On Wednesday my Jazzology Classic Jazz Artist on Ssassy Radio ssassyradio is Charlie Parker: Biography[edit] Childhood[edit] Charles Parker, Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of Charles and Addie Parker. He attended at Lincoln High School[6] in September 1934, but withdrew in December 1935, just before joining the local musicians union.[why?] Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11, and at age 14 he joined his schools band using a rented school instrument. His father, Charles, was often absent but provided some musical influence; he was a pianist, dancer and singer on the T.O.B.A. circuit. He later became a Pullman waiter or chef on the railways. Parkers mother Addie worked nights at the local Western Union office. His biggest influence at that time was a young trombone player who taught him the basics of improvisation.[citation needed] Early career[edit] In the late 1930s Parker began to practice diligently. During this period he mastered improvisation and developed some of the ideas that led to bebop. In an interview with Paul Desmond, he said that he spent 3 to 4 years practicing up to 15 hours a day.[7] Bands led by Count Basie and Bennie Moten undoubtedly influenced Parker. He played with local bands in jazz clubs around Kansas City, Missouri, where he perfected his technique, with the assistance of Buster Smith, whose dynamic transitions to double and triple time influenced Parkers developing style. In 1938, Parker joined pianist Jay McShanns territory band.[8] The band toured nightclubs and other venues of the southwest, as well as Chicago and New York City.[9][10] Parker made his professional recording debut with McShanns band. As a teenager, Parker developed a morphine addiction while in hospital after an automobile accident, and subsequently became addicted to heroin. He continued using heroin throughout his life, which ultimately contributed to his death. New York City[edit] In 1939 Parker moved to New York City, to pursue a career in music. He held several other jobs as well. He worked for nine dollars a week as a dishwasher at Jimmies Chicken Shack, where pianist Art Tatum performed.[11] In 1942 Parker left McShanns band and played for one year with Earl Hines, whose band included Dizzy Gillespie, who later played with Parker as a duo. Unfortunately, this period is virtually undocumented, due to the strike of 1942–1943 by the American Federation of Musicians, during which time few professional recordings were made. Parker joined a group of young musicians, and played in after-hours clubs in Harlem, such as Clark Monroes Uptown House and Mintons Playhouse. These young iconoclasts included Gillespie, pianist Thelonious Monk, guitarist Charlie Christian, and drummer Kenny Clarke. The beboppers attitude was summed up in a famous quotation attributed to Monk by Mary Lou Williams: We wanted a music that they couldnt play[12] – they referring to white bandleaders who had usurped and profited from swing music.[citation needed] The group played in venues on 52nd Street, including Three Deuces and the Onyx. While in New York City, Parker studied with his music teacher, Maury Deutsch.[citation needed] Bebop[edit] According to an interview Parker gave in the 1950s, one night in 1939 he was playing Cherokee in a jam session with guitarist William Biddy Fleet when he hit upon a method for developing his solos that enabled one of his main musical innovations. He realized that the twelve tones of the chromatic scale can lead melodically to any key, breaking some of the confines of simpler jazz soloing. Early in its development, this new type of jazz was rejected by many of the established, traditional jazz musicians who disdained their younger counterparts. The beboppers responded by calling these traditionalists moldy figs. However, some musicians, such as Coleman Hawkins and Tatum, were more positive about its development, and participated in jam sessions and recording dates in the new approach with its adherents. Because of the two-year Musicians Union ban of all commercial recordings from 1942 to 1944, much of bebops early development was not captured for posterity. As a result, it gained limited radio exposure. Bebop musicians had a difficult time gaining widespread recognition. It was not until 1945, when the recording ban was lifted, that Parkers collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell and others had a substantial effect on the jazz world. (One of their first small-group performances together was rediscovered and issued in 2005: a concert in New Yorks Town Hall on June 22, 1945.) Bebop soon gained wider appeal among musicians and fans alike. On November 26, 1945, Parker led a record date for the Savoy label, marketed as the greatest Jazz session ever. Recording as Charlie Parkers Reboppers, Parker enlisted such sidemen as Gillespie and Miles Davis on trumpet, Curly Russell on bass and Roach on drums. The tracks recorded during this session include Ko-Ko, Billies Bounce and Nows the Time. Shortly afterward, the Parker/Gillespie band traveled to an unsuccessful engagement at Billy Bergs club in Los Angeles. Most of the group returned to New York, but Parker remained in California, cashing in his return ticket to buy heroin. He experienced great hardship in California, eventually being committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital for a six-month period. Addiction[edit] Parkers chronic addiction to heroin caused him to miss gigs and lose work. He frequently resorted to busking on the streets, receiving loans from fellow musicians and admirers, and pawning his saxophones for drug money. Heroin use was rampant in the jazz scene, and the drug could be acquired easily. Although he produced many brilliant recordings during this period, Parkers behavior became increasingly erratic. Heroin was difficult to obtain when he moved to California, where the drug was less abundant, and he began to drink heavily to compensate. A recording for the Dial label from July 29, 1946, provides evidence of his condition. Before this session, Parker drank a quart of whiskey. According to the liner notes of Charlie Parker on Dial Volume 1, Parker missed most of the first two bars of his first chorus on the track, Max Making Wax. When he finally did come in, he swayed wildly and once spun all the way around, away from his microphone. On the next tune, Lover Man, producer Ross Russell physically supported Parker. On Bebop (the final track Parker recorded that evening) he begins a solo with a solid first eight bars; on his second eight bars, however, he begins to struggle, and a desperate Howard McGhee, the trumpeter on this session, shouts, Blow! at him. Charles Mingus considered this version of Lover Man to be among Parkers greatest recordings, despite its flaws.[13] Nevertheless, Parker hated the recording and never forgave Ross Russell for releasing it. He re-recorded the tune in 1951 for Verve. When Parker was released from the hospital, he was clean and healthy. Before leaving California, he recorded Relaxin at Camarillo in reference to his hospital stay. He returned to New York, resumed his addiction to heroin and recorded dozens of sides for the Savoy and Dial labels, which remain some of the high points of his recorded output. Many of these were with his so-called classic quintet including Davis and Roach.[citation needed] Charlie Parker with Strings[edit] A longstanding desire of Parkers was to perform with a string section. He was a keen student of classical music, and contemporaries reported he was most interested in the music and formal innovations of Igor Stravinsky and longed to engage in a project akin to what later became known as Third Stream, a new kind of music, incorporating both jazz and classical elements as opposed to merely incorporating a string section into performance of jazz standards. On November 30, 1949, Norman Granz arranged for Parker to record an album of ballads with a mixed group of jazz and chamber orchestra musicians.[14] Six master takes from this session comprised the album Charlie Parker with Strings: Just Friends, Everything Happens to Me, April in Paris, Summertime, I Didnt Know What Time It Was, and If I Should Lose You. Jazz at Massey Hall[edit] In 1953, Parker performed at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada, joined by Gillespie, Mingus, Powell and Roach. Unfortunately, the concert clashed with a televised heavyweight boxing match between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott, so it was poorly attended. Mingus recorded the concert, resulting in the album Jazz at Massey Hall. At this concert, Parker played a plastic Grafton saxophone.[citation needed] At this point in his career he was experimenting with new sounds and materials. Parker himself explained the purpose of the plastic saxophone in a May 9, 1953 broadcast from Birdland and did so again in a subsequent May 1953 broadcast. Parker is known to have played several saxophones, including the Conn 6M, the Martin Handicraft and Selmer Model 22. He is also known to have performed with a King Super 20 saxophone. Parkers King Super 20 saxophone was made specially for him in 1947.[citation needed] Death[edit] Parkers grave at Lincoln Cemetery Parker died on March 12, 1955, in the suite of his friend and patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City, while watching The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show on television. The official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, but Parker also had an advanced case of cirrhosis and had suffered a heart attack. The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parkers 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age.[15] Since 1950, Parker had been living with Chan Berg, the mother of his son Baird (who lived until 2014)[16] and his daughter Pree (who died as an infant of cystic fibrosis). He considered Chan his wife although he never formally married her, nor did he divorce his previous wife, Doris, whom he had married in 1948. This complicated the settling of Parkers estate and would ultimately serve to frustrate his wish to be quietly interred in New York City. It was well known that Parker never wanted to return to Kansas City, even in death.[citation needed] Parker had told Chan that he did not want to be buried in the city of his birth; that New York was his home. Dizzy Gillespie paid for the funeral arrangements[17] and organized a lying-in-state, a Harlem procession officiated by Congressman and Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., as well as a memorial concert, before Parkers body was flown back to Missouri, in accordance with his mothers wishes. Parkers widow criticized Parker’s family for giving him a Christian funeral even though they knew he was a confirmed atheist.[18] Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Missouri, in a hamlet known as Blue Summit, located close to I-435 and east Truman road. Parkers estate is managed by CMG Worldwide. Music[edit] Parkers style of composition involved interpolation of original melodies over existing jazz forms and standards, a practice known as contrafact and still common in jazz today. Examples include Ornithology, also known as How High The Moon and Yardbird Suite, the vocal version of which is called What Price Love, with lyrics by Parker. The practice was not uncommon prior to bebop, but it became a signature of the movement as artists began to move away from arranging popular standards and toward composing their own material. While tunes such as Nows The Time, Billies Bounce, Au Privave, Barbados, Relaxin at Camarillo, Bloomdido, and Cool Blues were based on conventional twelve-bar blues changes, Parker also created a unique version of the 12-bar blues for tunes such as Blues for Alice, Laird Baird, and Si Si. These unique chords are known popularly as Bird Changes.[citation needed] Like his solos, some of his compositions are characterized by long, complex melodic lines and a minimum of repetition although he did employ the use of repetition in some tunes, most notably Nows The Time. Parker contributed greatly to the modern jazz solo, one in which triplets and pick-up notes were used in unorthodox ways to lead into chord tones, affording the soloist with more freedom to use passing tones, which soloists previously avoided. Parker was admired for his unique style of phrasing and innovative use of rhythm. Via his recordings and the popularity of the posthumously published Charlie Parker Omnibook, Parkers identifiable style dominated jazz for many years to come. Other well-known Parker compositions include Ah-Leu-Cha, Anthropology, co-written with Gillespie, Bird Gets the Worm, Cheryl, Confirmation, Constellation, Donna Lee, Moose the Mooche, and Scrapple from the Apple. Miles Davis once said, You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.[19]
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 15:17:44 +0000
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