"Charlie Parker looked like Buddha," Jack Kerouac declared in a poem about the alto saxophonist who was the single most important figure in the gestation of modern jazz. The beat laureate wasn't hallucinating: Some photos of Parker, showing him with a pot belly, round face, and eyes that Kerouac described (in The Subterraneans) as "separate and interested and humane," do suggest a likeness to one popular image of Buddha. But Kerouac's analogy depended less on Parker's physical appearance than on vibes - an awed perception of his music as godlike in its complexity and power.
Kerouac wasn't alone in ascribing divinity to Parker ("Bird" to initiates). There were hipsters in California who swore that Parker once walked on water. Soon after his death in 1955, at the age of thirty-four (from the cumulative effects of heroin and hard liquor, although labor pneumonia was the official cause), the graffiti "BIRD LIVES" began to appear on New York subway walls. If interpreted to mean only that Parker's music was immortal, the message was indisputable. But who knows what else some of his more frenzied apostles had in mind?
Among fellow musicians, Parker was in the eye of the beholder: What he was like as a person depends on whom you ask. In the recently published Miles: The Autobiography, Miles Davis, who played with Parker as a neophyte trumpeter in the 1940s, portrays him as an id-driven monster willing to pawn a borrowed horn or pocket his sidemen's wages if that was what it took to stay high. According to Davis and others who knew him, Parker was a man of insatiable appetites and few inhibitions.
Yet what sticks in most musicians' minds about Parker is his erudition, not his self-indulgence. The alto saxophonist Frank Morgan, for example, who was still in his teen when he chose Parker as a role model, remembers being as much impressed by Parker's elocution and vocabulary as by his mastery o f his horn. And even Davis marveled at him as "an intellectual [who] read novels, poetry, history, stuff like that."
What of Parker's role in turning others on? For many younger musicians, he was a walking advertisement for a heroin: despite lectures from him to the contrary, they decided that the junk he was pumping into his veins must be the most vital of his creative juices. "You have to realize that [he] wasn't only a great musician," say us tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, one of several acolytes whom Parker tried in vain to discourage from following his path. "He was also a very sick man who was dying from self-abuse and felt guilty about the example he had set for others." But as trumpeter (and nonuser) Art Farmer remarks, "Telling people to do as I say, not as I do, is never very effective advice."
Myth and Supposition
Parker is such a creature of myth and supposition that it would be difficult to imagine that he ever really existed were it not for the hard evidence of his recordings - and even these leave gaps. Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and a handful of others planted the seeds of bebop (the name given their music, in onomatopoeic imitation of its quick, evenly accented quarter notes) in big bands during the waning days of the swing era. But due to a two-year musicians' union ban on studio recordings beginning in 1942, our knowledge of bebop's beginnings are largely based on hear say. And most of the concert
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