Bird Watching
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Bird Watching Bob Reisner's recent book, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (Citadel, 256 pp., $4.95), presents important biographical documents-recollections,...
...he knew he was a genius with nowhere to go...
...Parker's personality was a seesaw weighted on one end by colossal pride and on the other by profound selfhatred...
...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Bird Watching Bob Reisner's recent book, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (Citadel, 256 pp., $4.95), presents important biographical documents-recollections, letters, medical reports-in the form of an unassembled jig-saw puzzle...
...There is a sense of his being totally possessedpicked up and hurled about by the force of his own inspiration...
...Unlike the deliberate artist who changes his material constantly and devises new styles and techniques to render each new theme, the improviser tells the same story over and over again, altering it in various ways to accommodate the inspiration and the insight of the moment...
...Bird himself complained that his greatest music, the music he created in hundreds of sessions in clubs, at dances, or in private parties, had never been waxed...
...He filed his reports alphabetically, and, when the time came to do the book, he simply hauled the stuff out and sent it to the printer...
...The power, the virtuosity was his to the end...
...He abraded his guts into dangerous peptic ulcers, he suffered agonies of despair, he attempted suicide several times...
...Soon after these were recorded, beginning about 1950, Bird began to decline musically as well as emotionally...
...Until quite recently only those lucky few who were hip to the jazz scene of the late '40s had any real idea of what Bird sounded like when he expressed himself freely, heedless of the performance values stressed in the recording studio...
...He did experiment with concertolike treatments of pop tunes, using a string and woodwind orchestra, but this was a musical blunder strongly motivated by a naive craving for extra-musical status...
...It was at this time, too, that Parker talked so much about studying composition and going on to greater things than jazz...
...The Jazz Cool discs present Parker at the height of his powers, circa 1948, with a backing that includes most of the foremost boppers of the School Parker...
...At best he could effect a momentary escape through the only avenue that was always open and always safe-music...
...Like many psychopaths, Bird was extremely intelligent...
...other times, he would throw his weight around like a musical bully, playing coarsely, aggressively, crowding his side-men to the ropes in combative four-bar exchanges...
...Never have we heard Bird so powerful, so free, so daringly open...
...Sometimes, of course, he ran up against guys who weren't afraid of him...
...probably he needed a new medium, a new synthesis...
...In any case, it was certainly much too late for Parker to begin anew...
...he understood his condition perfectly...
...Everybody from the Baroness de Koenigswarter down to the lowliest hackie divined an essential goodness in Parker, and they vainly struggled to save him...
...The geniuses of popular music never seem to realize that the only way for them to rise is to dig deeper into their native soil...
...On one page, there is a Parker who was generous to a fault, giving his last dollar to an indigent musician, playing all night in a bar for drinks, or shoving one of his women into the arms of a startled but eternally grateful friend...
...I suspect he had gone as far as he could go with the jazz of that period...
...He liked to play Big Daddy, handing out advice, helping young performers gain confidence, and shedding a genial radiance of joi de vivre over the dismal jazz scene...
...Studying the puzzle more closely, however, some unifying patterns emerge...
...Now the reader is left with the job of putting some 80-odd pieces together to make a composite picture of America's greatest jazz musician...
...This material has now been made available in a series of recordings that are the best as well as the most authentic evidence of the genius of Charlie Parker...
...He used the familiar one-two of the paranoid personality: First, the soft-sell, all butter and bull...
...It is terrible to think that this man whose only escape from a life of emotional squalor was through his art found himself at last blocked even there...
...Bird had inside him a bottomless well of frustration, particularly oral frustration, the kind that leads to over-eating, alcholism, drug addiction...
...But generally, by mixing up his pitches-slow curves and hot ones down the middle-Bird put everyone away...
...by slipping them over the familiar material like colored glasses, he profoundly altered the character of this material...
...He would have died long before his 35th year if he had not been surrounded by loving and faithful people who pulled him out of jams, loaned him money, gave him food and shelter, and held back the swarm of dope peddlers who descended on him like flies on a rotten carcass...
...For the first time on records, for example, we hear Bird playing with Fats Navarro, the superb trumpet man whom Ross Russell describes as being closer to Bird on the horn than either Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis...
...In his way, he was repeating the same futile pattern that George Gershwin fell into in his last years...
...Throughout the period of his greatest creativity, from 1945-50, Parker had substantially the same book, the same traditional form, and the same individual technique...
...His oft-quoted statement about the relation of art to experience has the familiar Romantic ring: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom...
...After his 30th year, Bird began to deteriorate...
...But, man, there's no boundary line to art...
...He was luckier than he knew: Some of those faithful disciples who trailed after him wherever he went succeeded in capturing on discs a few of his most inspired sessions...
...He was infinitely resourceful in varying the details and in discovering new connections in the material, but the basic elements never changed...
...He knew he was killing himself with drugs and liquor...
...He was like Beethoven in his passionate commitment to naked self-expression...
...The relation between Parker's violent and erratic personality and his extraordinary improvisational art is close and obviously significant...
...he knew the answers to all the questions he kept asking other people...
...Sometimes Bird would spend a whole evening playing everything in a cool, detached style full of wistful delicacy...
...They teach you there's a boundary line to music...
...Particularly important are the three volumes of Charlie Parker in Great Historical Recordings (Le Jazz Cool 101, 102, 103) and Bird Is Free (Carlton 401...
...By turns vulgar and courtly, arrogant and self-abasing, gentle and cruel, Bird seems consistent only in his inconsistency...
...For sheer self-assertion nothing can compare with the Lester Leaps In-10 choruses at machine-gun tempo, all of them probably directed at the great tenor man's head...
...When things were going well, when he had his daily supplies of junk, lush, willing white girls, and submissive colleagues, Bird could be generous, amiable, even charming...
...But his knowledge did him no good: He could never transcend the terms established for his life by the nature of his personality...
...Parker's moods were really the content of his art, the categories of his mind...
...but having destroyed his own soul, he lost his ability to reach the souls of others...
...If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn...
...One striking side-effect of Reisner's mindless method is the light it throws on the bizarre inconsistency of Parker's behavior...
...Like the old Greek modes or the Indian ragas, his moods were highly charged with experiential significance...
...To those who have for years listened to Parker's numerous and brilliant studio recordings, these on-the-gig recordings will come as something of a shock...
...As Ross Russell put it, "Bird was a guy who hung everybody up...
...Even before his death in 1955, Bird was dead at the core...
...if that failed, he came in hard and low with the muscle...
...No wonder he wanted to drink iodine and die...
...His friends were either flunkies, victims, or willing martyrs...
...Equally astonishing is the depth and solidity of his moods: the tragic, the ebullient, the resigned, the hostile-aggressive...
...Charlie Mingus was as big as a pro tackle, so Bird decided to pay him after all...
...But when things took a turn for the worse, when the pusher failed to show, when the management demanded its due, or some little squirt in another band tried to show him up, the veneer of Parker's humanity would peel off, revealing the ugly personality structure so forcibly described by the Bellevue psychiatrists: "A hostile, evasive personality with manifestations of primitive and sexual fantasies associated with hostility and gross evidence of paranoid thinking...
...The repetition of the word "hostile" is significant...
...Turn the page, though, and you see Yardbird through another pair of eyes: Here is Parker coolly taking the last eight cents from the outstretched palm of an impoverished jazzman, breaking into a friend's dressing room to steal his horn, or bullying the boys in his band out of their weekly wages...
...Don Byas had his own knife, so Bird put his away...
...Probably no other man in the history of American music so fully expressed his personality in his art as did Charlie Parker...
...the anger he could not release he was forced to absorb into his own system...
...Unfortunately, Reisner never got beyond the stage of primitive acquisition...
...The original idea was sound: tape-recorded interviews with everyone who knew Bird, from his mother to his favorite cab driver...
...And many of the fluctuations in his behavior were due to his inability to handle momentary crosses or frustrations...
...What did change from one night to the next, even from one set to the next, was his mood...
...His last batch of studio records, made in 1953, show him a hollow colossus standing astride the world of jazz...
...In his two recorded versions of Lover Man, for example, the notes are practically the same, yet the meanings are utterly different...
...Since he could never attain satisfaction of his Gargantuan appetites and demands, he was often a desperately angry man, conscious of his anger, fearful of its consequences, and therefore duplicitous and shifty in his dealings with people...
Vol. 45 • November 1962 • No. 24
