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CHARLIE PARKER/ 2012
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 3 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0268 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you."
- Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker -
Charles Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), also known as Bird or Yardbird,[2] was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Charlie Parker is widely considered one of the most influential jazz musicians of his time.[3] He acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career[4] and the shortened form, "Bird", continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology", "Bird Gets the Worm" and "Bird of Paradise."
Parker was a leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuoso technique, and improvisation. His innovative approach to music exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. Parker introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas, including rapidly passing chords, new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber. Many Parker recordings demonstrate virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines, fusing jazz with other musical genres, including blues, Latin and classical.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later, the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than an entertainer.
Biography -
Childhood:
Charlie Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of Charles and Addie Parker. Charlie attended Lincoln High School.[5] He enrolled in September 1934 and withdrew in December 1935, just before joining the local Musicians Union.
Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11, and at age 14 joined his school's 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. Parker's mother Addie worked nights at the local Western Union. His biggest influence at that time was a young trombone player who taught him the basics of improvisation[citation needed].
Early career:
In the late thirties 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 3–4 years practicing up to 15 hours a day.[6]
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 Parker's developing style.
In 1938, Parker joined pianist Jay McShann's territory band.[7] The band toured nightclubs and other venues of the southwest, as well as Chicago and New York City.[8][9] Parker made his professional recording debut with McShann's band.
As a teenager, Parker developed a morphine addiction while in the 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:
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 Jimmie's Chicken Shack, where pianist Art Tatum performed[citation needed]
In 1942 Parker left McShann's band and played with Earl Hines for one year, whose band included Dizzy Gillespie, who later played with Parker as a duo. Unfortunately, this period is virtually undocumented, due to the the strike of 1942–1943 by the American Federation of Musicians, during which time few recordings were made. Parker joined a group of young musicians, and played in after-hours clubs in Harlem, such as Clark Monroe's Uptown House and Minton's 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 couldn't play"[10] – "they" being the white bandleaders who had usurped and profited from swing music. 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.
Bebop:
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 called these traditionalists "moldy figs". However, some musicians, such as Coleman Hawkins and Benny Goodman, 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 bebop's 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 Parker's collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell and others had a substantial effect on the jazz world. One of their first (and greatest) small-group performances together was rediscovered and issued in 2005: a concert in New York's 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." The tracks recorded during this session include "Ko-Ko" and "Now's the Time".
Shortly afterwards, the Parker/Gillespie band traveled to an unsuccessful engagement at Billy Berg's 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:
Parker's 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, Parker's behavior became increasingly erratic. Heroin was difficult to obtain when he moved to California, where the drug was less abundant, and Parker began to drink heavily to compensate for it. A recording for the Dial label from July 29, 1946, provides evidence of his condition. Prior to 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, Parker begins to struggle, and a desperate Howard McGhee, the trumpeter on this session, shouts, "Blow!" at Parker. Charles Mingus considered this version of "Lover Man" to be among Parker's greatest recordings despite its flaws.[11] Nevertheless, Parker hated the recording and never forgave Ross Russell for releasing it. He re-recorded the tune in 1951 for Verve.
When he was released from the hospital, Parker was clean and healthy, and proceeded to do some of the best playing and recording of his career. 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 trumpeter Miles Davis and drummer Max Roach.
Charlie Parker with strings:
A longstanding desire of Parker's 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 Music, 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.[12] Six master takes from this session comprised the album Charlie Parker with Strings: "Just Friends", "Everything Happens to Me", "April in Paris", "Summertime", "I Didn't Know What Time It Was", and "If I Should Lose You". The sound of these recordings is rare in Parker's catalog. Parker's improvisations are, in comparison to his usual work, more distilled and economical. His tone is darker and softer than on his small-group recordings, and the majority of his lines are beautiful embellishments on the original melodies rather than harmonically based improvisations. These are among the few recordings Parker made during a brief period when he was able to control his heroin habit, and his sobriety and clarity of mind are evident in his playing. Parker stated that, of his own records, Bird With Strings was his favorite. Although using classical music instrumentation with jazz musicians was not entirely original, this was the first major work where a composer of bebop was matched with a string orchestra.
Some fans[who?] thought this record was a sellout and a pandering to popular tastes. It is now seen[by whom?] to have been artistically as well as commercially successful. While Charlie Parker with Strings sold better than his other releases, Parker's version of "Just Friends" is regarded[by whom?] as one of his best performances. In an interview, Parker said he considered it to be his best recording to that date.[citation needed]
Jazz at Massey Hall:
In 1953, Parker performed at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada, joined by Gillespie, Mingus, Bud Powell and Max Roach. Unfortunately, the concert clashed with a televised heavyweight boxing match between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott, so was poorly attended. Mingus recorded the concert, resulting in the album Jazz at Massey Hall. At this concert, he 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 does so again in subsequent May 1953 broadcast.[citation needed]
Parker is known to have played several saxophones, including the Conn 6M, The Martin Handicraft and Selmer Model 22. Parker is also known to have performed with a King "Super 20" saxophone. Parker's King Super 20 saxophone was made specially for him in 1947.
Death:
Parker died 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 Parker's 34-year-old body to be between 50 or 60 years of age.[13]
It was well known that Parker never wanted to return to Kansas City, even in death.[citation needed] Parker had told his partner, Chan, that he did not want to be buried in the city of his birth; that New York was his home. However, he had not divorced his wife, Doris, nor had he married Chan. This complicated the settling of Parker's inheritance and would ultimately serve to frustrate his wish to be quietly interred in his adopted hometown. Dizzy Gillespie was able to pay for the funeral arrangements[14] and organized a lying-in-state, a Harlem procession officiated by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., as well as a memorial concert, before Parker's body was flown back to Missouri, in accordance with his mother's wishes. Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Missouri, in an hamlet known as Blue Summit.
Parker's estate is managed by CMG Worldwide.
Music:
Parker's style of composition involved interpolation of original melodies over pre-existing jazz forms and standards, a practice still common in jazz today. Examples include "Ornithology" ("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; however, it became a signature of the movement as artists began to move away from arranging popular standards and compose their own material.
While tunes such as "Now's The Time", "Billie's Bounce", and "Cool Blues" were based on conventional 12-bar blues changes, Parker also created a unique version of the 12-bar blues for his tune "Blues for Alice". 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 "Now's 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, Parker's uniquely identifiable style dominated jazz for many years to come.
Notes:
2. ^ Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner
3. ^ Salamone, Frank A. (2009). The Culture of Jazz: Jazz as Critical Culture. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. p. 47. ISBN 0-7618-4135-0.
4. ^ "there are many contradictory stories of the name's origin". Birdlives.co.uk. Retrieved March 10, 2011.
5. ^ Woideck, Carl (October 1998). Charlie Parker: His Music and Life. Michigan American Music Series. University of Michigan Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0472085552. "In Lincoln High School he was the pride of his teachers..."
6. ^ "Paul Desmond interviews Charlie Parker". puredesmond.ca. Retrieved March 1, 2011.
7. ^ Woideck, Carl (October 1998). Charlie Parker: His Music and Life. Michigan American Music Series. University of Michigan Press. p. 18. ISBN 978-0472085552.
8. ^ "pbs.org". pbs.org. Retrieved March 10, 2011.
9. ^ amb.cult.bg[dead link]
10. ^ Blakely, Johanna (April 2010). Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture (TEDxUSC 2010). TEDTalks. Event occurs at 7:45–8:00. Retrieved December 3, 2010.
11. ^ Gitler, Ira (2001). The Masters of Bebop: A Listener's Guide. Da Capo Press. p. 33. ISBN 0306810093. "Charles Mingus once chose it when asked to name his favorite Parker recordings. 'I like all,' he said, 'none more than the other, but I'd have to pick Lover Man for the feeling he had then and his ability to express that feeling.'"
12. ^ Ross Russell Bird Lives! The High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, 1973, New York: Charterhouse, p273. ISBN 0-306-80679-7
13. ^ Reisner, Robert, ed. (1977). Bird: the Legend of Charlie Parker. New York: Da Capo Press. p. 133.
14. ^ "Ken Burns interviews Chan Parker" (PDF). Retrieved March 10, 2011.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Parker
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