Here’s Giddins’ description of the landmark recording of “Ko Ko,” an analysis designed to completely exclude anyone curious about Charlie Parker but unfamiliar with music theory:īased on the chords of “Cherokee,” the specialty feature of Parker’s apprenticeship, “Ko Ko” heralded a new point of departure for jazz in the postwar era, an effect paralleling that of Armstrong’s “West End Blues” in 1928. For example, he describes Parker is “autodidactic” instead of “self-taught.” Most of today’s musicians are self-taught, so they would relate to that word only Greenwich Village snobs and English majors who never got over it would refer to Bird as an autodidact. Giddins’ annoying habit of always using the most arcane vocabulary when simple English would do also serves to make Parker more intimidating to the average listener.

Hero to beatniks, an enigma to the masses, Charlie Parker became a cult icon, having passed the ultimate litmus test of artistic credibility by croaking off before his time.īiographies like Gary Giddins’ Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker make things worse by attempting to apply an analytical approach to the understanding of his music. The world was divided between those who dug Bird and those who thought his music ridiculously complex. In doing so, he became an object of worship for the intellectual crowd, a haunting and mysterious figure whose music contained an endlessly impenetrable message with meaning available only to those who claimed the advanced aesthetic ability to understand it.

From the public perspective, he disconnected jazz from danceable rhythms, an unforgivable sin at a time when swing ruled the airwaves and jazz was virtually synonymous with dance. Ian Anderson, “From a Deadbeat to an Old Greaser”Ĭharlie Parker is one of the most divisive and controversial figures in jazz history, and jazz could not have survived without him. Left the young brood to go on living without them. Of the heroes who were too wise for their own good Of Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, René Magritte, to name a few I.Īnd tired young sax-players sold their instruments of torture When bombs were banned every sunday and The Shadows played F. Made of dummies (with no mummies or daddies to reject them). Where blonde assistants fully fashioned a world You won’t remember the long nights-coffee bars and black tights

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