Charlie Parker

James Patrick

A
s if by immaculate conception, the first wave of modern
jazz recordings appeared in late 1945 and early 1946.
Granted the wisdom of hindsight, we know this star-
tling music had been taking shape over the previous
six or seven years, but much of its development had
been hidden from the music public. In a dispute between the Amer-
ican Federation of Musicians and the three ‘‘majors’’ of the recording
industry (Columbia, Decca, and Victor), most commercial recording
was silenced from August 1942 to November 1944. Various wartime
measures—the drafting of musicians, a shortage of shellac needed for
the manufacture of phonograph discs, gasoline rationing, and trans-
portation restrictions—further reduced opportunities for exposing
new music. It should not be surprising, then, that when many people
first heard bebop it sounded like a blurred image of the jazz past or,
worse, seemed disturbingly disconnected to earlier jazz traditions.
Woody Herman’s drummer Dave Tough was no exception:

As we walked in, see, these cats snatched up their horns and

blew crazy stuff. One would stop all of a sudden and another
would start for no reason at all. We never could tell when a solo

316
 was supposed to begin or end. Then they all quit at once and
walked off the stand. It scared us.

As it turned out, bebop was not merely the next new jazz style. Bebop
would not only endure but become established as the preeminent jazz
style—standing among all those that preceded it or those that de-
veloped after its first emergence as the lingua franca, the common
practice idiom of the art of jazz. At the center of this is Charlie Parker,
the legendary Bird.
Charles Parker Jr. was born on August 29, 1920, in Kansas City,
Kansas, the only child of Addie and Charles Parker Sr., grew up in
Kansas City, Missouri, and died on March 12, 1955, in the Manhattan
apartment of the Rothschild baroness, Pannonica de Koenigswarter.
Charlie Parker was one of the great transforming figures of twentieth-
century music, and the history of jazz is inconceivable without him.
Like Armstrong, Beethoven, or Schoenberg, Parker was one of those
ultra-rare originals in which a tradition’s past, present, and future
merge. In a musical culture where creativity and individualism are
aesthetic, indeed, ethical first principles, Parker was a landmark in-
novator. Bird is also one of jazz’s most traditional musicians, and, like
jazz itself, his music was a wondrous synthesis of diverse and seem-
ingly irreconcilable elements. Parker appears to have liked—or found
useful—almost any kind of music, and the raw material he refracted
was a large and variegated mix. There was jazz, especially the great
soloists Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Haw-
kins, Johnny Hodges, and Lester Young, and, less probably, Jimmy
Dorsey, Rudy Wiedoeft, and Rudy Vallee. There was popular music,
including children’s ditties, folk melodies, dance tunes, and Tin Pan
Alley and Broadway songs. In his later years, Parker also developed
a fondness for ‘‘classical’’ music and particular admiration for the
modern composers Bartók, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and
Varèse. Foremost, however, was the blues and the robust milieu of
black music in Kansas City during the 1930s.
No other jazz musician has so gripped the imagination of fellow
artists and lay people alike. Parker’s reputation was fueled not only
by the brilliance of his music but also by the colorful and often lurid
saga of his personal life. Parker’s time on earth was brief and tur-
bulent. The basic problem for the Parker biographer is that virtually
any tale about the man could be true. We have an extensive anecdotal
lore, which has been gathered from hundreds of informants, a large
percentage of them credible. From these we know that Parker could

charlie parker ••• 317

Charlie Parker, c. 1947. Courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.
be caring or self-absorbed, coarse or refined, generous or greedy, af-
fable or withdrawn, and display any number of other polarities in
behavior. Clearly Parker was a fundamentally troubled man who
added the self-inflicted insults of heroin and alcoholic addiction to
his burdens. Trumpeter Kenny Dorham succinctly explained, ‘‘He had
to have a lot of everything.’’ Probably the best composite portrait
presents him as a supremely dazzling musician, witty, highly intel-
ligent, articulate, reckless, and irresponsible. Bird was a suave manip-
ulator who could charm even those people he had badly mistreated—
until he went to the well once too often, which happened with several
of his friends, most of his musical and business colleagues, and all of
his four most serious relationships. In a rare moment of self-
revelation, Parker rhetorically asked trumpeter Benny Harris, ‘‘What
good is love if you can’t take?’’ Many lives were and continue to be
enriched by Charlie Parker, but as another musician laughingly put
it, ‘‘To know Bird you got to pay your dues.’’ Given Parker’s complex
and volatile personality, it is sometimes too easy to lose sight of the
extraordinary power that music exerted on him. Until his late years—
when the appetites and dark forces overcame him—the Parker story
is, at its core, about the triumph of music as the dominant obsession
in a perplexing array of contesting compulsions. The ultimate tragedy
is that Charlie Parker’s astonishing music could not save Charlie Par-
ker from himself.
Parker’s chaotic personal life and the transcendency of his mature
playing might suggest that he was some kind of black Mozart for
whom great art came quickly and easily. In fact, Charlie was a spoiled
mama’s boy who showed little interest in or aptitude for music until
his middle teens. When he first became seriously committed to the
life of a musician his progress was slow, and he was sometimes cruelly
humiliated. In his own words:

I had learned to play two tunes in a certain key . . . the first eight
bars of ‘‘Lazy River’’ and I knew the complete tune of ‘‘Hon-
eysuckle Rose.’’ . . . So I took my horn out to this joint where . . .
a bunch of fellows who I had seen around worked and the first
thing they started playing was ‘‘Body and Soul’’ . . . So I go to
playing my ‘‘Honeysuckle Rose’’ . . . They laughed me off the
bandstand.
Everybody fell out laughing. I went home and cried and
didn’t play again for three months.

charlie parker ••• 319

 Parker eventually responded, however, with a steely resolve to work
hard and grow. He recalled this period near the end of his life:

I put quite a bit of study into the horn. . . . In fact, the neighbors
threatened to ask my mother to move once . . . they said I was
driving ’em crazy with the horn. I used to put in at least eleven,
eleven to fifteen hours a day.

Like most jazz musicians of his time, Parker learned the basic com-
ponents of his craft in a concurrent fashion through practical expe-
rience. As he was learning his instrument, he was also acquiring
improvising skills, basic harmony, and a repertory and studying older
jazz masters firsthand or on recordings—each advance tested via a
process of trial and error in the fiercely competitive Kansas City bands
and jam sessions. At the age of fifteen Charlie quit school to become
a full-time musician, married his childhood sweetheart, Rebecca Ruf-
fin, and started using heroin. For the next four years Parker appren-
ticed in a number of local and regional bands. Parker’s first major
breakthrough occurred in 1937. During that summer he was em-
ployed at a resort in Eldon, Missouri, studied harmony with guitarist
Efferge Ware, and memorized several of tenor saxophonist Lester
Young’s recorded solos. When he returned to Kansas City his playing
was vastly improved, and he worked with alto saxophonist Buster
Smith, who, along with Young, would become a central influence on
his early style. Parker experienced his next major breakthrough at a
jam session in New York, where he spent most of 1939. That famous
epiphany is recalled in a 1949 interview for Down Beat:

Charlie’s horn first came alive in a chili house on Seventh Ave.

between 139th St. and 140th St. In December, 1939. He was
jamming there with a guitarist named Biddy Fleet. At the time,
Charlie says, he was bored with the stereotyped changes being
used then. ‘‘I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else,’’
he recalls. ‘‘I could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it.’’
Working over ‘‘Cherokee’’ with Fleet, Charlie suddenly found
that by using higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and
backing them with appropriately related changes, he could play
this thing he had been ‘‘hearing.’’

Parker’s personal behavior became increasingly reckless, but he was

now convinced of his musical destiny, and his quest would not be

320 ••• james patrick

restrained by any customary sense of responsibility. In 1940 Charlie
asked Rebecca for a divorce and extracted a promise from his mother
that she would care for his wife and two-year-old son, Leon. In Re-
becca’s words:

He held my hand and he says, ‘‘Rebec, would you free me,

please. . . . I believe I could become a great musician if I were
free.’’ . . . And that was all. He would never be back.

From 1940 to 1942 Parker played in Jay McShann’s band, made

his first recordings, and acquired his nickname Yardbird, eventually
shortened to Bird. In December 1942 he was hired as a tenor saxo-
phonist by Earl Hines, whose band included several other young mod-
ernists, Dizzy Gillespie among them. Parker remained with Hines
until April 1943, returned to Kansas City, and in May 1944 was per-
suaded to rejoin Gillespie and other former Hines colleagues as the
nucleus of Billy Eckstine’s legendary band. By August 1944 Parker
had left Eckstine, and in September he cut his first small-group re-
cordings as featured soloist with guitarist Tiny Grimes. During this
crucial 1940–44 period, Parker made only a small handful of com-
mercial recordings. Before the Grimes date he is highlighted in only
a few brief solos, most notably ‘‘Hootie Blues’’ (1941), ‘‘Swingmatism’’
(1941), and ‘‘The Jumpin’ Blues’’ (1942) with McShann. It remains
one of the profound laments in the history of jazz that, due to the
AFM recording ban, neither the Hines nor Eckstine bands in which
Parker worked are preserved in sound. On the other hand, approxi-
mately thirty privately made recordings ranging from 1940 to early
1944 have survived and preserve Parker in a diverse assortment
of musical contexts: solo, unaccompanied alto saxophone; small
McShann groups; the full McShann band; alto plus guitar; a Harlem
jam session; and one item with Parker, Gillespie, and bassist Oscar
Pettiford made in a Chicago hotel room in 1943.
The year 1945 was pivotal and decisive. In New York Parker led
his own group for the first time and worked extensively with Gilles-
pie in small ensembles. From January 4, 1945, to February 5, 1946,
Parker and Gillespie made sixty-five seminal recordings together (in-
cluding private recordings, airchecks, and alternate takes from studio
sessions) with one or the other as leader or the two together working
as sidemen. Several of these would define the new jazz and serve as
a core canon for the modern era: ‘‘Dizzy Atmosphere,’’ ‘‘Groovin’
High,’’ ‘‘Hot House,’’ ‘‘KoKo,’’ ‘‘Salt Peanuts,’’ and ‘‘Shaw ’Nuff.’’ By

charlie parker ••• 321

 the time Bird made his first shocking and brilliant recordings as a
leader on November 26, 1945, at the age of twenty-five he had been
a professional musician and heroin addict for nearly ten years. The
genius of Charlie Parker—as it was now fully revealed—owed less
to the divine muses than it did to his hard work, study, broad ex-
perience, and the determined will to fulfill his destiny as a great
musician.
Parker and Gillespie took their new music to Hollywood in De-
cember 1945 for an eight-week nightclub engagement. Gillespie re-
turned to New York, and Bird remained in Los Angeles, recording
and performing in concerts and nightclubs until a nervous breakdown
and his chemical appetites led to a six-month confinement at Cam-
arillo State Hospital. Parker was released in late January 1947 and
returned to New York in early April. Throughout 1946 and early
1947 the jazz press had kept bebop insiders up to date about Parker’s
West Coast odyssey. The faithful were primed for Bird’s return, and
a reenergized, if not rehabilitated, Charlie Parker did not disappoint
them. Parker formed his classic quintet with Miles Davis, trumpet,
Duke Jordan, piano, Tommy Potter, bass, and Max Roach, drums—
with Bud Powell, John Lewis, Tadd Dameron, or Al Haig sometimes
on piano or Curley Russell on bass. This group remained intact for
nineteen months (a period of relatively remarkable stability in Bird’s
volatile career), worked and traveled regularly, and from May 1947
to September 1948 recorded many of the finest specimens of Parker’s
music for the Dial and Savoy companies: ‘‘Donna Lee,’’ ‘‘Chasin’ the
Bird,’’ ‘‘Embraceable You,’’ ‘‘Scrapple From the Apple,’’ ‘‘Klact-
oveeseds-tene,’’ ‘‘Another Hair Do,’’ ‘‘Barbados,’’ ‘‘Ah-Leu-Cha,’’
‘‘Parker’s Mood,’’ and ‘‘Marmaduke.’’
By 1950 Charlie Parker was not merely a cult hero worshiped by
obeisant hipsters but also a star. He was now recording exclusively
for the (eventual) Verve company and Norman Granz, who was de-
termined that under his guidance Parker could receive mass appre-
ciation if presented in ‘‘fresh dimensions.’’ Granz insisted that Bird
perform ‘‘pretty tunes written by good song writers’’ and recorded
him with string ensembles, big jazz bands, Afro-Cuban outfits, wood-
wind and vocal groups, and other large and expensive conglomera-
tions usually denied to jazz artists at the time. Much of this was pooh-
poohed by the jazz hard core, but there is no denying that such
records as ‘‘Just Friends’’ and ‘‘April in Paris’’ (both 1949 and released
together on Charlie Parker With Strings) had a tremendous effect on
his career. The Verves contain very little of Parker’s very best playing,

322 ••• james patrick

but due to their broad distribution and constant availability for the
past five decades they remain among his most well known recordings.
Among these are the unalloyed small-group bebop items: ‘‘Laird
Baird’’ (1953), ‘‘Confirmation’’ (1953), ‘‘Kim’’ (1953), ‘‘She Rote’’
(1951), and ‘‘Blues for Alice’’ (1951).
Parker had achieved critical and popular success. He performed at
Carnegie Hall, visited Europe in 1949 and 1950, and headlined the
Festivale Internationale de Jazz in Paris. He was the winner of mag-
azine polls, received excellent reviews, was the subject of feature ar-
ticles, and had a nightclub, Birdland, named in his honor. At the
same time he began to unravel again. His marriage to Doris Sydnor
dissolved, there was more heroin and alcohol, and his health deteri-
orated. He was arrested on a narcotics violation and, as a result, his
New York City cabaret license was revoked, which banned him from
nightclub employment. There was unprofessional and sometimes bi-
zarre behavior on and off the bandstand; there were troubles with
club owners, his booking agency, and the AFM. Sporadically em-
ployed and badly in debt, Parker twice attempted suicide in 1954 and
was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York. Two remarkable
medical documents summarize this last fragile and pathetic stage in
Parker’s life. They read in part:

The [admitting] diagnosis was acute and chronic alcoholism and

narcotic addiction . . . Evaluation by psychiatrists indicate [sic]
a hostile, evasive personality with manifestations of primi-
tive and sexual fantasies associated with hostility and gross evi-
dence of paranoid thinking. Psychoanalytic diagnosis: ‘‘latent
schizophrenia.’’

Additional medical tests were performed including a neurological ex-

amination, a spinal tap, and a blood Wasserman sample, which in-
dicated that Parker had syphilis, but the disease had not yet attacked
his central nervous system.
Parker’s last public engagement was on March 5, 1955, at Birdland
(where he had been barred as a performer and customer), and he
died seven days later. The official cause of death given by the medical
examiner was lobar pneumonia. The attending physician (who re-
fused to sign the death certificate) attributed Parker’s death to ad-
vanced cirrhosis of the liver and a heart attack and estimated his age
to be around sixty. Bird was thirty-four.
The mature Parker style is complex, but also one of supreme clarity

charlie parker ••• 323

 and coherence. Perhaps the three most immediately striking features
are his sound, tempos, and rhythm. In contrast to the rich timbres of
Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter, Parker developed a hard, pene-
trating tone with a slow, narrow vibrato, which was eminently suited
to the aggressiveness of the new music. With regard to tempo, we
should recall that a standard mechanical metronome of the time op-
erated within a range of Largo at 40 quarter note beats per minute
to Presto at 208. Several of Parker’s recordings (especially a number
of live performances) are totally off this tempo map and are true
Prestissimos (‘‘as fast as possible’’), such as the hypersonic ‘‘KoKo’’
(1949 at 360), ‘‘Dizzy Atmosphere’’ (1947 at 375), and ‘‘Salt Peanuts’’
(1949 at 385). At the other end of the scale, some of Parker’s most
dazzling and ornate studio performances use very slow tempos, such
as ‘‘Parker’s Mood’’ (1948 at 80), ‘‘Funky Blues’’ (1952 at 65), and
‘‘Embraceable You’’ (1947 at 60). Parker’s rhythm is a marvel of
continuous variability. The tremendous drive of his line often owes
relatively less to basic syncopation rather than to an enveloping ir-
regularity at several different levels of musical time. The basic pulse
is constantly broken into a succession of varied and discontinuous
subdivisions. The length of phrases and the positioning of their be-
ginnings and endings within the measure are highly irregular, while
accentual bombs drop here and there. Dizzy Gillespie nailed it when
he said: ‘‘Bird had a knack for getting from one note to another like
nobody else.’’
Parker’s solos avoid direct reference to the original melodies. Para-
phrase—the use of ornamentation or other modest reshaping in
which the original tune is perceivable in the variation—is usually
reserved for opening or closing statements when a well-known pop-
ular song is serving as the theme. Typically Parker based his solos
on the underlying chord structure, endlessly creating new melodies
with no obvious resemblance to the originals. In doing so, Parker
often used a process known to musicologists as centonization (from
the Latin cento, patchwork) whereby new works are created out of
short, preexisting melodic formulas. Thomas Owens has identified
about one hundred of Parker’s formulas and demonstrated in ex-
haustive detail how Parker’s solos—never identical and never ‘‘for-
mulaic’’ in the narrow sense—were in large part the result of his
constant variation and redisposition of these melodic cells.
Identifying a core of ‘‘greatest hits’’ or hypothesizing a stash of
indispensable recordings for the proverbial desert island has long been
an entertaining parlor game for jazz aficionados. In the case of Charlie

324 ••• james patrick

Parker, the expert literature suggests that there is a commonly ac-
cepted handful of pieces that must be heard by anyone who wants
to experience the full measure of Bird’s music. A few of these are
briefly discussed below. Fortunately, all are currently in print and
available to listeners.

‘‘KoKo,’’ Savoy, November 26, 1945

Parker’s ‘‘KoKo’’ solo provides a summary of his most exciting playing
style and faultless instrumental technique at very fast tempos. The
piece is based on the chord structure of ‘‘Cherokee,’’ which had fig-
ured prominently in his second developmental breakthrough and was
one of his featured numbers with the Jay McShann band. Yet other
facts indicate that the ‘‘Cherokee’’/‘‘KoKo’’ concept held special sig-
nificance for Parker. First, after 1945 he reserved the piece for use
on special occasions such as radio broadcasts or important concerts at
Carnegie Hall in New York. Second, he embedded into his perform-
ances a small collection of figures that function as a kind of melodic
autobiographical sketch: an in-your-face accelerated quotation of the
‘‘Cherokee’’ melody; a quotation from the New Orleans standard
‘‘High Society’’; a fast-moving sequential lick incorporating ‘‘Tea for
Two,’’ which was originally concocted as a mnemonic aid to the im-
provisational navigation of the difficult chord structure of the middle
section of ‘‘Cherokee’’; an isolated, sustained, and blues-inflected sin-
gle note (F); and a long, descending figure reminiscent of pianists
Fats Waller’s and Art Tatum’s recordings of ‘‘Tea for Two.’’ Parker
calls attention to these figures by their unusual degree of internal
repetition and by positioning them at the most prominent places in
the chorus—at the very beginning and end, or at the beginning of
the B section of the AABA structure. What is most remarkable, how-
ever, is that given the formidable challenge of keeping his line mov-
ing and composing at very high speed, Parker produced a melody of
great logical design.

‘‘Lady Be Good,’’ Clef, January 28, 1946

Lester Young’s 1936 version of George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘‘Lady Be
Good’’ was one of the solos that Parker memorized in the summer
of 1937. Bird’s 1946 performance not only pays homage to his roots
in Kansas City but also serves as a two-chorus history lesson as the
solo evolves from the beginning swing era flavor into the full-fledged
Parker style. In the opening section Parker employs implied call
and response, answering his references to Gershwin’s melody with

charlie parker ••• 325

 repetitive riff phrases, and inserts figures recalling moments from the
Young solo. In the second part the line is fast-moving and rhyth-
mically and harmonically complex. Throughout the solo, however,
the blues are never far away, and Parker’s tone and declamation are
unusually strident and intensely expressive—a distant remove from
Ira Gershwin’s coy words about a lonely guy in the big city. Near
the end, Parker rounds things off with an aggressive, signifying blues
lick and a variant of the opening idea to provide a brief recapitulation
of what has transpired and how far we have traveled in two short
choruses.

‘‘Embraceable You’’ (Take 1), Dial, October 28, 1947

Parker frequently turned to another Gershwin song, ‘‘Embraceable
You.’’ In all, there are seventeen surviving versions from 1943 to
1953, but the classic slow ballad specimen is the first of two studio
takes made in 1947. Parker’s one-chorus solo has been discussed by
several eminent jazz writers and has even served as the token jazz
example in general books devoted to ‘‘serious’’ music. Despite the
title, this recording is hardly a performance of the 1930 song since
Parker almost entirely avoids direct contact with Gershwin’s original
melody. Instead of simply paraphrasing Gershwin’s tune or linking
together patchwork figures to fit with the underlying harmony, Par-
ker builds much of his solo on a rapid six-note figure (C-G-F-E-
D-E) presented at the very beginning. The writer Gary Giddins has
identified this figure as a quotation from the opening of the 1939 pop
song ‘‘A Table in a Corner.’’ This improbable overlay, moreover,
serves as a concise distillation of Gershwin’s entire first phrase. What
might have begun as a merely ingenious quotation unfolds as a tour
de force of improvised motivic composition. The six-note idea is re-
iterated and variously repronounced (to borrow a well-chosen word
from the great critic Martin Williams), transposed, ornamented,
speeded up, slowed down, its contour broadened, and enveloped in
long, fast-moving phrases—all this motivic wizardry projected against
Parker’s exquisite overall dramatic pacing and narrative design.

‘‘Klact-oveeseds-tene’’ (Take 1), Dial, November 4, 1947

Parker’s composition almost certainly was conceived at this studio
date and consists of an assembly of three elements: the introduction
and coda, which was borrowed from ‘‘The Chase,’’ recorded earlier in
1947 for Dial by tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordan and Wardell Gray;
a modest reworking of the AABA chord pattern of Juan Tizol’s ‘‘Per-

326 ••• james patrick

dido’’ (1942); and a newly composed melody to be used only for the
A sections, leaving the B section open for improvisation. The tempo
is medium up. There are two takes, and each offers forty-eight mea-
sures of Parker improvising during the opening and closing themes
and in his one-chorus solo. A comparison will show that the two have
much in common with regard to Parker’s deployment of several of
his favorite figures, used pretty much in the same way and in the
same places. Yet the first take is something very special. The general
tendency toward rhythmic irregularity is taken to a dangerous ex-
treme in the fragmented beginning. Three very short but progres-
sively longer ideas of two notes, three notes, and six notes are punched
out and isolated from each other by silence. As Parker develops these
ideas by combining, transposing, and ornamenting them, the line
becomes increasingly continuous and the fragmentation is resolved.
What initially may have seemed absurdly reckless is quickly trans-
formed into a statement of awe-inspiring, logical structure. As for the
weird title, Parker was usually content to allow the record companies
to name his pieces, but Bird himself supplied this one and let others
ponder its meaning. One speculation has it that it is fractured German
for Klack (an interjection denoting the noise ‘‘slap-bang!’’) and wied-
ersehen (‘‘good-bye’’). Another suggests that it refers to the call letters
of KLAC, a radio station in Southern California where Parker spent
1946 and early 1947. Probably the most plausible explanation was
provided by the amateur Parker recordist Dean Benedetti: ‘‘Why,
man, it’s just a sound.’’ There is no evidence that Parker ever per-
formed this piece again.

‘‘Parker’s Mood’’ (Take 2), Savoy, September 18, 1948

The entire compass of Parker’s music—from the simple and direct
to the complex and oblique—ranges within the basic framework of
the twelve-measure blues. The blues offered two contrasting, but not
irreconcilable, possibilities to Parker: a cherished heirloom through
which tradition could be transmitted, and a familiar referential idea
that could be elaborated upon in the modern jazz manner. ‘‘Parker’s
Mood’’ is Bird’s slow blues masterpiece. The rhythmic subtlety is
fantastic: the complexity of individual phrases; the staggered, not-
quite-on-the-beat flow. At the same time, there is the singable/
speakable naturalness of vocal/oral tradition in the varied inflection
of repetitive figures. The net effect is a performance that, all at once,
is progressive and traditional, astonishing and deeply moving. Jay
McShann, Parker’s early employer, once remarked:

charlie parker ••• 327

 Ask me what did he do, I tell them he played the blues . . .
anything that Bird played . . . Bird played the blues. Regardless
of how much technique he had. He played the blues. . . . Bird
was one of the greatest blues musicians in the world.

Parker was above all a great improviser, and probably no other mu-
sician before the advent of free jazz was so committed to and trusting
in the principle of spontaneous creation. Bird’s off-the-top approach
could be dangerous and exhilarating, with so little assured by pre-
meditation and so much riding on the reflexive moment. Tommy
Potter described the sometimes hectic atmosphere at the Dial and
Savoy studio sessions:

On record dates he could compose right on the spot. The A and

R [artists and repertoire] man would be griping, wanting us to
begin. Charlie would say, ‘‘It’ll just take a minute,’’ and he’d
write out eight bars, usually just for the trumpet. He could trans-
pose it for his alto without a score. The channel [the B section
of thirty-two-measure AABA pieces] could be ad libbed. The
rhythm section was familiar with all the progressions of the
tunes which were usually the basis of originals.

In his autobiography, Miles Davis recalled the first public engage-

ment of the classic quintet in 1947:

You had to be ready for anything. . . . A week or so before open-

ing night, Bird called for rehearsals. . . . On the first day of re-
hearsal, everybody showed up but Bird . . . and I ended up re-
hearsing the band. Now opening night . . . we ain’t seen Bird in
a week, but we’d been rehearsing. . . . When it’s time for the
band to hit, he asks, ‘‘What are we playing?’’ . . . He played like
a motherfucker. . . . It was something. We were . . . amazed. . . .
You came to expect it. And if he didn’t do something incredible,
that’s when you were surprised.

Parker once advised a young musician:

First you master your instrument, then you master the music;
then you forget about all that shit and just play.

328 ••• james patrick

He was telling this jazz apprentice that you needed to be prepared if
you wanted to enter the magic zone of spontaneity.
A few observations about Parker’s approach to musical form are
instructive. The basic, overall shape of a typical Parker performance
is utterly traditional and unremarkable. Parker relied on the time-
honored theme and variations procedure, with the ubiquitous twelve-
bar blues and thirty-two-measure 8⫹8⫹8⫹8, AABA patterns as the
most frequent designs for the initially stated themes and the subse-
quent solo choruses based on them. Still, Parker continuously came
up with new ways to shake up this basic plan. He combined composed
(preexisting) melody with improvised melody, tended to use only as
much composed material as might be required to provide a sense of
repetitive coherence, and, generally, enlarged the role of improvisa-
tion and thrust it into places where it did not normally ‘‘belong.’’ A
conventional performance would dictate that someone play the mel-
ody of the theme more or less as written while the rhythm section
provided the basic harmony and pulse. This would be followed by
individual solo choruses, new melodies based on the melody or har-
mony of the theme, and the performance concluded with a restate-
ment of the theme. Parker, however, liked to mitigate the distinction
between composed theme and improvised variation and, otherwise,
challenge normative procedures. Parts of the theme’s melody might
be improvised:

A A B A
8 8 8 8
Parker-Davis Parker-Davis Parker Parker-Davis
composed composed improvised composed

“Scrapple From the Apple,” Theme

A A B A
8 8 8 8
4 + 4 4 + 4
Parker-Davis Parker Parker-Davis Davis Parker
composed improvised composed improvised improvised

“Constellation” (Take 2), Theme

The internal choruses might be divided up between multiple soloists.

Sometimes only part of the initially stated theme would return at the
end, often replacing the last phrase of the final solo chorus. These
two ideas are combined in ‘‘Ah-Leu-Cha’’:

charlie parker ••• 329

 A´ A´´ B´ A [ABA]
8 8 8 8 8 8 8
Parker 2+2+2+2 Parker-Davis omitted
improvised Russell-Roach composed
improvised

“Ah-Leu-Cha,” Last Chorus

Sometimes composed themes would be omitted altogether and their

normal function supplied by an elaborate introduction. Parker’s
‘‘KoKo’’ solo is a variation on a theme (the song ‘‘Cherokee’’) that
never appears:
Introduction [Theme—Omitted]
8 8 8 8 A A B A
Parker-Gillespie Gillespie Parker Parker-Gillespie 16 16 16 16
composed improvised improvised composed

Variations Drum Solo [Theme—Omitted] Coda

64 + 64 32 (same routine as introduction)
Parker Roach
improvised improvised

“KoKo” (1945), Complete Performance

Like all great music Parker’s has the potential for any number of
different strategies for its analysis. This is reflected in the divergent
approaches taken in three excellent, large-scale studies: Thomas
Owens’s Charlie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation (1974), Lawrence
Koch’s Yardbird Suite: A Compendium of the Life and Music of Charlie
Parker (1988), and Henry Martin’s Charlie Parker and Thematic Im-
provisation (1996). Whereas Owens is chiefly concerned with the for-
mulaic construction of Parker’s melodic vocabulary and Koch with
the harmonic relationships of melody to a given chord patterns, Mar-
tin focuses on motivic organization that is revealed by voice-leading
analysis. In addition, Carl Woideck’s Charlie Parker: His Music and
Life (1996) is a first-rate general survey with especially strong treat-
ments of Parker’s 1940–43 apprenticeship and the tantalizing hints
of new directions in the final years.
Parker was a genius, but his terrifying ability to produce sublime
spontaneous composition was girded by a few elemental factors. First,
superior instrumental technique whereby the musical idea could be
transmitted instantaneously to musical performance. Second, a limited
repertory and range of harmonic material with which he was inti-
mately familiar. Third, a large, though necessarily limited fund of

330 ••• james patrick

melodic figures—his musical vocabulary—which could be drawn on
quickly. Fourth (and more mysteriously), the utter internalization of
these things so that the process of improvised creation, assembly, and
reassembly could be carried out spontaneously with great expressive
freedom. Still, any earnest attempt to describe Parker’s art ends with
a shrug. Bird’s music is so well made, his manipulation of melody,
harmony, and rhythm so unified, and the emotional effect so pro-
found that no single interpretation seems sufficient or even the best
path to its understanding. Among the millions of words written about
Charlie Parker, Bird’s own explanation may be the most useful: ‘‘It’s
just music. It’s playing clean and looking for the pretty notes.’’

charlie parker ••• 331