The History of Jazz (43 page)

Parker was no saxophone prodigy. The various accounts of his early musical activities stress enthusiasm rather than depth of talent. A famous anecdote tells of the young altoist’s humiliation at a jam session presided over by drummer Jo Jones of the Count Basie band. Struggling with the tempo, Parker faltered on the sax, but continued to press on—until Jones imperiously dismissed the youngster by picking up a cymbal from his kit and lofting it through the air to crash at the altoist’s feet. Amid derisive laughter, Parker made his way off the bandstand. Rather than be discouraged by this public failure, Parker practiced with even greater determination. During a summer stint playing and practicing at a resort in the Ozarks, he studied the recordings Lester Young had made with the Count Basie band and deepened his knowledge of music theory. We can only speculate on Parker’s progress during this period, but his rapid ascension, after the Ozarks gig, to higher-profile engagements with better-known musicians suggests that the hard work was now paying off. At the close of summer, Parker was hired to play second alto in Buster Smith’s band, and the Kansas City veteran now served as a mentor for the teenager. In Smith’s group he worked alongside pianist Jay McShann, who would soon be featuring Parker in his own band.

Parker later claimed, in a notorious aside, that he had begun dissipating at age twelve and using heroin by age fifteen. An exaggeration perhaps, but only a slight one. An indifferent student, Parker left Lincoln High School before his sophomore year. By age sixteen, Parker was married, with a pregnant wife, and working as a professional musician. Sometime during the next year, first wife Rebecca Ruffin asserts, he began using intravenous drugs. After leaving Buster Smith, Parker played for a few weeks with Jay McShann before taking to the road, not as a part of a traveling band but merely as a wandering vagabond. In Chicago he caught the attention of Billy Eckstine, as much for his unkempt appearance as for his superlative alto playing—“the raggedest guy you’d want to see,” Eckstine recalled years later, “but playing like you never heard.” Later, he made his way to New York and he worked as a dishwasher at a Harlem nightspot where Art Tatum played. Like Armstrong and Ellington before him, Parker failed to take New York by storm on his first visit. After gigging sporadically and trying his hand at various local jam sessions, he soon retreated to Kansas City, ostensibly for his father’s funeral. Around this same time, he acquired the nickname Yardbird, often shortened to Bird. Accounts of how he earned this sobriquet differ—it may have initially referred to nothing more than an appetite for poultry—but eventually it took on a larger significance, representing to his fans the unprecedented free-flying creativity of his alto sax lines.

The survival of an amateur recording of Parker from this period provides us with the first insight into the pathbreaking approach to improvisation he was in the process of developing. The precise dating of this workout over the changes of “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Body and Soul” has generated much debate. Some have placed it as early as 1937, others as late as 1940. Parker’s apparent allusions to a Roy Eldridge and Chu Berry recording of “Body and Soul” from 1938 and to the melody of Jimmy Van Heusen’s “I Thought About You,” copyrighted and first recorded in 1939, suggest that the document comes from the latter end of this period. Moreover, the maturity of Parker’s conception also supports a recording date of around 1940, after his return to Kansas City from his Chicago and Harlem experiences. After all, Parker later claimed that his initial breakthrough—a realization that the higher intervals of the chord could serve as the basic springboard for melodic improvisation—took place during this New York visit. And the “Honeysuckle Rose”/“Body and Soul” performance makes liberal use of this technique. This is no student exercise. No other saxophonist of the day, Hawkins or Young included, was delving this deeply into advanced harmony. The relaxed virtuosity of his later recordings is notably absent, the phrasing is still stiff; but Parker’s conceptual understanding is frighteningly mature.

Soon after returning to Kansas City, Parker rejoined McShann, with whom he would stay for most of the next two years. His solos graced a number of McShann recordings from this period, commercial sides as well as amateur transcriptions, and attracted a small cadre of admirers—albeit mostly among other musicians rather than the general public. Especially revealing are performances from November 1940 recorded at a local radio station by several ardent Wichita University jazz fans. On “Lady Be Good,” Parker shows that he has mastered the mannerisms of Lester Young (even including a passing allusion to “Mean to Me”) in crafting a polished if somewhat derivative solo. But, once again on “Honeysuckle Rose,” Parker distinguishes himself with a commanding improvisation, daring in its melodic thrusts and executed with fluidity. Several months later, McShann began recording commercially for Decca, and Parker’s solo contributions again stand out. On “The Jumpin’ Blues,” Parker opens his improvisation with a willowy extended phrase that anticipates the unadulterated bebop of his later composition “Ornithology.” This is the saxophonist’s strongest recorded work to date, confirmed further by “Sepian Bounce” and “Swingmatism” from the same period.

Although the influence of Lester Young has been frequently highlighted—and no doubt proved crucial in Parker’s musical development—the altoist clearly drew inspiration from a variety of other sources during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Parker’s early recordings show the wide range of his musical tastes: a hotel room jam session preserved on disk by Bob Redcross in February 1943 finds him quoting Ben Webster’s solo on “Cotton Tail”; other amateur sides show Parker alluding to Coleman Hawkins’s landmark improvisation on “Body and Soul”; an even more unusual addition to the Parker discography from this period captures the altoist practicing over a recording of the Benny Goodman Trio. At other points, momentary echoes of Willie Smith and Johnny Hodges can be heard in his playing. The lithe phrasing of Young overlays all these sources, providing the basic melodic prism through which the other influences were filtered. A few years later, the jazz press would depict Parker and the other beboppers as rebels who had rejected the swing tradition, but a much different lesson can be drawn from these recordings of bop in transition. The stylistic leap made by Parker (and the other beboppers) would have been impossible without careful study of the earlier pioneers of jazz tradition.

But even the most careful genealogical tracing of Parker’s sources fails to explain the unique sound of his alto saxophone. There are no predecessors—neither Lester nor Hawk, Hodges nor Carter—in this regard. A utilitarian philosophy, emphasizing economy of means, appears to be at work here. Each note is articulated with focused energy, each phrase smoothly executed but infused with an acerbic aftertaste. Phrases start and end with crisp precision. No moody rubato timing stretches out the melodic line. There are no lingering breaths, à la Ben Webster, to impart an expansive, velvety quality to the music. Each phrase is attacked with clear intent. All in all, no saxophonist before Parker had such a cutting sound. As such, his influence on later jazz players has been enormous. After Parker, the more warm and rounded tone of a Benny Carter or Johnny Hodges became passé, their diffused romanticism replaced by a surgical sharpness of attack. For all their differences, the testosterone-infused sounds of later jazz saxophonists (Rollins, Coltrane, Coleman) would not have been possible without Parker’s pioneering model. This too was part of the bopper’s rebellion against the pop music pretensions of Swing Era jazz. The sentimental trappings, the influence of the sweet bands, the various ways the rough edges of jazz music had been softened for consumption by a mass audience—these elements were now to be purged in favor of a purer conception of jazz: an art music with the emotional pungency of a battle cry. Slow dancers seeking a romantic interlude were now advised to keep their distance from the jazz bandstand.

In 1940, the Cab Calloway band came to Kansas City, with a young trumpeter named John Gillespie—already dubbed Dizzy by his colleagues—in the horn section. During an intermission, trumpeter Buddy Anderson told Gillespie about a local saxophonist who was well worth hearing. Gillespie later recalled his low expectations: “ ‘Oh, man,’ I said, ‘a saxophone player? I’m playing with Chu Berry; and I know Benny Carter and played with Coleman Hawkins, and I know Lester Young.’ ” Gillespie, despite his youth, was already one of the most harmonically and technically adept trumpeters of the day, and was not prepared to be impressed. However, Anderson persisted, and the following day arranged for the two to engage in an impromptu jam session, with Gillespie comping on piano and Parker playing alto. The meeting would prove to be a major turning point in both careers. “I was astounded by what the guy could do,” Gillespie continued the story. “These other guys that I had been playing with weren’t my colleagues, really. But the moment I heard Charlie Parker, I said, there is my colleague. … Charlie Parker and I were moving in practically the same direction too, but neither of us knew it.”
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Gillespie had traveled a much different route in reaching this defining moment in his musical development. Unlike Parker, who had been schooled in the midst of a burgeoning jazz scene, Gillespie had come of age in the backwoods of Cheraw, South Carolina. The last of nine children—“only seven of us lived long enough to get a name”
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—John Birks Gillespie was raised by an indifferent mother and an abusive father. “Every Sunday morning, Papa would whip us. That’s mainly how I remember him.” The elder Mr. Gillespie was a bricklayer who played piano with a local band on the weekends. He also agreed to store the instruments at his home during the week—to prevent a down-and-out sideman from pawning one in between gigs. The house’s front room had the cluttered look of a used instrument shop, its furnishings including a piano, a set of drums, a mandolin, a guitar, and a red one-string bass fiddle. From an early age, John Birks learned about the sound, the feel of these different musical “toys.”

Support and encouragement came mostly outside the home, from neighbors and teachers. During fifth grade, Gillespie was enlisted into the school band. The youngest student in the ensemble, he had last choice of the available instruments, and was assigned a slide trombone that was several inches too large for his meager arm span. Undeterred, Gillespie practiced diligently and soon was borrowing a neighbor’s trumpet, which he also learned to play. By age twelve he had acquired a rudimentary technique on both horns, but increasingly gravitated toward the trumpet. Opportunities to perform were soon coming his way. In this sheltered environment, the youngster could develop a sense of identity and mastery as a musician that would not have been possible in a Kansas City or New York. Gillespie prided himself on being the “best young trumpeter around Cheraw.” In fact, he could only play in one key at the time, and struggled to read music. In an encounter reminiscent of Parker’s humiliation at the hands of Jo Jones, Gillespie’s pretensions to expertise were shattered when a local trumpeter who had been gigging in Philadelphia came back to Cheraw to visit his family. He “cut me seriously,” Gillespie later recalled. “Sonny counted down and started playing in the key of C, but all I could do was fumble around because I couldn’t find one note on the trumpet. … I felt so crushed, I cried, because I was supposed to be the town’s best trumpet player.”

A sociology of jazz could glean much from these accounts of jam-session disgraces. Such public embarrassments would stand as a frequent rite of passage for the modern jazz musican. Years later, both Parker and Gillespie would play similar mind games on other, lesser players. At the early 1940s sessions at Minton’s and Monroe’s, the Harlem clubs where the bebop vocabulary was refined, the cognoscenti used fast tempos and complex melody lines to intimidate outsiders and establish their own credentials. In a setting where conservatory degrees were still unknown, one’s curriculum vitae was earned every night on the bandstand. This combative, macho culture is rarely discussed, but remains a core value within the jazz community. In the biographies of Parker and Gillespie—and numerous other players—these painful setbacks take on the luster of defining moments, described with a fervor that recalls the hackneyed adage about “separating the men from the boys.” The accepted jazz cliché about “payin’ one’s dues” puts a more socially acceptable twist on this whole ritual—making it sound, after all, like some sort of economic transaction— but ignores the undercurrent of aggression that infuses this darker side to the jazz mindset. Who knows what modern jazz would have sounded like without this persistent desire for one-upmanship?

In Gillespie’s case (as in Parker’s before him), the youngster now studied the horn with renewed dedication. Within months he had learned to play with ease in several keys. By the time he was fifteen, Gillespie felt confident enough to sit in with the visiting jazz bands that performed at the Cheraw Elks Hall. But the music that came to Cheraw over the airwaves had an even more profound effect on him. The Gillespie household possessed neither a gramophone nor a radio, but a neighbor who owned both let the teenager stop by to use them. Broadcasts featuring the Teddy Hill Orchestra, captured in performance at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, would make the strongest impression on Gillespie. The youngster paid particular attention to Hill’s trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who would remain the dominant model for Gillespie as he strived to create his own approach to the horn. The solid technique, the rhythmic excitement, the commanding range—these same qualities that he so admired in the elder trumpeter’s playing would later infuse Gillespie’s own virtuosic conception of the instrument. One measure of how well he succeeded would come several years later when he joined the Teddy Hill band himself, filling the same role that Eldridge had held before him.

In fall 1933, Gillespie entered the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, where he pursued the formal study of music. His grasp of harmony was further enriched by his work on the piano, where he tried out chord structures and, in later years, wrote most of his compositions and arrangements. In spring 1935, his family moved to Philadelphia, and the youngster followed a few months later. Here he began working odd jobs as a professional musician and associating with other aspiring young trumpeters—in particular his cousin Charlie Shavers, three months older than Dizzy, who would come to prominence as a soloist with the John Kirby sextet, one of the finer small combos of its day, and later with the Tommy Dorsey big band.