cause of death was pneumonia among a combination of causes, and the examining doctor recorded that his thirty-four-year-old body was so worn it looked to be in its mid-fifties. (Legacy) Soon after news of his death spread, the graffiti “Bird Lives” multiplied across New York's subways and streets. At the wish of his mother, Addie, the funeral was held in his hometown of Kansas City. His life lasted only thirty-four years, but the language of harmony and rhythm he left behind became a gateway every jazz musician since has had to pass through.
Lesser-known stories
His fondness for country music is an anecdote often retold among those who knew him. Fellow musicians recalled that on tour, in rooming houses or in the car, he would put country·western music on the jukebox and enjoy it; that a pioneer of bebop loved a genre then less popular among Black musicians struck people as so unexpected that it stayed little known. His interest in modern classical composers ran deep as well. He constantly carried scores by Stravinsky, Bartók and Hindemith, and in the early 1950s he is said to have written to the composer Edgard Varèse asking to study with him. The story that, during a 1951 Birdland set, he noticed Stravinsky in the audience and slipped the opening phrase of his “Firebird” into an improvisation on “Ko-Ko” survives in the testimony of several colleagues. There are several theories, too, about the origin of the nickname Bird. Bandleader Jay McShann recalled that when the tour car hit a chicken (a yardbird), Parker had the car stopped, insisted on picking up the bird, and had it cooked at their lodgings, and he traced the nickname to that moment. Other colleagues' memories diverge somewhat, and which is the true origin remains unclear to this day.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Bebop
(Meaning of the word) The name bebop is commonly said to come from an onomatopoeia imitating the clipped, two-note accented melodies characteristic of the music. (In jazz) A new jazz idiom born in the after-hours jam sessions of Harlem in the mid-1940s, marked by fast tempos, complex harmony and irregular accents. Unlike the swing era, when big bands played set arrangements, its center became small groups in which each player in turn spun out long improvisations. It is a little like classmates abandoning the usual jump-rope rhyme and improvising rhythm games instead, each changing the beat in turn.
Chord changes
(In jazz) The term for the sequence of chords a tune passes through from beginning to end. Players memorize this progression and improvise within its frame. It is like the fixed path of squares on a board game: the order in which you step through them is set, but what you say and which strategy you use along the way changes from moment to moment.
Contrafact
(In jazz) The practice of keeping the chord progression of an already well-known tune and composing an entirely new melody over it. Charlie Parker's “Ko-Ko,” which borrows the harmony of the jazz standard “Cherokee” and sets a completely different melody on top, is a classic example. It is like making up brand-new words and a new tune to sing over the accompaniment of a familiar children's song.
12-bar blues
(In jazz) The oldest and most fundamental jazz·blues form, cycling in rounds of 12 bars. Because a fixed sequence of chords repeats once every 12 bars, players can share this frame tacitly and trade improvisations. It can be likened to a playground game in which everyone repeats a clapping chant they all know, one round at a time.
Head-solo-head
(In jazz) The most common structure in jazz performance: the tune's melody (the head) is played once at the start, then the players take turns improvising (soloing) over its harmony, and finally they return to the opening melody to close the piece. It is like a class presentation where you state the title at the start, everyone takes a turn sharing their thoughts, and at the end you come back to the title to wrap up.
Cabaret card
(In jazz) An identification card that New York City, from the 1940s through the 1960s, required musicians to hold if they wanted to play in nightclubs serving liquor. An arrest record could get the card refused or revoked, so a musician who lost it could no longer appear on New York's major club stages, a devastating blow to their livelihood. Its effect was much like a school penalty where breaking a rule once bars you from club activities altogether for a set period.
Swing
(In jazz) The rhythmic elasticity that builds when the beat is not divided with mechanical precision but pushed and pulled, the offbeat placed slightly late or closer to a triplet feel. People say it is like riding a swing, where nudging the timing of your kick ever so slightly forward and back carries you higher and more smoothly. (Elsewhere) Swing is also the word for the wide sweep of the arms used to hit the ball in baseball or golf.