Charlie Parker
Charles Parker Jr., nicknamed "Bird" or "Yardbird", was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and advanced harmonies. He was a virtuoso and introduced revolutionary rhythmic and harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. Parker primarily played the alto saxophone.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer.
Early life
Charles Parker Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas, to Charles Parker Sr. and Adelaide "Addie" Bailey, who was of mixed Choctaw and African-American background. He was raised in Kansas City, Missouri, near Westport Road. His father, a Pullman waiter and chef on the railways, was often required to travel for work, but provided some musical influence because he was a pianist, dancer, and singer on the Theatre Owners Booking Association circuit. Parker's mother worked nights at the local Western Union office during the 1920s.Parker first went to a Catholic school and sang in its choir, but his parents separated in 1930 due to his father's alcoholism and the effects of the Great Depression. By the time he was in high school, Parker, his older half-brother John, and his mother Addie were living near 15th Street and Olive Street and she was working as a cleaner in order to afford housing.
Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11, and at age 14 he joined the Lincoln High School band, where he studied under bandmaster Alonzo Lewis. His mother purchased a new alto saxophone around the same time. Parker's biggest influence in his early teens was a young trombone player named Robert Simpson, who taught him the basics of improvisation.
Parker withdrew from high school in December 1935, joined the local musicians' union, and decided to pursue his musical career full-time.
Career
1936–1938: Jam sessions and woodshedding
Upon leaving high school, Parker began to play with local bands in jazz clubs around Kansas City and often ambitiously took part in jam sessions with more experienced musicians. In early 1936, at one such jam session with the Count Basie Orchestra, he lost track of the chord changes while improvising. This prompted Jo Jones to contemptuously remove a cymbal from his drum kit and throw it at his feet as a signal to leave the stage.Rather than becoming discouraged, Parker vowed to practice harder. He mastered improvisation and, according to his comments in an interview with Paul Desmond, spent the next three to four years practicing up to 15 hours a day. Parker proposed to Rebecca Ruffin, his girlfriend four years his senior, and the two married on July 25, 1936. They had two children before divorcing in 1939, in large part due to his growing drug addiction.
In late 1936, Parker and a Kansas City band traveled to the Ozarks for the opening of Musser's Resort south of Eldon, Missouri. Along the way, the caravan of musicians had a car accident and Parker broke three ribs and fractured his spine. Despite this near-death experience, in 1937 Parker returned to the area, where he spent a great deal of time woodshedding and developing his sound. Working with a pianist and guitarist, he practiced improvising over chord changes and began to develop the ability to solo fluently across chords and scales.
In 1938, Parker joined pianist Jay McShann's territory band. His first gig with the band was during the summer or early fall at the Continental Club in Kansas City, where Parker worked as a substitute alto saxophonist for Edward "Popeye" Hale. In December, he joined Harlan Leonard's Rockets; the band played at dances including a Christmas dance for which Parker was listed in a local newspaper as one of the Rockets' personnel.
1939–1944: Development of bebop
In 1939, Parker moved to New York City to pursue his musical career but worked part-time jobs to make a living. Among the more musically significant of these was as a dishwasher for nine dollars a week at Jimmie's Chicken Shack, where pianist Art Tatum performed. Struggling with poverty, Parker went to the home of fellow alto saxophone player Buster Smith to ask for help. Smith allowed Parker to live in his apartment for six months and gave him gigs in his band. Parker's playing at the gigs impressed several New York musicians, including pianist and bandleader Earl Hines.While living in New York, Parker achieved his musical breakthrough, developing a new improvisational vocabulary which later came to be known as "bebop". Playing "Cherokee" in a practice session with guitarist William "Biddy" Fleet, he realized that the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale can lead melodically to any key, breaking some of the confines of simpler jazz soloing. Parker recalled: "I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn't play it... Well, that night I was working over 'Cherokee' and, as I did, I found that 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. I came alive."
In 1940, he returned to Kansas City to perform with Jay McShann and to attend the funeral of his father, Charles Sr. The younger Parker then spent the summer in McShann's band playing at Fairyland Park for all-white audiences; trumpet player Bernard Anderson introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie. The band also toured nightclubs and other venues of the southwest, as well as Chicago and New York City, and Parker made his professional recording debut with McShann's band that year. When in New York, to experiment with his new musical ideas that went beyond the bounds of McShann's group, Parker joined a group of young musicians who played in after-hours clubs in Harlem venues including Clark Monroe's Uptown House. Fellow musicians at the venues included developing beboppers Gillespie, pianist Thelonious Monk, guitarist Charlie Christian, and drummer Kenny Clarke. A pianist and one of the pioneers of bebop, Mary Lou Williams, said the after-hours sessions were an opportunity "to challenge the practice of downtown musicians coming uptown and 'stealing' the music."
Parker left McShann's band in 1942 and played for one year with Hines, whose band also included Gillespie. This band's performances and therefore Parker's role in them are virtually undocumented due to the strike of 1942–1944 by the American Federation of Musicians, during which time few professional recordings were made. In fact, much of bebop's critical early development was not captured for posterity due to the ban and the new genre gained limited radio exposure as a result. The few recordings in which Parker participated in 1943 took place in Chicago and included a jam session recording with Gillespie and bassist Oscar Pettiford, another session with Billy Eckstine playing trumpet, some informally recorded practice sessions, and a duo with pianist Hazel Scott. Parker's time with Hines's band and his travel between New York and Chicago enabled him to model his style on, according to his own words, a "combination of the Midwestern beat and the fast New York tempos." Parker began writing compositions thanks to his growing friendship with Gillespie, who began notating Parker's solos as melodies. Among these early Parker compositions were "Koko", "Anthropology", and "Confirmation".
Parker left Hines's band and formed a small group with Gillespie, pianist Al Haig, bassist Curley Russell, and drummer Stan Levey. The group stood out from its contemporaries, as it was racially integrated and lacked a guitarist for rhythmic support. This new format freed soloists from harmonic and rhythmic restrictions, and in late 1944 the group secured a gig at the Three Deuces club in New York. The group's name recognition spread along 52nd Street and its style was dubbed "bebop" for the first time. Musicians at other clubs came to hear bebop and reacted unfavorably to it because, according to Charles Mingus, they saw it as a threat to their style of jazz.File:Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, Max Roach.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|Parker with Tommy Potter, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and Duke Jordan, at the Three Deuces, New York,
1945–1953: Solo career
Only in 1945, after the AFM's recording ban was lifted, did Parker's collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and others have a substantial effect on the jazz world. One of their first small-group performances together, a concert in New York's Town Hall on June 22, 1945, was rediscovered in 2004 and released in 2005. Bebop soon gained wider appeal among musicians and fans.On November 26, 1945, Parker led a record date for Savoy Records, marketed as the "greatest Jazz session ever". Recording as Charlie Parker's Reboppers, Parker enlisted sidemen Gillespie and Miles Davis on trumpet, Curley Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums. The tracks recorded during this session include "Ko-Ko", "Billie's Bounce", and "Now's the Time".
In December 1945, the Parker 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. After he dedicated one of his compositions to local drug dealer "Moose the Mooche" at a studio session in the spring, the dealer was arrested, and without access to heroin, Parker turned to alcohol addiction. He suffered a physical and mental breakdown after a studio session in July 1946 for Dial Records, and was briefly jailed after setting the bedsheets of his Los Angeles hotel room on fire and then running naked through the lobby while intoxicated, after which he was committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital for six months.
When Parker was discharged from the hospital, he was healthy and free from his drug habit. Before leaving California, he recorded "Relaxin' at Camarillo," in reference to his stay in the mental hospital, at one of two successful recording sessions. The first took place with a septet while the other paired Parker with pianist Erroll Garner's trio and vocalist Earl Coleman. Upon returning to New York in 1947, Parker resumed his heroin usage. He recorded dozens of sides for the Savoy and Dial labels, which remain some of the high points of his recorded output. Many of these were with his new quintet, including Davis and Roach. Parker and Davis disagreed on who should be the quintet's pianist, with Parker originally hiring Bud Powell for a May 1947 recording session but later favoring Gillespie's arranger, John Lewis; Davis preferred Duke Jordan. Ultimately the quintet used both, as Parker wanted to balance leadership of the group with mentoring younger musicians such as Davis.
Following the establishment of a regular quintet, Parker signed for Mercury Records with Jazz at the Philharmonic promoter Norman Granz as his producer. The partnership enabled Parker to work with musicians from other genres, such as Latin jazz percussionist and bandleader Machito, and to appear in concerts at Carnegie Hall as part of the Jazz at the Philharmonic series. Further, Granz was able to fulfil a longstanding desire of Parker's 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, 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. Six master takes from this session became 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".
In 1950, Parker and Gillespie recorded Bird and Diz, an album that proved to be among the few times Parker worked with bebop pianist Thelonious Monk; the music was released in 1952. Meanwhile, Parker's regular group maintained popular success with a European tour in 1950 and live gigs at New York nightclubs continued, leading to live albums One Night in Birdland and Summit Meeting at Birdland. But Parker became frustrated and disillusioned that, due to racial discrimination, he was reaching the limits of what he could achieve in his career.
In 1953, Parker performed at Massey Hall in Toronto, joined by Gillespie, Mingus, Powell, and Roach. The concert happened at the same time as a televised heavyweight boxing match between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott, so it was poorly attended. Mingus recorded the concert, which resulted in the album Jazz at Massey Hall. At the concert, Parker played a plastic Grafton saxophone.
Other live, and often bootleg, recordings of Parker were made in the early 1950s, frequently with groups other than his usual quintet. Among the most notable of these, particularly according to critics, are Charlie Parker in Sweden, Bird at St. Nick's, Inglewood Jam, Live at Rockland Palace, Charlie Parker at Storyville, and The Washington Concerts.