Bird

When Charlie parker was blowing, the music spilled and tumbled out of him – abstract, brush-stroked joys and hates translated by some mysterious process into the mathematical sense of tangible, recordable sound. His phrases always came in a bewildering succession, confounding sometimes even his friend Dizzy, who had the wit and taste to write some of them down immediately, lest they be lost, as many of Bix's were; and they came in such fertility and profusion that even first-class musicians, invited to sit in where he was blowing, refused to spring the clips of their cases or sat paralyzed into silence. "Who wants to go up against this cat?" they said.

One night, before anybody realized exactly what Charlie Parker was, tenor man Ben Webster wandered into Minton's, a musicians' hangout up in Harlem, and heard him blowing tenor. Webster did not know that alto was his real instrument; he rushed up, grabbed the tenor away, protesting, "That horn ain't supposed to sound like that!" But he was profoundly disturbed, and Billy Eckstine later told of how Ben went on to other joints telling about the cat he'd heard wailing in Minton's. That was the way he affected many old-timers: he stirred them up. Some of them were so shocked and puzzled they could only retreat into anger; Louis, with the dignity of a deposed monarch, tried and still tries to ridicule the pretender. Eddie Condon compared the whole bop school to the noises waiters make when they drop plates. Even the great Goodman sensed that he could not beat them; he therefore tried joining them for a while, and then went back to molesting the fish on his Connecticut property. Meanwhile Bird went on wailing, becoming as he wailed the prince and prophet of what for a time was called bop but is now called simply jazz (except, of course, by the likes of Eddie and Louis).

Some say he was a martyr to the music. Some say that the people who heard him, and grasped something of what he was trying to do, were the only ones who were satisfied, that he himself never was; and some say he died because he never could hit what he saw, soaring far out of his reach, in the sights of that blindly instinctive yet appallingly sophisticated talent. Nonsense. He had the security of the genuine artist, and when he was at his best he knew nobody could touch him. He was a perfectionist. But he did not die because of some hand-wringing desire to do what was beyond him. He died because he had been engaged since his early teens in a methodical yet fantastic process of self-extermination, as unwitting yet as artfully conceived as any solo he ever played through the marijuana clouds of an after-hours session. He made a fakir's bed of his vices and hurled himself upon it night after night, until finally the sum of the myriad wounds infected him and did him in.

When he did die, innumerable nameless people went around chalking Bird Lives on walls and subway kiosks in New York. "Bird" came from "Yard-bird," which was what he was called until his fame – if not his virtuosity – made the shorter nickname imperative. One of his friends found a line from John Keats: "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" Some of the hipsters took a wry, ironic satisfaction in quoting it after it was learned that Bird's body had been lying unclaimed in a city morgue for at least two days. Others taped his solos off records and strung them together so that they could listen to Bird unmenaced by the ideas of others for an hour at a time. Thus the legend began ... but it had been in the making long before he died the night of March 12, 1955.

Bird was quite a man. When he was deep in debt and someone gave him a job that paid well, he sometimes threw the money away on a party for his friends. He was always in need of money; he always borrowed and never repaid; one of his friends said, "To know Bird, you have to pay your dues." He experimented with marijuana, heroin and opium, and was an addict for varying periods from the time he was about 14, but he would stoutly deny that addiction had ever improved his or anybody else's playing. Half the time, when someone offered him a job, he would have to borrow money to get his horn out of the hockshop (he hocked everything; once a friendly manager started buying him a Cadillac on the installment plan; two weeks later, Bird hocked it). He was continually starting life anew: resting, eating good nourishing food, getting plenty of sleep – and then, in an instant, throwing up the whole thing to return to his pattern of personal destruction. More than that, he was one of those people whose every word, gesture or act somehow becomes anecdotal. He was a character capable of sharp satire, effervescent wit and curious idiosyncrasy. As S. N. Behrman once said of Oscar Levant, "If he wasn't real, you couldn't imagine him."

At the mention of his name, people will sit and tell Bird stories by the hour. They tell, for example, of his fondness for queer costumes. He loved to dress up. One night he would arrive for a job in Bermuda shorts and knee socks; the next night he would come in wearing overalls, canvas galluses and a straw hat. He once wore a cowboy costume to Birdland, the jazz club named after him because it was dedicated to his kind of music. Another time he hired a horse at a Central Park riding academy, cantered downtown to Charlie's Tavern, a musicians' gathering place, and tried to ride inside.

Despite his own liking for eccentric dress, Bird disapproved of the berets, goatees and thick-rimmed glasses that Dizzy and other bopsters wore. He said it was part of an effort to commercialize the music. Yet he himself could be as commercial as a tight-fisted agent. For a time he was playing in Sunday night jam sessions at The Open Door, a Greenwich Village spot on West Third Street, a few doors down from Eddie Condon's. "Bird was terrible about money," the promoter of those sessions recalls. "He always thought he was being cheated. One night I was counting the receipts and paying him off and he was yelling 'You son of a bitch, you lousy no-good bastard,' etc., etc., and just then some woman patron came into the office by accident. Bird changed instantly. He became courtly. 'If you will excuse us,' he said, 'we are conducting a little business. I'll be with you in a moment,' he said. I flipped ..."

At times his moneymaking schemes struck friends as diabolical. He hired two hill-billy musicians to sing during intermissions at The Open Door. Their voices would have made Elvis Presley's sound almost bearable. The manager protested that they were driving customers away.

"That's the idea, man," Bird said. "We're full up now. Those guys will drive out some of the customers and let some new spenders in."

Duke Ellington once offered to take him on his band. Parker said he wanted $350 a week, about twice what Ellington's other musicians were getting. "I'd work for you, Bird, if you paid me that kind of money," Ellington said.

Yet there were times when thoughts of money or remuneration of any kind were far from his mind. He was capable of making magnificent gestures to help others. Alan Morrison, the jazz critic, recalls a time he went to see Bird in a run down hotel to ask him to play a benefit for an interracial veterans' organization. "Bird was wild to do it," Morrison says, "and looking forward to playing with Dizzy, Bud Powell and Max Roach. But while I was telling him about the benefit, the sweat was running off him. His temperature was well over 100 degrees. The man had pneumonia." Still, he was determined to make the gig. "I'll go, I'll go – take me in an ambulance," he pleaded.

Morrison finally persuaded him to stay in bed. When he left, Bird was still protesting that he would go.

Music was everything to him. He was as much at home in a concert hall as he was in a Harlem cellar hearing a fat woman wail about what her man had done to her. Jimmy Raney, the guitarist, recalls how he and Bird would sit for hours listening to Bartok records and sipping gin. Bird revered the modern classical composers, but when he spoke of highbrow music he used the vernacular of his own kind. "That Heifetz," he said, "that cat really screams." Another time, describing the string section which he used on an LP record made for Norman Granz, he said, "They're mostly cats off Koussevitzky's band."

When Bird was feeling good, he had a powerfully magnetic charm. He was suave, urbane, warm and mannerly; sometimes, to delight his friends, he would affect an English accent. As a master of ceremonies, he could be witty. Introducing a mediocre pick-up band hired to play during his breaks, he would say, "And now, at tremendous expense, the management brings you ..." And the management would beam, (continued on page 46) Bird (continued from page 38)unaware of his ridicule. Other times, when the cats in the audience became vociferous, whistling and shrieking, Bird would step to the microphone and say, "Just a mild round of applause will suffice ..."

But at other times he could change his mood as rapidly as the keys changed in his solos; he could be rude, crude and cruel, even toward musicians, whom he respected above all others. Willie Jones, when he was a beginner on the drums, once showed up for a job where Bird was working and calling the tunes. Willie hoped the first would not be too fast; he had not yet perfected his ability to make the up-tempos he now makes with ease. Perversely, Bird called for Fifty-Second Street Theme, a very fast tune. Willie scuffled through, playing on instinct, afraid to stop. At the end he said to Bird that he was sorry he had dragged. Bird said, sarcastically, "I called that one to help you."

Bird's range of behavior with women encompassed both aspects of his nature. The saxophone was never instrument enough for the outpouring of his feelings. He went with wealthy, titled women (died in the apartment of one, in fact) and he went with two-bit tramps. Parker was the wonder of his friends, some of whom he occasionally would call in to witness or photograph his actions. He was not merely a satyr; he may have had the most advanced case of satyriasis ever known, and this is a rarity in a person addicted to drugs.

"Bird had to have two or three [women] at a time," a friend recalls. "And he never gave them any rest. All night long he would take one, then the other, then the first one again, and sometimes he would go out looking for a third and a fourth. He didn't have to look far; women of all kinds went looking for him ... One followed him from state to state. One of the best-known singers in the business never got enough of him. She would drop everybody else to go with him."

Curiously enough, in the waning years he was a one-woman man. He was married four times, perhaps even five. No one knows much about the first two marriages, except that the second did not last long and the first produced a son, Leon, who was in the Army when Bird passed on. The third marriage was to a former hatcheck girl named Doris Snyder. His fourth (or fifth) wife was Chan Richardson, a beautiful girl who bore him two children, Baird, a boy, and a daughter named Pree. The little girl died of pneumonia when she was three and some say that Bird returned to dope after her death. He was inconsolable for months. The little boy, now living with his mother in New Hope, Pennsylvania, is the image of his father.

Bird left Chan from time to time, but always went back and attempted to become a normal family man. "She was the only woman who ever really meant anything to him," an acquaintance says, "except for his mother." Another suggests that Chan may well have been the mother-image he was seeking all his life; she was always patient, always understanding, always willing to take him back.

But restlessness still held him when he was trying his hardest to be a husband and father. Usually, when he could no longer hold out against it, he turned to junk. One pop, and the genius became a wild man. He called the habit "the rage," and when rational would talk lucidly against it, but he could not seem to talk himself out of falling victim to it. He would call the pushers "the lowest scum," but when the rage was on him, he would give them whatever he had in his pocket whether it was eight or eight hundred dollars.

Bird's mind was so keen, one friend says, that everything he did, he did in a new way – even taking dope. "He was highly inventive about drugs," this man says. "He would sniff little pellets through a straw into his nostrils, or if he didn't have a straw he would use a crisp dollar bill, rolled up." To some people who knew Bird well, it was amazing that he managed to retain a shred of sanity and conscience while under the influence, but he did.

Bird was hooked, he said himself, at 14. Some older musicians gave it to him in a washroom in Kansas City, solemnly assuring him that it would improve his playing. All it improved was the road he traveled toward his doom – but when he found that out, it was too late. Yet something enabled him to over-power the junk – for periods – and this something was what made his friends forgive his derelictions.

One friend said of him, "You had to forgive Bird everything, even the things he did to himself, simply because he brought so much beauty into the world."

Bird seemed to have found the new music the way a poet stumbles upon his inner gifts. In the late Thirties and early Forties Dizzy Gillespie, Theolonious Monk and Kenny (Klook) Clarke, tired of the traditional sounds and ideas, began writing down some experimental things, largely – at first – for the purpose of keeping the squares out of the sessions at Minton's, which some day may be marked by a brass plaque as the birthplace of bop. The boys were carried away by what they were doing, and began to experiment more and more. Others fell into the new line: Charlie Christian, a small, bespectacled guitarist out of Oklahoma who had been with Goodman in the latter's small groups; Lester Young, of the Basie band; and Milton Hinton, a bassist who played with Calloway and other groups. The strange new music had a hard time getting itself recognized; it was unpopular even among some of those who had been enthusiastic exponents of the big-band jazz commonly called swing; Cab Calloway was so irritated by Dizzy's outlandish solos he ultimately fired him off the band. The founders of bop went on their way, staying with it, ignoring the criticism and the outright protests. And that they had something was proved by others, in other sections of the country: bopsters began to appear mysteriously, and Bird was one of these strange ones. As Pablo Picasso first painted in a way that pleased the academicians, grew bored and began to scatter his faces and bodies and colors in wild swaths and cubes and amorphous forms all over the canvas, so Bird first went through a period in which he learned to swing in the old way.

Bird was born in Kansas City – that much is known. He used to give the date as August 29, 1920, but he may have been born earlier than that. "He was no 34 when he died," trumpet man Harold Baker says. "I was born in 1913 and Bird was older than me. I remember him playing with Jap Allen's band around Kansas City in 1931. Naw, he was no 34." Friends account for the discrepancy by saying that Bird was always close-mouthed about his family and background; perhaps, one says, he felt guilty about recalling the days when he had been relatively innocent (in Leonard Feather's Inside Be-Bop there is a picture of him taken when he was six; the caption reads, "I was a clean little bird; lots of things I didn't know ... wish I'd never found them out."). Other friends say that talking about his childhood bored Bird. He went to public schools, spent three years in high school and, as he later told Feather, "wound up a freshman." He played baritone horn in the school band and began on alto when his mother bought him one. That, as nearly as it can be ascertained, was in 1935. Perhaps because he thought it ludicrous, he liked to say that his first influence on the alto was, of all people, Rudy Vallee. When he was 15 he was taken on the Lawrence (88) Keyes' band, which played gigs around the Kansas City area.

Whenever he got the chance, Bird would go out jamming. Jo Jones has said of Kansas City, in the days of Bird's growing up there, "It was a very strange thing at those sessions ... Nobody ever got in anybody's way. Nobody ever had to point a finger and say, 'You take it now ...' Any place ... where there was (continued on page 52) Bird (continued from page 46) a session the guys would just get up on the bandstand, and spiritually they knew when to come in." Soon after Bird learned to play, he would go and hang around the joints and listen to the sessions; they wouldn't let him inside because of his age. One friend says, "When he wasn't allowed in, he would stand outside in the alley with his ear to the wall, fingering his alto and playing – and that's how he got his name, they always found him in an alley or a yard and they called him Yardbird." (Parker's own version was different: he said people called him first "Charlie," then "Charl," then "Yarl," then "Yard," and finally "Yardbird.") The first place he was permitted in a session was a club called the High Hat at Twenty-Second and Vine.

"I knew a little of Lazy River and Honeysuckle Rose," he recalled, "and played what I could ... I was doing all right until I tried doing double tempo on Body and Soul. Everybody fell out laughing. I went home and cried and didn't play again for three months."

Bird played with various bands, among them Harlan Leonard's Rockets. Then he cut out. As soon as he did, the legend began to take shape. Billy Eckstine recalls the first time he heard Bird; it was in a spot called the 65 Club in Chicago, where a group led by a trumpet player named king kolfax featured an altoist named Goon Gardner. One night, Eckstine says, a ragged kid, fresh off a freight train, came in and asked if he could sit in on alto. Gardner handed him his horn.

"... and this cat gets up there," Eckstine later said, "and I'm telling you he blew the bell off that thing. It was Charlie Parker, just come in from Kansas City on a freight ..."

Goon Gardner lent Bird a clarinet and got him a few dates around town. One day Bird disappeared. He went back to Kansas City and jammed around until he joined the Jay McShann band. By then the cats were lining up to hear him in the sessions, although he was still playing the more or less traditional Kansas City style. In 1939 he arrived in New York, again without a horn, and worked as a dishwasher until he saved enough to get one. Then he began gigging around town. And then it happened. Later he told about it; Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff reproduced what he said in their fine book, Hear Me Talkin' To Ya:

"I remember one night," Bird said, "... I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December, 1939. Now 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."

Biddy Fleet, who was playing guitar behind him, sensed what he was doing and went along. From then on, he started to work on it, but always by himself, as though it were some guilty secret. He didn't attract attention with it until he began working in Monroe's, an after-hours spot. Kenny Clarke says, "Bird came into there about 1940 ... They began to talk about Bird because he played like Pres on alto. People became concerned about what he was doing. We thought that was something phenomenal because Lester Young was the style setter, the pace setter, at that time. We went to listen to Bird at Monroe's for no other reason except that he sounded like Pres. That is, until we found out that he had something of his own to offer ... also had something new. He used to play things we'd never heard before – rhythmically and harmonically. It aroused Dizzy's interest because he was working along the same lines and Monk was of the same opinion as Dizzy."

Once the music began to catch hold, says the pianist George Wallington, it affected its disciples like junk. "In the years between '42 and '48 the fellows lived only to play," Wallington recalls. "We were obsessed by the new music. There was such pleasure in the faces of the guys. We would play our regular jobs until 3:00 A.M., then go to an after-hours place until around 7:00, then wait around a few hours until the Nola or some other rehearsal studios opened at 9:00, then rent a studio and practice some more."

Bird returned to Kansas City and rejoined McShann, with whom he went back to New York in 1942. The musicians already knew what he could do, and now the trade press woke up; he was given favorable notice in Metronome and Down Beat. The McShann band moved on to Detroit. Bird evidently didn't like it there; he was back in New York within a week. He played for a while with Noble Sissle, then joined the Earl Hines band in 1943. The alto chairs were full, so Bird went in on tenor. He did not especially like the instrument, but he impressed Hines, who later said Bird had the unique ability of learning any arrangement by going through it one time.

Hines endured a good deal from Bird, who missed nearly as many theatre shows as he made, for one reason or another. Even fines did not keep him from missing. Presently the band members, who were annoyed because his absence made their music sound incomplete, ganged up on him and insisted that he must not miss another show. "We shamed him into promising that he wouldn't miss again," one says. Bird said he would make every last show the next day; he would stay in the theatre all night to make certain he would be on time; but the next day, as usual, he was nowhere to be found. The band played the show without him, and after-ward discovered that he had slept all the way through it, under the bandstand.

Hines eventually added a group of strings; that was too much for Bird, who left shortly thereafter in company with Dizzy. He went briefly with Andy Kirk, Cootie Williams and a band that Eckstine formed when he left Hines to strike out on his own. With Hines and with Billy, his friendship with Dizzy solidified. Eckstine later said, "Bird was responsible for the actual playing of it [bop] but for putting it down, Dizzy was responsible."

The Eckstine band was not commercially successful: the public apparently was not ready for its advanced sound. And Bird had long since decided that he did not feel at home in a large organization. He left, and for the rest of his life he played mainly in small groups. In 1946, he and Dizzy went to California; at that time, the coast was not yet hip. "Nobody understood our kind of music," Bird later told Leonard Feather. "They hated it, Leonard. I can't begin to tell you how I yearned for New York." And the rage got him again; he fell so low he had no place to stay until someone put him up in a converted garage. Ross Russell, of Dial Records, arranged to record him, but although he showed up, that was about all he did. At the session, everybody knew he was ready to crack up. The following day he was in Camarillo State Hospital, where he remained for seven months.

In 1947 he was out, back in New York, and apparently in good health again. He had gained 40 pounds. He worked around with small groups and took one to Paris and Scandinavia in 1949. In Europe he could get all the heroin and hashish he wanted, which did not improve his behavior. Europeans have always been enormously receptive to jazz, and reporters flocked to interview him. Most of them were shocked by his deportment; during one interview he kept reading aloud from The Rubaiyat and refused to answer questions.

The rest of his life was a series of (concluded on page 76) Bird (continued from page 52) bouts with dope, recoveries, bouts with liquor, recovery from stomach ulcers, departures from and reconciliations with Chan. He tried to get off the hop, but couldn't. "I think," says Bird fan Lon Flanigan, Jr., "he had resigned himself to it. He spoke of developing a sound mind in a sound body, of playing jazz just a few more years and then going to Europe to study composition, and of settling down. But there was something about the way he spoke that made me think he knew damned well it was all a dream. He just wasn't the self-denying type, and he knew it."

Norman Granz helped him get on his feet for a time. Granz conceived the idea of putting him in front of a string group; he made some records and toured with it, but it was not too successful. The purist Bird fans disliked his working with the strings; others thought some of his most beautiful solos were done in this period. They rank Just Friends as one of the best of his records. That was recorded in 1950, the year in which he really began to fall apart. "The Bird has begun to moult," one cat said. In 1953, after Bird's little daughter died, he seemed to have lost all hope. Now managers of clubs and ballrooms were hostile; previously they had tolerated his eccentricities, and even when he had failed to show for gigs they had been willing to book him later. But they had had enough.

Bird had caused so many scenes at Birdland that at times he was not permitted inside. Once he even had to buy a ticket to get in; the managers were feeling especially benevolent that night. In September, 1954, the club decided they could not ignore the public clamor any longer. Although Bird was not playing as well as formerly, his fans still were loyal. The managers took him back with the string group. On opening day, he left his house early and went to the barber, and friends reported seeing him looking fine in the afternoon. But somewhere he must have met a pusher. That night, in the club, before the packed house, he went to pieces on the stand. The strings began with East of the Sun and he came in playing Dancing in the Dark. He screamed angrily over the microphone, using four-letter words. He fell; he fired the musicians off the stand. That night he swallowed iodine and they hauled him to Bellevue.

When Bird got out, he went back to Chan, and they started over one more time in New Hope, Pennsylvania. "He came into town to play a Town Hall concert," Leonard Feather says. "He looked healthy, played magnificently, and told me he was commuting daily between New Hope and Bellevue, where he was undergoing psychiatric treatment. He had dropped 20 pounds of fat and seemed like a new man."

A month later Feather saw him again in a bar near Birdland. The bloat was back; the sad eyes were glazed; he could scarcely speak.

There was only one more public scene. Birdland reluctantly gave him a chance to work off some of his obligations in a two-night engagement with Bud Powell, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey and Charlie Mingus. But again he caused a scene, walked off the stand, refused to go back on, publicly humiliated Bud Powell and was finally located out in the street with tears streaming down his face. In February, 1955, he started out on tour but returned to New York within a few days. He was separated from Chan and living in the Village with one of his Mohammedan friends. On the night of March 9 he started off for a job in Boston but stopped off at the Fifth Avenue apartment of Baroness Nica Rothschild de Koenigswarter. The Baroness was a great jazz fan.

In the Baroness' pad, Bird complained of difficulty in breathing. He fainted. The Baroness called a doctor, who recommended that Bird be removed to a hospital immediately. Bird refused to go. He remained in the apartment with the Baroness looking after him until Saturday night. Watching the Dorsey Brothers Show on TV, he suddenly began to cough. Then he died. Later, when they opened him up, they found that he had been suffering from pneumonia, ulcers and cirrhosis.

They took his body to Bellevue, where it lay unclaimed for 48 hours. Chan didn't know he was there; nobody knew, evidently, except the Baroness. Nor did she make any attempt to get in touch with any of his friends. When the body finally was discovered to be that of Charlie Parker, Mrs. Doris Snyder Parker flew in from Chicago to claim it. Chan, too, tried to claim it.

To many of Bird's friends, the funeral – held in the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street – was a sorry shambles. Lennie Tristano had wanted to play the organ; he wanted to play Bird's tunes. Instead, there was The Lost Chord. The minister said to those of Bird's friends who were present – Tristano, Dizzy, Charlie Shavers, Louis Bellson and others – that Bird had been put in the world to make people happy, and that if he had been alive he would have told his friends to be up and doing because life was not an empty dream. The musicians nearly became sick, but they knew the man was trying to say something nice and they appreciated the effort. Then, as a climax, or nadir, the body was sent back to Kansas City – the last place, Bird had said, where he wanted to be buried.

"I sat there myself at that funeral," one friend said later, "tears coming out of my eyes, feeling holy, thinking of the last time I was with him. He was down in a pad on Tenth Street, stripped naked, playing the saxophone so hot if he had been skinned he would have been happy. He didn't know how sick he was – but he was so far gone I thought he would drop dead. I thought of times I'd played the violin for him and times when he was on the stand in his prime, with Max Roach wailing behind him on drums. And I thought of how many bills I'd had to pay in hotels for quilts and blankets and rugs that burned because he'd fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand. I thought of the near escapes with the police and how he'd had the nerve to toss me a syringe and tell me to get rid of it. I thought of all the IOUs he had given me, enough to paper my house with. I thought of all these things and I thought if he were alive I'd work with him again if he asked me."

That could serve as Bird's epitaph.