The History of Jazz (48 page)

When compared against such spirited outings, Parker’s string orchestra efforts, supervised by Granz, are a mixed achievement at best. Certainly the blame here is not solely Granz’s. Parker had long been fascinated with contemporary orchestral music. His conversations were laced with references to Prokofiev and Stravinsky. He told a Swedish interviewer that violinist Jascha Heifetz ranked among his favorite musicians (“His phrasing is such that he swings”
¹¹
). At his daughter’s funeral, he had a pianist play the music of Bartók. As noted, he discussed taking lessons with modernist composer Edgard Varèse (reportedly offering to cook for Varèse in return), and supposedly sent a letter to Arnold Schoenberg asking for advice. Given these leanings, orchestral settings were an obvious area of exploration for Parker. Yet Bird lacked the patience to oversee the details of such ambitious projects. Unlike an Ellington, for whom composition, arranging, and bandleading were areas of passionate interest, Parker was inclined to delegate these tasks to others and merely show up to play. For the string orchestra projects, arrangements were contracted out—with mediocre results. Rather than Prokofiev or Bartók, the models these charts mostly call to mind are rather the worst examples of Paul Whiteman’s concert jazz from the 1920s and 1930s. Alas, they would have been better suited as accompaniment, not to the leading altoist in modern jazz, but at most to an elevator journey of brief duration. Clearly there was a degree of credibility that Parker earned by fronting a string orchestra, an aura of respectability that few jazz artists enjoyed during these years and most craved. Yet, in the final analysis, “Bird with Strings” (as these efforts came to be known) never came close to realizing Parker’s aspirations for creating modern jazz on a grander scale. Instead they settled for a petty, hollow refinement, diluting the impact of an artist who was at his best when no strings were attached.

This onstage propriety was increasingly at odds with the travails of Parker’s private life. Drug addiction had taken its toll. Rolling up his sleeve and showing the needle marks on his arm, Parker told a friend: “This is my home, this is my portfolio, this is my Cadillac.” Bird was barely thirty, yet he looked much older. His once taut figure now took on a bloated aspect, and he tipped the scales at over two hundred pounds. He was bothered by an ulcer and his doctor warned of a possible heart condition. His relationship with Doris Sydnor, who had traveled to California to be lady-in-waiting during his Camarillo internment, was now breaking up, and Parker was renewing his ties with Chan Richardson. Au courant with the ways of jazz musicians and artists, Chan could be a soul mate in a way that Doris was not. But there was a trade-off. Doris, with a doting, almost maternal attitude toward Parker, had shielded him (as best she could) from the seamier side of the jazz milieu. She would wait for him at clubs, carry his saxophone, try to pick up the pieces of his dissipated life. With Chan, Parker made only fleeting attempts to settle down. Such stability ultimately proved too confining. When his daughter Pree died, Parker was on the road, lodging with sculptress Julie MacDonald. Chan had been forced to take Pree to public clinics, because there was no money for a private doctor—this at a time when Parker was at the peak of his fame and earning potential. But even when he wasn’t out of town, Parker had little attachment for hearth and home. When he succumbed to his own final illness, Bird was back in New York, but even then he opted to recuperate at the apartment of a lady friend rather than stay with Chan and his son.

The instability could also be seen in Parker’s onstage life. True, at any given performance, he was still capable of extraordinary music making. His 1953 Toronto concert at Massey Hall (alongside Gillespie, Mingus, Roach, and Powell) has been marketed as “The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever,” and for once the exaggerated hype of the record company is somewhat justified by the level of the music. Other late performances (in 1952 at Rockland Palace; in 1953 with The Orchestra in Washington, DC) show that Parker at his best still had to be considered the preeminent saxophonist in modern jazz, despite his private turmoils. But these moments of glory were far from the norm in Parker’s final years. The regular working band of the 1940s had by now given way to less permanent settings. He would play with pickup groups in different cities, or tour with Stan Kenton or Jazz at the Philharmonic. At other times he brought a string orchestra on the road, playing the same warmed-over arrangements night after night, set after set. His behavior onstage could be erratic or rude, and at times he might not show at all, causing club owners to grow wary. One night he fired the entire string orchestra during a performance, then left the empty stage to drink whiskey at the bar. Matters were further complicated by Parker’s problems with his cabaret card, which made it difficult for him to work in New York during a period of almost two years. There was heavy symbolism in the fact that Parker even came to be considered
persona non grata
at Birdland, the premier jazz club that had been named in the altoist’s honor in 1950. His final club appearance was marred by an embarrassing onstage confrontation with pianist Bud Powell, an unfortunate swan song to cap Bird’s volatile career.

His health—both physical and mental—had been precarious for some time. So many rumors circulated, most of them plausible if not true: he had swallowed iodine in an apparent suicide attempt; he had been twice hospitalized at Bellevue; or he made ominous comments about his own impending demise. Friends would tell of Bird arriving unannounced, knocking at doors in the middle of the night, seeking drugs, money, distraction. The inevitable terminal illness came in March 1955. Parker needed to get to Boston for a club engagement but, beset by the pain of his aggravated ulcer, made it no farther than the apartment of his friend, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. A doctor was called in, but Parker refused to go to a hospital. Three days later, he finally succumbed; his death was attributed to the combined effects of a bleeding ulcer and pneumonia. But these were only the arbitrary, final causes. Even more telling was the other notation on the death certificate: the doctor’s estimate of Parker’s age. Not knowing the true dates, he guessed that his patient was between fifty and sixty years old. In fact, Parker was only thirty-four.

“Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker’s next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?” Charles Mingus queried.
¹²
There was a touch of exaggeration in Mingus’s claim—but only a touch. During his lifetime, Parker exerted a hypnotic influence on the younger generation of jazz musicians, and his mystique not only continued unabated after his death but even intensified. His life now took on the quality of legend. “Bird is not dead,” Mingus continued, “he’s hiding out somewhere, and he’ll be back with some new shit that will scare everyone to death.” Picking up on this theme, Parker devotees brandished the phrase “Bird Lives”—anticipating, with their “in-denial” obsession, the postmortem Elvis fascination of a later generation—employing the slogan as a talisman, motto, and enigmatic graffiti all rolled into one.

But when Parker, unlike the King, failed to be spotted at supermarkets (if only on the cover of a checkout counter tabloid), most bop fans turned their energy toward finding the “next Bird,” the new hot alto saxophonist who would carry the jazz idiom to another level. Only three months after Parker’s death, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley arrived in New York. Within days of sitting in with the band at Cafe Bohemia, he was the talk of the town. True to form, Adderley’s record company promoted him as the “new Bird,” and though Cannonball’s assured technique and flair for improvisation may have reminded many of this famous predecessor, his warmer tone was a marked departure from the Parker model, as was his more rhythmically rooted approach to phrasing. Adderley served a brief but memorable stint with Miles Davis, during which he participated on the seminal
Kind of Blue
session, and in time developed a more controlled style of improvisation, with greater sensitivity to space and a more relaxed delivery. If Adderley failed to become the bebop messiah that fans were seeking, he nonetheless did an admirable job of pleasing both jazz purists and casual audiences, who relished his funk-inflected performances such as “Dis Here,” “Work Song,” and “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

Phil Woods, another much-lauded “disciple of Bird,” also made a splash on the New York jazz scene in the mid-1950s, both through his work as a leader and in his extensive sideman efforts. His professionalism, technical facility, and smooth attack enabled Woods to fit in with ease in almost any musical setting, whether the commercial pop music of a Billy Joel (who featured Woods on the hit song “Just the Way You Are”) or the much different soundscapes of Benny Goodman or Thelonious Monk. For a time Woods was perhaps too much in demand as a session player. His gigs as a bandleader became less frequent, and his promise as a major jazz star seemed destined to be only partly realized. Between 1958 and 1967, Woods made only four recordings as a leader. But with the formation of his excellent European ensemble in 1968, and his return to bebop roots with his post-1974 American bands, Woods made it clear that he belongs on any short list of leading post-Parker alto saxophonists.

Jackie McLean, a third altoist to come of age in the shadow of Parker during the 1950s, took a different approach to the instrument. While others emulated Parker’s virtuosity and borrowed verbatim various licks and ii–V–I cadences, McLean offered a sparser, more jagged approach. It was the spirit of Bird—his intensity, his drive, his raw emotion—not, as with so many other saxophonists, mimicked phrases and patterns, that came through in McLean’s music. Unlike Adderley and Woods, he adopted an acerbic tone, one distinctly unsuitable for pop music or pseudo-funk hits. His early work with Miles Davis and as a leader revealed an allegiance to the bop style, but McLean remained open to the influence of other approaches, with elements of John Coltrane’s modal excursions, Sonny Rollins’s hard bop, and Ornette Coleman’s free playing eventually entering into his music. By the time of his vital recordings from the 1960s for the Blue Note label, McLean was brandishing an urgent sax style, one that had largely discarded the formulaic resolutions of bop.

These three players—Adderley, Woods, McLean—in turn came to be revered as influential stylists in their own right, with a host of younger players following in their footsteps. We can trace this influence, for example, in the 1980s work (respectively) of Richie Cole, Vincent Herring, and Bobby Watson. But behind all these figures, the larger influence of Charlie Parker could still be felt, almost as strongly as during his lifetime. Bird’s impact extended to the West (Art Pepper, Sonny Criss, Bud Shank) and the East (Charles Mariano, Ernie Henry, Dave Schildkraut), to the baritone (Leo Parker, Serge Chaloff, Cecil Payne) and the tenor (Teddy Edwards, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins)—indeed, almost everywhere one looked on the jazz landscape. For better or worse, the bebop vocabulary refined by Parker and his contemporaries remained either an explicit source of inspiration or, at a minimum, a reference point for virtually all postbop jazz styles during the next half-century. Even the avant-garde musicians who, on the surface, seemed to rebel the most vociferously against the dominance of bop were secret worshippers at its shrine. For it was bebop itself, embodying as it did the spirit of rebellion par excellence within the world of jazz, that stood—yea, still stands!—as the most pertinent role model for all later jazz revolutions.

As it is commonly told, the history of jazz piano mirrors the evolution of the music as a whole. Earl Hines is said to have developed a “trumpet style” in response to Armstrong’s innovations. The pianism of Ellington is praised for representing a microcosm of his orchestral works. The music of Bud Powell, we are told, translated the advances of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to the jazz keyboard. These generalizations, as clumsy as they are—and they are all too easy to criticize—still catch a broad truth. They rightly call our attention to the symbiotic relationship between the harmonic and rhythmic underpinnings of the music, epitomized in the work of jazz pianists, and the evolution of the monophonic improvised lines, best exemplified in the play of the horns. In this regard, jazz music is radically different from painting or literature or other mediums in which individuals work alone, in which the influence of others is felt at a distance, as part of a cultural context. With few exceptions, the nature of jazz performance requires group interaction of the highest level. And much of the irony of jazz is that, for all its celebration of the individual soloist, it remains a music of ensembles. The story of each major innovator in the music’s history—Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coleman—repeats this truism. There are no lonely geniuses in the jazz pantheon, for in this medium there is almost always the company of a band.

By the mid-1940s, a distinctively modern jazz piano style had developed. Its historical antecedents were surprising. A decade before, most knowledgeable listeners would have looked toward Art Tatum, or perhaps to Duke Ellington, for an indication of the future of jazz piano. Their music seemed to encompass the most forward-looking thinking in terms of harmony, rhythm, melody. As it turned out, the orchestral approach to the keyboard of a Tatum or Ellington was too thick, too textured to work in the context of a bebop rhythm section. Instead, the new generation of modern jazz pianists looked for a leaner, more streamlined approach. This new style, as it developed, came to emphasize the right hand, which played fast melody lines laced with all the chromatic color tones and rhythmic flurries found in a Parker alto solo. The left hand supported this linear approach with supple comping chords—often simple structures built with only two or three notes—that were almost as important for their rhythmic kick as for their meager harmonic implications. In this regard, the bebop pianists were closer in spirit to Count Basie, the unassuming antivirtuoso of Kansas City jazz, than to the more technically proficient stride and Swing Era players. True, the influence of the stride tradition could not be completely shaken off—in particular, Tatum’s triumphant mastery of the keyboard continued to haunt later players. Its influence lurked below the surface of even such committed modernists as Powell and Tristano— and was especially evident when these bebop piano titans played unaccompanied. Hints of the linear styles of Hines and Wilson could also be detected among the boppers (with Monk’s modernism looking back even further to the work of James P. Johnson). Yet, for the most part, the bebop players tended to be ruthless in jettisoning the excess baggage of the recent past in their attempts to find a purer, unencumbered voice for the jazz keyboard.