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Reviewed by:
  • Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch, and: Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker by Chuck Haddix
  • Scott DeVeaux
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker. By Stanley Crouch. (New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 365. $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-200559-5.)
Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker. By Chuck Haddix. Music in American Life. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 188. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-252-03791-7.)

As jazz enters the academy, it is surprising how little we know about some of its most important artists. Charlie Parker, the saxophonist at the center of modern jazz, lived a short and troubled life; fewer than thirty-five years separated his birth in 1920 from his drug-addled death in 1955. Chuck Haddix’s new book, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker, does its best to fill in the puzzle with documented facts. A Kansas City local and director of the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Libraries, Haddix builds on many recent sources, including Chan Parker’s autobiography, the Ross Russell Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, interviews with Parker’s childhood friends in Kansas City, and a previously overlooked interview with Parker’s first wife, Rebecca Ruffin. Most of these details clarify Parker’s childhood and adolescence in Kansas City. For example, Haddix documents the youthful Parker’s enrollment in the Penn School, the first institution west of the Mississippi River for educating African American students, where, believe it or not, the kids donned wings for a school pageant entitled “Birdland.” The rest of the book [End Page 209] is thoroughly professional, even if for much of it Haddix retells familiar incidents in plain, unsentimental prose.

Haddix’s account is overshadowed by the long-awaited book from the pugnacious jazz critic Stanley Crouch. Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, the first of what could be several volumes on Parker’s life, covers only the years leading to his stunning debut at age twenty with the Jay McShann Orchestra at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Crouch has been working on this biography for over thirty years; interviews with Buster Smith, Jay McShann, and Gene Ramey date back to the early 1980s. Indeed, some of this material has already been seen. Gary Giddins’s Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York, 1987) drew on Crouch’s interviews, especially his long-standing relationship with Parker’s first wife. Armed with reels of tape recordings and his prodigious writing voice, Crouch was in a position to put all competitors in his wake.

Yet its appearance is a disappointment—a biography that is often indistinguishable from historical fiction and therefore worthless as biography. Crouch derives from careful listening to his informants an intense sense of atmosphere, deepened by his poetic streak. Toward the beginning of the book, he provides a gripping description of the McShann band’s drive to New York, which makes us feel that we are riding in the car’s front seat.

There are limits to this kind of novelistic description, however. Consider Crouch’s account of Parker’s humiliation at a jam session at the Reno Club, immortalized in the 1988 movie Bird by the image of Jo Jones’s cymbal crash, “dinging” Parker out. Haddix provides a paragraph-long account citing the only surviving source—Gene Ramey, who has repeated the story on radio and in oral history archives. Armed with his own interview with Ramey, Crouch stretches this incident out for seven pages. Among other things, Crouch cites Parker’s body language—“Charlie would cadge a cigarette and stand off to the side with his hand in his pocket, one leg forward and bent a little, trying to give off the look of an older player swimming deeply but easefully in the nightlife” (p. 150). Crouch even speculates on Parker’s mental state: “He could feel his every breath, almost the flow of his blood, the indifferent presence of his nervous system” (p. 153).

How on earth could Crouch know such...

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