Bird II: "Loverman" and "Summertime"

By: Bernard Chazelle

One day, Bird was walking on Broadway with 50 cents in his pocket, his entire fortune. He bumped into a blind beggar playing the accordion. "Can you play 'All the Things You Are'?" The accordionist said yes and obliged. Bird turned to his friend and say "Whoa, he can play the chords!" He dropped 25 cents into the man's bowl and walked on. Half-an-hour later, Bird walked back and heard the same music again: he dropped his last 25 cents.

Nat Hentoff likes to tell this anecdote. Once, at a bar, Bird insisted on playing country music on the jukebox. He had no patience with the jibes of other jazzmen present that these were the corniest of sounds. "No," Bird insisted, "they're telling stories that are real to them. I want to hear what they're saying. I want to hear their stories."

He heard the stories. And he told them, too. Bird always thought of his music as story telling.

Charlie Parker felt deeply about racism and the exploitation of his music that went with it. When Babs Gonzales tried to get him off drugs, he snapped:

"Wait until everybody gets rich off your style and you don't have any bread, then lecture me about drugs."

Yet he did all he could to keep Red Rodney, a Jewish white trumpeter from Philly, off heroin. He failed. When he toured in the South with Rodney, a true friend, he had him pass off as a black albino to get around the ban on mixed-race bands. He'd boss him around on stage ostentatiously, "Come on, boy, get me my horn," clearly enjoying the reverse racial stereotype. When Bird moved to California, he was met with incomprehension: "They all hate my music." He ended up in a mental institution.

Bird's music is like Mozart played in fast-forward. Bird's ability to say so much in so little time is unmatched. In a one-minute solo, he gives you enough musical ideas to build the foundation of a whole symphony. But Bird won't come to you. You have to come to him. But once you do, I guarantee you, you won't let go.

Bird's tone is fabulous, and very unique. He's one of the easiest jazz instrumentalists to recognize. The man really was a tenor sax player who happened to play alto. He used an unplayable reed (much like Stevie Ray Vaughn set his guitar to be virtually unplayable by anyone unwilling to bleed for it). Perhaps only the trumpeter Clifford Brown could match his intense warmth. Bird was first and foremost a bluesman. Unlike, say, John Coltrane, who could outblues anyone but was not a blues musician at heart, Bird's bebop's innovations were all rooted in the Kansas-City blues of his youth.

I included two pieces that Bird aficionados love to hate.

On Lover Man, Bird can barely play, so devastating is his withdrawal from heroin. He misses his intro and barely makes it through. That same night he set fire to his hotel room and ended up spending 6 months at Camarillo State Hospital's psychiatric ward. Bird never forgave his producer for releasing this session. But I agree with Charles Mingus that it is one the most poignant pieces of music ever recorded.

Summertime is part of the "Charlie Parker with Strings" recordings that the producer Norman Granz agreed to put together to commercialize Bird's music. It's the sort of sell-out music that snobs and purists despise. I love it, partly for an anecdotal reason. Bird kept referring to this session as one of the happiest moments of his life. His dream was to be Wynton Marsalis. While he had to endure the "You boys" and enter hotels through the kitchen door, Bird craved respectability. His secret ambition was to go to Paris to study composition. His ultimate fantasy was to have dinner with Stravinsky and Picasso. Playing "With Strings" was the closest he ever got to it. Some of the tunes were recorded at Carnegie Hall. Some of the musicians included members of the Boston Symphony. The whole gig was his idea, not Granz's. It gave Bird his fondest musical memories.

— Bernard Chazelle

Posted at September 17, 2008 06:58 PM

