Bird Still Sounds Like Tomorrow

Remembering Charlie Parker on the 106th anniversary of his birth.

There are musicians who belong unmistakably to their time.

You hear a few measures and immediately know where you are.

The clothes change, recording technology changes, and styles change. Eventually the music becomes a kind of beautiful historical document—something we admire partly because it tells us what another age sounded like.

And then there is Charlie Parker.

Bird.

Charlie Parker would have turned 106 years old on August 29.

He has been dead for seventy-one years.

And somehow, he still sounds like tomorrow.

That is the thing about Parker that continues to astonish me. Put on “Ko-Ko,” “Confirmation,” “Ornithology,” or “Parker’s Mood” and try to convince yourself that you are listening to a musician whose primary body of work was recorded before most Americans owned a television.

It is almost impossible.

The notes move too quickly, the harmonic mind behind them is too restless, and the rhythmic displacement is too alive.

There are ideas inside Charlie Parker solos that musicians are still unpacking.

It would be easy simply to say that Parker, along with Dizzy Gillespie and the other musicians gathering in places like Minton’s Playhouse in New York, helped create bebop.

That is certainly true.

But even calling Charlie Parker one of the founders of bebop somehow feels insufficient.

Bird did not simply help create a style.

He helped create a new musical language.

He Was Already Somewhere Else

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to hear Charlie Parker for the first time in the 1940s.

Not after seventy years of musicians absorbing his vocabulary, not after Miles Davis or John Coltrane.

Not after hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz, fusion, or generations of conservatory-trained players learning bebop scales and transcribing Parker solos.

Imagine hearing it before you knew what it was.

Imagine hearing someone seemingly disregard the edges of the musical map and then discovering that he was not disregarding them at all.

He simply understood the map so completely that he knew how to draw roads nobody else had noticed.

That is the distinction.

Parker’s playing could sound reckless.

It was anything but.

This was not a man throwing notes against chord changes and hoping some of them stuck.

Charlie Parker knew exactly what he was doing.

He was the consummate musician’s musician.

And I think that part of his story matters because we sometimes do a disservice to extraordinarily gifted people by explaining everything with one word:

Genius.

Genius makes it sound effortless.

Bird was gifted beyond measure.

But Bird also worked.

It Wasn’t Magic

In a famous 1954 interview with fellow alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, Parker talked about periods when he practiced as much as eleven to fifteen hours a day.

Eleven to fifteen hours.

Think about that for a moment.

He woodshedded, worked through tunes, studied harmony, and listened.

He learned his instrument so thoroughly that eventually the horn seemed less like an object he was playing and more like an extension of whatever was happening inside his mind.

That changes the way I hear him.

Those impossible streams of eighth notes were not tricks.

That freedom had been purchased with discipline.

That is true of nearly every great musician I have ever encountered. Eventually the technique becomes so deeply embedded that the listener stops hearing the labor.

We simply hear freedom.

But freedom came after scales, wrong notes, embarrassment, and repetition.

After hours spent alone with the instrument when nobody was applauding.

There is something almost vocational about that.

A gift may be given.

Craft has to be built.

Perhaps that is one reason stories about great musicians have always fascinated me. Music has an almost mysterious ability to connect discipline and freedom, memory and imagination.

I have written about something similar in “To Drink and Dance With One Hand Free,” where an old family memory, a dance and a familiar musical world suddenly brought generations together again.

Then Stravinsky Walked Into Birdland

Perhaps my favorite Charlie Parker story involves another musical revolutionary.

Igor Stravinsky.

That pairing alone makes me smile.

The Russian composer who had helped detonate the twentieth-century musical world with The Rite of Spring sitting in Birdland listening to the man who was busy detonating jazz.

One night in 1951, Stravinsky reportedly came into Birdland to hear Parker.

Trumpeter Red Rodney noticed him and made sure Bird knew who was sitting in the audience.

Parker did not make a speech.

He did not walk over and ceremoniously shake Stravinsky’s hand, he did something much better.

He called “Ko-Ko.”

And not leisurely.

“Ko-Ko” was already one of Parker’s most ferocious vehicles.

Bird launched into it.

Then, during his improvisation, Parker casually dropped a musical quotation from Stravinsky’s Firebird into his solo.

Not as some clumsy quotation.

Not as a musical joke stapled onto the outside.

He placed Stravinsky inside Parker.

And kept going.

Stravinsky understood immediately.

According to the wonderful story that has been passed down from that evening, the great composer became so excited that he pounded his glass against the table and sent his drink spilling onto the people nearby.

I love that story.

One musical genius recognized by another.

No introduction necessary.

No lecture, no explanation.

Bird essentially winked at Stravinsky in Stravinsky’s own musical language.

And Stravinsky got the joke.

That takes more than fast fingers.

That takes knowledge.

Bird Heard Everything

Parker’s musical world was much larger than jazz.

He listened seriously to Stravinsky and Bartók, knew the concert repertoire, and was interested in twentieth-century classical music. Then he was able to carry the ideas from that world around in his head right alongside the blues, standards, Kansas City swing and the rapidly evolving harmonic vocabulary of bebop.

That may be one reason Parker still sounds so modern.

He was never particularly interested in staying inside somebody else’s category.

Jazz over here.

Classical music over there.

Old music here.

New music there.

Bird heard music.

And then everything he heard became material.

That kind of listening has always fascinated me.

Music has this strange ability to collapse time. A melody written decades—or centuries—ago suddenly becomes present again the moment someone genuinely listens to it.

Charlie Parker accomplished another version of the same miracle.

He collapsed musical history.

You can hear the blues behind him, you can hear Kansas City, Lester Young, and Stravinsky.

And if you listen from the other direction, you can hear enormous stretches of the next seventy years waiting inside him.

That is one of the reasons I keep returning to music in these reflections. Music is rarely just sound. It carries memory, history, place and people with it. If you enjoy reflections where those worlds meet, you can find more on the Food for the Way blog.

Continue the Journey

If these reflections on music, memory, faith, family and the people who leave something behind speak to you, I would love to have you walk a little farther with me.

Thirty-Four Years

And then there is the painful part.

Charlie Parker did not live to become an old master.

He did not make it to fifty.

Or forty.

He did not even make it to thirty-five.

When Parker died on March 12, 1955, he was only 34 years old.

Thirty-four.

There is something almost impossible about that number when you consider the amount of music we associate with him.

He had lived hard.

Heroin addiction followed him through much of his adult life. So did heavy drinking, physical illness, emotional turmoil and the exhausting instability that accompanied them.

There is always a temptation when writing about artists like Parker to romanticize that part.

The tortured genius.

The flame that burned so brightly it simply had to burn itself out.

I don’t believe that.

The drugs did not make Charlie Parker a genius.

The alcohol did not teach him harmony.

Addiction did not create bebop.

If anything, those things stole years of music the world might otherwise have heard.

His genius survived despite them.

The tragedy is not that Parker had to destroy himself in order to create his music.

The tragedy is that a man capable of creating that music could not escape what was destroying him.

Still, it is almost impossible to comprehend how much musical life he compressed into those thirty-four years.

By the time most people are figuring out what they want to become, Charlie Parker had helped reinvent an art form.

Seventy-One Years Later

Charlie Parker has now been gone for seventy-one years.

Had he lived, he would be 106.

And I genuinely believe that if some impossible miracle placed Bird on a bandstand tonight—with a good rhythm section behind him, an alto in his hands and a couple of choruses to figure out what everyone was doing—he would still sound progressive.

Maybe astonishingly so.

Because being modern is not really about technology.

It is not about fashion.

It is not even about chronology.

Sometimes being modern means having a mind that sees possibilities before the rest of us have developed the vocabulary to describe them.

Bird had that kind of mind.

There is another thought I have returned to often since writing “One More Morning: Reflections on Survival, Faith, and Grace.”

None of us knows how many pages we are going to get.

Charlie Parker received far fewer than anyone would have wished.

But good Lord, what he wrote on them.

Maybe that is part of what Bird can still teach those of us who are musicians—and those of us who are not.

Know your craft.

Stay curious.

Listen outside the little boundaries people construct around you.

Do the work when nobody is watching.

Never assume you have heard everything there is to hear.

And when someone hands you whatever gift happens to be yours, don’t merely possess it.

Develop it.

Push it.

Find out where it can go.

Charlie Parker had only thirty-four years.

Yet 106 years after his birth, musicians are still chasing him.

Bird is still ahead.

And somehow, after all this time, he still sounds like tomorrow.

Learn More About Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker left an extraordinary musical legacy despite a life that lasted only thirty-four years. If you would like to hear more of Bird’s story, explore his music, or see some of the objects and photographs that survive from his career, these are excellent places to continue:

• Smithsonian — Charlie Parker’s Alto Saxophone
  The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture preserves one of Parker’s own King Super 20 alto saxophones, dating from around 1947. It is a remarkable physical connection to the musician whose sound helped redefine modern jazz.
• Smithsonian Magazine — The Long Journey of Charlie Parker’s Saxophone
  A fascinating look at Parker’s instrument, its history, and the importance of the unmistakable sound Bird created during the formative years of bebop.
• WRTI/NPR — The Birth of Bird
  This account of Parker’s development as a young musician includes his own recollection of practicing as much as eleven to fifteen hours a day. It is a wonderful reminder that behind Bird’s seemingly effortless improvisational freedom were years of intense study and work.
• Library of Congress — William P. Gottlieb Jazz Photography Collection
  Explore William P. Gottlieb’s extraordinary photographs from the golden age of jazz. The collection includes historic images of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and many of the musicians who shaped American jazz.
• Library of Congress — Gerry Mulligan Remembers Charlie Parker
  One musician remembering another. Gerry Mulligan describes the impact Parker had on him and recalls how astonishingly different Bird sounded when those early records first appeared. It provides a particularly valuable musician’s perspective on just how revolutionary Parker really was.
• Library of Congress — Charlie Parker at Carnegie Hall, 1947
  View William P. Gottlieb’s iconic 1947 portrait of Charlie Parker at Carnegie Hall. Gottlieb’s jazz photographs were dedicated to the public domain and provide one of the finest visual records we have of Bird and his musical world.

Seventy-one years after his death, there is still more to discover in Bird’s music. Perhaps that is the greatest testimony to how far ahead Charlie Parker really was.

More From Food for the Way

If you enjoyed this reflection, you may also enjoy:

• To Drink and Dance With One Hand Free — a reflection on music, family memory, Czech heritage and the strange way a song can collapse the distance between generations.
• One More Morning: Reflections on Survival, Faith, and Grace — a reflection on survival, mortality and what it means to realize that none of us knows how many pages remain.
• Read More Food for the Way Reflections — reflections on faith, family, music, memory, Czech heritage, history and the places where all of them meet.

Continue Walking With Me

Food for the Way is about the things that remain with us: faith, family, music, memory, history, suffering, grace and the people whose voices somehow keep speaking long after they are gone.

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