Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker

5. Bird Lives

111 5 . b i r d l i v E S HE RESTORED, REVITALIZED Charlie Parker of 1947 is the illustrious Bird, the fabled Bird of a thousand acquaintances , numberless funny and harrowing anecdotes, and a profusion of masterpieces. The period of his ascension dates from his quietly triumphant return to New York in April and continues almost until his deliverance eight years later, all of it chronicled in passionate, contradictory, and wistful testimony. Like loosely assembled fragments of a shattered mirror, they reflect a shimmering, deceptive mosaic. The image looms elusively, assuming a different temper in each ray of light. Even the photographs indicate a magic show. His weight billows and recedes, his face—a potato from one perspective, a stone carving from another—transmogrifies, as the boyish spark is quenched and revived. Only the eyes are candid, registering cockiness, intensity, wit, detachment, pain, pleasure, concentration, anger, and more. The premature creases speak less T Tommy Potter, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach, at the Three Deuces, New York City, 1948. BIRD LIVES 112 of sickness and self-abuse than of a life that never knew youth, or one that sustained the veneer of youth to cloak an unseasonable knowledge. (Rebecca: “Charlie was always old.” Chan: “I couldn’t believe he was just twenty-six.”) He might almost have been born a sachem. The music, too, defies easy apprehension. Only in jazz is the official work so frequently qualified by ancillary discoveries. Sketches do not supersede a painting; first drafts do not supplant the published novel or musical score. But jazz records, the art’s one sure covenant with posterity, are definitive only by default. They document random performances, especially in the case of a musician as committed to improvisation as Bird. Even a cursory examination of his alternate takes shows the degree of serendipity involved in Left to right: Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, and Symphony Sid Torin at Birdland, New York City, 1953. BIRD LIVES 113 producing work that is soon considered classic. How many thousands of potential classics, then, were performed in the absence of recording engineers? Beginning with his 1947 homecoming, sixty pounds heavier and lustrous with good health, Parker was stalked by amateur recordists intent on preserving every fugitive solo. Singleminded and thrifty, they sometimes recorded Parker alone, turning off the disc, wire, or tape machine when other members of his band soloed. Some preserved radio airchecks, others followed him into clubs, others had access to private jam sessions. The technology that domesticated entertainment makes every consumer a potential producer. Leaving aside the issue of theft, which remains thorny because American copyright laws are stubbornly inhospitable to improvised music, those low-fidelity mementos vastly enlarge our understanding of Parker’s accomplishment. More than 350 Parker improvisations recorded privately between 1947 and 1954, excluding posthumously discovered studio performances, surfaced in the thirty years after his death, and they constitute a treasure with few parallels in musical history.* (One thinks of the countless hours of “new” Ellington, and of the manuscripts in Schubert’s attic.) They afford us far more than extended solos or versions of compositions that he never officially recorded, and substantiate the claims of his contemporaries, who insist that the records, magnificent though they are, do not tell the whole story. They are proof that the formalist, who structures his inventions with sovereign care in the confines of a three-minute 78 rpm record, raged luminously, almost recklessly, for the pleasure of an * This number now figures as absurdly low. In 1990, Mosaic Records released the legendary cache of Parker solos and snippets privately documented by Dean Benedetti in 1947 and 1948: more than 265 excerpts, some seven hours of crudely recorded but not infrequently thrilling music. Other discoveries added to the treasure, notably, from Uptown Records in 2005, a previously unknown 1945 Town Hall concert by the Three Deuces band (Parker, Gillespie, Al Haig, Curley Russell, Sid Catlett alternating with Max Roach, and a brief appearance by Don Byas), including a version of “Salt Peanuts” with four rapturous Parker choruses —the kind of solo that makes you wonder how we presumed to know this man without having known this performance. BIRD LIVES 114 eager audience; that, notwithstanding his lexicon of trademark licks and transitions, he rarely repeated himself; that he was witty, irreverent, and impulsive; that he could play any piece in any key; that although his virtuosity may occasionally have been...