Charlie Yardbird Parker, surrounded by myth, abused when alive as well as after his death, changed everything when it comes to jazz. Louis Armstrong once said that Charlie Parker played “Chinese jazz.” Carl Woideck claims that Parker’s improvisations consists of little bits of licks strung together.
Mostly I dislike the views of jazz critics and college music professors. Louis Armstrong I can forgive since Parker’s music was two generations removed from the music Armstrong helped to shape. Most jazz educators come from a classical music background who took a few courses in college on jazz and then try to teach others their own misconceptions and erroneous thinking. To understand what Charlie Parker represented one needs to understand that there is more than one form of jazz. Some of the main forms are Dixieland, Swing, Be- bop (an unfortunate moniker for something so sophisticated), Hard bop, and Fusion. Swing jazz was basically dance music – the pop music of its day. It was something people danced to rather than listened to as serious music. Charlie Parker changed that conception of jazz completely moving it into the realm of serious music that one would sit down and listen to. For this alone all modern jazz musicians owe Parker a great deal whether they care to admit or not and some do not even though it is like denying that the sun rises in the morning and sets at night.
Charlie Parker was what I think of as an anti-hero, not exactly an angel whose eccentric behavior was mythologized, aggrandized, and exaggerated yet was due to the unhappy fact of his drug addiction reportedly which came about after becoming addicted to morphine in a hospital following an auto accident though drug use by jazz musicians was hardly a novelty. Parker – wrongly in my opinion— blamed himself for influencing other jazz musicians into becoming heroin addicts. One only need consider that drug abuse in America crosses all social levels and creeds and had done so before Parker was born. Though not exactly an angel and altogether only human Parker was always willing to help other musicians with their music. If Parker did some unsavory things it wasn’t any different from any other heroin addict that ever was. What remains as astonishing is that Parker could play so brilliantly despite his addiction rather than because of it. The fact is drug usage inhibits one’s playing ability rather than adds to it. One can only wonder how much better Parker’s music would have been without the drugs and alcohol abuse. It is almost certain that he would have lived a much longer life without the drugs and booze at any rate.
Still, there is one thing critics and college professors do get correct and that is that Charlie Parker was a phenomenal jazz musician who had mastered every aspect of improvising to the point of where there really was nobody before or after Parker that could play so well or had mastered all the aspects of improvising in such a brilliant and inspiring manner. Parker was truly one of a kind that likely only occurs once in the entire history of western music.
Though I don’t agree with some of Carl Woideck’s analysis of Parker’s music he has written what is likely the most honest and well thought out biography of Charlie Parker though certainly not as entertaining as the biographies—which seem to either romanticize and exaggerate – that have been written prior so his book is worth reading for that aspect alone. I also suspect that Woideck’s observations on Parker’s music are subject to the fact that he must rely on only what has been recorded which is but a fraction of Parker’s music as well as Woideck’s own perceptions on how jazz is played which is only one man’s opinion and certainly doesn’t encompass the views of all jazz musicians because in the end there is more than one way of approaching the analyzing of the technical aspects of jazz improvisation. And let’s face it, back in the day jazz musicians didn’t go to college to learn their art. Woideck’s biggest mistake is he confuses musical devices with licks. A lick is a memorized fragment of melody, basically a cop-out by the musician using it while a musical device is a method for accomplishing something in a musical manner such as the use of surrounds which are useful for changing the direction of a melodic line of which Parker used an interesting variation and of which Woideck mistakenly calls a small fragment of melody.
While there is little doubt that Parker did use licks especially in the last years of his life it needs to be said that all musicians have them and use them. There are levels of musicianship when it comes to improvising and to become even just say competent takes a great deal of work. To take it to the heights that Parker achieved requires even more work and it isn’t sustainable like turning on a water faucet. Nobody is capable of “making history” every time they pick up a horn and there are only so many times that one is inspired to play at their absolute best when creating an improvised solo. It’s like requiring an artist to produce a masterpiece for every painting or sculpture created. And in fact, Parker was likely getting tired of the music he helped create and had expressed interest in studying composition in Europe.
The fact remains that Charlie Parker was a true original and though I notice some try to attribute the creation of what is (sadly) called Be-bop to some of his contemporaries this just isn’t true and is a disservice to Parker. And despite Parker’s usage of extended chord tones Parker was essentially and irrevocably steeped in what is called the blues, and his main contribution to changing jazz (another unhappy term derived from the word jizz since early jazz was often played in what were called jizz houses or whore houses) was the way he phrased his music and his belief that jazz should be played “cleanly” without heavy vibrato or imitations of animal sounds, etc. that were popular in early swing music. It was also Parker’s incredible technique that forever changed the face of jazz. In the end Parker did it first despite some of the absurd claims of jazz historians.
Listen to Paul Desmond interviewing Charlie Parker where he explains his approach to jazz:
