The History of Jazz (45 page)

The landscape of jazz was now changing in tandem with the music. In the years leading up to World War II, a few small jazz clubs had set up business in the ground floor of the brownstone apartments on Fifty-second Street between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. As the music’s audience shifted from dance aficionados to serious listeners, these clubs gained distinction as the new center of the jazz universe, close enough to Times Square to draw visitors, servicemen on leave, and patrons of New York theater and nightlife. Today this urban landscape is dotted with banks and retail stores—the last jazz club shut its doors in 1968—but while the glory days lasted, this stretch of less than a half-kilometer was the epicenter of hot improvised music in America.

The arrival of bebop on Fifty-second Street marked a signal event, initiated by Dizzy Gillespie’s stint with a small combo at the Onyx Club in early 1944. Gillespie had sent a telegram to Kansas City enlisting Charlie Parker’s participation, but Bird never replied to—and perhaps never received—the missive. Gillespie had also hoped to have Bud Powell on piano, but eventually settled for George Wallington, a young white player well versed in the new style. But even without Parker and Powell, this band was destined to make a tremendous impact on the jazz scene. To complement Wallington in the rhythm section Gillespie relied on Oscar Pettiford—who, along with Charles Mingus and Ray Brown, would come to rank among the preeminent bassists playing in the Jimmy Blanton tradition of full-toned swing—and drummer Max Roach. In time, Roach would rival Kenny Clarke as the leading exponent of bop drumming. A native of the Carolinas like Gillespie and Monk, Roach had made a name for himself while still in his midteens as house drummer for the sessions at Monroe’s Uptown House. Now, together with Pettiford, he provided Gillespie with a progressive rhythm section, capable of playing at the fastest tempos without losing the flowing legato that the modern style required. Gillespie eventually expanded the band to a quintet with the addition of Don Byas, a Hawkins-inspired tenor saxophonist who stood out as one of the few Swing Era horn players who successfully adapted to the demands of bebop.

The inevitable appearance of Charlie Parker on Fifty-second Street in September 1944, for an engagement at the Three Deuces, built on the interest generated by Gillespie’s band. Now elevated from the after-hours clubs and jam sessions of its early days, bebop was legitimized by its presentation in quasi-respectable venues; moreover, the reverberations of modern jazz, already fueled by word of mouth, were now being amplified by commercial recordings and radio broadcasts. In this context, critics and journalists felt compelled to deal with this new music, if only as a fad or phenomenon, although the early reactions of the mainstream media were almost uniformly unfavorable. An article in
Collier’s
proclaimed, “You can’t sing it. You can’t dance it. Maybe you can’t even stand it. It’s bebop.”
Time
magazine, struggling to define bebop for its readers, explained that it was “hot jazz overheated, with overdone lyrics full of bawdiness, references to narcotics and double-talk.”
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Prominent musicians of the “old school” also chimed in with invective: Cab Calloway and others denounced modern jazz as “Chinese music”; Louis Armstrong lambasted “all them weird chords which don’t mean nothing … you got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to”; Benny Goodman complained that modern jazz players were “not real musicians,” they were “just faking.” Traditional cornetist Doc Evans went so far as to hold a mock funeral for bebop.
Downbeat
, which delighted in the controversy, ran a photo commemorating the event.

Before 1945, only a few recordings of this new music had been available to the general public, but now several small record companies, such as Guild and Savoy, began to sense opportunities in promoting the modern jazz idiom. On February 9, Gillespie recorded an impressive performance of “Blue ‘n’ Boogie” with a band that also included saxophonist Dexter Gordon. Less than three weeks later, Parker and Gillespie recorded several historic sides, including “Dizzy Atmosphere” and “Groovin’ High.” On “Dizzy Atmosphere,” Parker floats over the changes, flirting with polytonality during the second eight bars and executing a stunning rhythmic displacement in the bridge; Gillespie follows with a virtuoso’s bag of tricks: dancing leaps into the high register, intricate repeated passages, odd intervals, and choppy change-up phrases. “Groovin’ High” (Gillespie’s reworking of the song “Whispering”) and “All the Things You Are” were more subdued, with Parker contributing supple solos somewhat reminiscent of his Lester Young roots. In May, Parker and Gillespie were reunited at a session that produced “Salt Peanuts,” noteworthy for a scalding Gillespie contribution that stands out as one of the most dramatic brass solos in the history of jazz. In November, Gillespie rejoined Parker for a session under the latter’s leadership for the Savoy label. Two blues songs from that date—“Billie’s Bounce” and “Now’s the Time”—would garner respect as classic performances, studied and emulated by many other musicians; but even more impressive was the version of “Ko Ko” recorded that day. This reworking of “Cherokee” opens with an eerie introduction—perhaps the most famous in jazz since Armstrong’s clarion call to kick off “West End Blues”—bobbing and weaving phrases played without harmonic support, anticipating the ambiguous tonality employed by Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry some fifteen years later. This is followed by one of Parker’s finest solos, two full choruses of driving bebop that few other saxophonists of the day could have played, let alone improvised.

A few days after this session, Gillespie and Parker left New York to bring a bebop band to Southern California for an engagement at Billy Berg’s, an upscale nightclub known for its name jazz acts and its (rare at the time) racially integrated audiences. Los Angeles listeners had already enjoyed a small taste of this new music—in the local performances of a bop band led by Coleman Hawkins, as well as through the modern jazz recordings that were making their way out west. Now LA jazz buffs had six weeks to assess the music as played by its greatest innovators. Audiences were intrigued, if not captivated, by the band, but local musicians were clearly paying close attention to the modernistic concepts of Parker and Gillespie.

By this time, Parker’s addiction and unstable behavior were increasingly evident to outsiders, the private life of the altoist filtering into the public persona. On any given night, he might skip a performance or arrive late. Finally, at the close of the Los Angeles engagement, Bird missed the flight home. As a result, his planned six-week stay in California would stretch out to over sixty weeks—fifteen tumultuous months that witnessed some of Bird’s finest music making but were equally clouded by periods of dissolution. In the first weeks following Gillespie’s departure, Parker continued to flourish. Ross Russell, proprietor of a local record store, had attempted to set up a studio session with Parker and Gillespie at the close of the Billy Berg’s gig, but Bird never showed up for the date. Undaunted, Russell decided to record Parker as a leader, using local and visiting musicians as sidemen. In exchange for a $100 advance, Parker agreed to record exclusively with the Dial label for the next year. For the first session under Parker’s leadership, Russell engaged a band that included trumpeter Miles Davis, only nineteen years old and recently arrived in California with the Benny Carter band, tenorist Lucky Thompson, and a rhythm section composed of pianist Dodo Marmarosa, bassist Vic McMillan, guitarist Arv Garrison, and drummer Roy Porter.

The Dial work, judged as a whole, contains much of Parker’s finest music, but this initial date proved especially memorable. Only four compositions were recorded, but each ranks as a bop masterpiece. “Moose the Mooche,” named by Parker for his L.A narcotics supplier, features a clever stop-and-start melody over “I Got Rhythm” changes—drummer Porter reports that Parker wrote the lead sheet during the drive to the studio—and stellar alto solos on all the takes. On “Yardbird Suite” and “Ornithology,” Parker provides whirlwind thirty-two-bar solos. But the highlight of the session was “Night in Tunisia.” This Gillespie composition sets up the first soloist with an interlude leading into a four-bar break. Parker uses this break to execute a mesmerizing double-time jazz cadenza. Few jazz reed players could approach the sheer speed of this passage, but even more impressive is the rhythmic phrasing in which coy accents, oddly placed in crevices between the beats, impart a bobbing, weaving quality to the horn line. Parker follows up with a sleek sixteen-bar solo, which for all its merits is overshadowed by the previous four-bar explosion.

If this session displayed Parker at his best, the next recording date finds him at his nadir. His physical condition had deteriorated markedly in the intervening weeks. In addition to ingesting whatever narcotics he could procure, Parker was drinking heavily. Around this same time he developed a nervous twitch: his arms would shoot up in the air uncontrollably, sometimes in midperformance. His playing, so spontaneous and fresh in his first weeks on the West Coast, now often sounded strained and inconsistent. Those close to him feared that he was at the breaking point. “I thought he was going to die,” Miles Davis later recalled. Howard McGhee confided to Russell that he felt Parker was “cracking up.”
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Despite these warning signs, Russell scheduled a session for July 29. He persevered even when Bird arrived at the studio in an almost comatose state—and despite the warning of Dr. Richard Freeman, a psychiatrist who was the brother of Russell’s partner, that Parker was showing symptoms of alcoholism and malnutrition. After all, hadn’t Parker played brilliantly in the past despite similar bouts of dissipation? The first number recorded that day went poorly. Dr. Freeman responded by giving Parker six tablets of phenobarbital. To complete the following take of “Lover Man,” Parker needed to be supported from behind—and even then can be heard to stagger away from the microphone. “He was turning around and around, and his horn was shooting up in the air,” Howard McGhee has related.
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Charles Mingus would later praise this as one of Parker’s most powerful solos. McGhee also defended the performance, arguing that, despite Bird’s state, the “sound came out fine. There are no wrong notes.” Few other commentators have agreed. Parker’s tone, usually so taut, sounds flabby, and his phrasing is hesitant, indecisive. The most telling verdict came from Parker himself, who was incensed when “Lover Man” was released by Dial.

Had the fiasco stopped there, the “Lover Man” session would have been merely an unfortunate episode in Parker’s career. As it was, events took an even more ominous turn in the hours following the recording. At his hotel that evening, Parker wandered into the lobby naked, and later that night set his room afire, perhaps falling asleep while smoking. When the police arrived, they forcibly subdued him, placed him in handcuffs, and took him to jail. Eventually Russell tracked him down and managed to have Parker transferred to the State Hospital at Camarillo, located seventy miles north of Los Angeles.

The following six months stand out as an unusual interlude in Parker’s career. During the first weeks at Camarillo, Bird took little notice of his surroundings, and the doctors talked of applying electroshock treatment. The idea was dropped as Parker became more alert and involved in his day-to-day regimen. By the second month, he was tending vegetables in the hospital garden—and telling visitors it was a “gas.” He also laid bricks and talked of becoming a mason. Not that he had forgotten about music—the hospital had its own Saturday night band, and Parker joined in on C melody saxophone. By the time of his release, Parker was no doubt in the best shape of his adult life and (thoughts of masonry left far behind) ready to resume his jazz career.

The first session after Bird’s release gives little hint of this renewal. On these sides, Parker insisted on featuring vocalist Earl Coleman, a smooth baritone in the mold of Billy Eckstine, and only a glimmer of Parker’s improvisational acumen shines through. A week later, however, Parker undertook a combo recording that found him in the company of a strong bop band that included tenorist Wardell Gray, trumpeter McGhee, and pianist Dodo Marmarosa. “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” from this date, is one of Parker’s finest compositions, a sinuous blues with a free rhythmic quality to its melody line. On these tracks, and in performances with McGhee at the Hi De Ho Club, Parker made it clear that his playing had reached a new level, as compelling as before, but more pliant, less intense. The coy title of the Camarillo tribute was no false claim. His work increasingly reflected the relaxed command of an established master, rather than the irreverent challenges of a young revolutionary. This new sound would, for a time, coexist with the earlier, more insistent style, finally becoming dominant in Parker’s later recordings for Norman Granz. The relative merits of the later and earlier Bird continue to generate debate in jazz circles, with most jazz devotees finding reasons to criticize the eventual “mainstreaming” of Charlie Parker. But few can dispute the underlying truth that this change symbolized: within a few years of its revolutionary arrival on the scene, bebop was no longer a radical underground movement. As surprising as its early disruption of the Swing Era pieties was the speed with which modern jazz was accepted as part of the mainstream sound of the music.

In April, Parker returned to New York, his reputation only enhanced by the tumultuous events of the previous fifteen months. The New York jazz scene had changed in the intervening period, with bebop in the ascendancy and the Swing Era in its final days. Just the previous December, eight major big bands had broken up— including those led by Goodman, James, and Dorsey—in the face of the changed jazz landscape. Now a cadre of new bebop players was making their presence felt. When Gillespie had returned to New York the previous year, he had hired alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt to take Parker’s place in the band. Stitt, who had apprenticed in Billy Eckstine’s orchestra, was the only altoist on the scene who could approach Parker in terms of speed and technique. His style may have been derivative—despite his protestations to the contrary, his approach often sounded like a careful imitation of Bird’s—but Stitt, at his best, was a spectacular soloist. In jam sessions he could be a devastating opponent, and Stitt delighted in such encounters, with many of his finest performances made in the heat of battle with Gene Ammons, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and others. In later years, he often played the tenor sax—on which his style was less akin to Parker’s—and showed that, in addition to his skill in building elaborate bop superstructures, Stitt also knew how to probe the depths of the blues.