Bird Lives!

By Joan Downs

"The history of jazz," Miles Davis maintains, "can be told in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker." Satchmo died at 71 on July 6, 1971, his name a household word; but 18 years have passed since Charlie ("Bird") Parker died, broke and burned out at 34. Except to jazz buffs, his name is barely remembered. No longer do such graffiti as "Bird lives!" appear on subway walls. Yet sooner or later Parker's genius confronts anyone who listens to jazz seriously.

He was jazz's most prolific improviser. Bird would blow 15 or 20 choruses on his alto saxophone without a repeat, then pause, breathe from his toes and blow ten more, bending and coloring the notes with a broad double-edged sound. Technically, his music was fiendishly complex; emotionally it was a pure sound riding a column of air that came straight from the gut. It was the kind of music musicians dream about.

Ross Russell's biography, "Bird Lives!", vividly documents the achievement and the tragedy of Parker's life. Unlike many writers who gush about jazzmen with little regard for facts, Russell remains temperate without being tepid. His style slips only when he reverts to a psuedo-novelistic form. Though Russell has unrestrained respect for Parker's talents, he nevertheless dismantles much of the myth that has grown around this genius of improvisation. Russell shows that Parker earned his place in jazz's pantheon by more than a shot of heroin. His talent was nurtured by hard work and an almost pathological concentration; Parker logged some 15,000 hours "woodshedding" (practicing). As he grew up, he heard firsthand all the important jazz artists who converged on his home town, Kansas City, Kans.: Count Basie, Hot Lips Page, Lester Young.

"Yardbird." Poor and black, Parker's father early deserted the family; his mother worked as a cleaning woman. By the time he was 13, she had scrimped enough to buy him a saxophone for $45. Silently fingering the battered 1898 sax, held together with tape and rubber bands, he would stand in the alleys outside the clubs waiting to talk to his heroes between sets--a practice that earned his nickname "Yard-bird." (It did not come about, as Russell claims, from a fondness for chicken.)

One night at the Reno Club he got a chance to sit in. He thought that he could play his saxophone as fast as Art Tatum played the piano, and began with a brief stratospheric flight that teased the ear. But he soon lost the key and then the beat. At that, the drummer's cymbal hurtled through the air, landing with a crash at his feet: in the customary jazz citation to a bad musician,

Charlie had been "gonged off" the stage.

Soon nobody was gonging off Bird. In his 20s, he had already become a legend. He had given his name to Birdland, and along with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell had founded a whole new jazz idiom called bebop. The beginning came one night while Parker was playing Cherokee in a Manhattan chili house: he reached up and got his line by filching the top notes off the chords. By mingling spontaneous pirouettes of fanciful improvisations with a tune's melody he vastly expanded the freedom of musicians.

Parker's life was as frantic as his music was creative. He said that he wanted to hear Schoenberg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Bartok--but he could never find the time. Married twice, his amorous escapades were infamous. He was charming, monstrous, lonely, tortured. He was trapped in the upside-down world of jazz. Day began at dusk and ended whenever the counterfeit glow of alcohol, drugs and sex wore off. He began to use heroin to unlock the doors of creativity the way Coleridge used opium and Schiller inhaled rotten apples. Finally he lost the trick of living off the top. "Do as I say and not as I do," he admonished Trumpeter Red Rodney as he gave himself a fix. He went into a steady decline. Though his records made millions, his last years were a hell of scrounging for drugs. He had a nervous breakdown, recovered, attempted suicide. In the end his body proved less durable than his music. Afflicted by cirrhosis of the liver, stomach ulcers and pneumonia, he died in Manhattan in 1955, a tragic figure who in a few short years had forever changed the sound of jazz.

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