This Day in Jazz History (‘Bird’ Parker Loses Velocity)

March 12, 1955—The drug-related death of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker at age 34 did more than just highlight how many in the postwar jazz community were victimized by substance abuse. It also cut short the life of an extraordinary figure who, by rights, should have gone on influencing musicians of all kinds for at least another generation.

Parker’s friend and patron, Nica de Koenigswarter, discovered his body slumped over in an easy chair in front of the TV set in her New York City home. What stunned me when I first heard about it—and, I bet, anyone else with no firsthand knowledge of drugs—was that the coroner had originally believed the deceased to be at least two decades older than his real age.

One not surprised was biographer Stanley Crouch, who, in profiling Parker decades after his death in Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2006), noted that his musical gifts were “laid low by his inability to stop fatally polluting and tampering with the flesh and blood source of his energy, with his own body.”

It was an all-too-common phenomenon in the jazz world of the Forties and Fifties. In a blog post for the British Psychological Society, Christian Jarrett cites a 1957 survey by critic Nat Hentoff which found that, among more than 400 New York City jazz musicians, more than half had tried heroin, with 16 percent admitting to regular use. The list here of those whose lives would be terribly disrupted by drugs, such as Parker, is long and, I would have to say, incomplete: not just Parker but also his protégé, Miles Davis (whom I wrote about in a prior post), Billie Holliday, Stan Getz, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Chet Baker, and Anita O’Day.

Crouch used another word, “velocity,” to describe the life-altering events crammed into Parker’s life between ages 16 and 20. But that term applies equally well to the creativity of the musician. “Bird” was a most appropriate nickname for him, because of the manner in which his imagination took flight.

I just spoke of my surprise over how rapidly his body aged, but I am perhaps even more astounded by how quickly he matured in mastering his instrument—from a teenager who was often laughed at or pitied as he first fumbled around, to a musician who, a mere decade later, set the standard in helping to pioneer the bebop movement. Cootie Williams of Duke Ellington's band once said, "Every instrument in the band tried to copy Charlie Parker, and in the history of jazz there had never been one man who influenced all the instruments."

Critic Gary Giddins may have summed up the towering achievement of Parker’s life better than anyone in his anthology, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998): “Parker altered the rhythmic and harmonic currents of music, and he produced a body of melodies—or more to the point, a way of melodic thinking—that became closely identified with the idea of jazz as a per­sonal and intellectual modern music.”

Quote of the Day (Dexter Gordon, on Life as a Jazz Expat)

“Since I've been over here [Denmark], I've felt that I could breathe, and just be more or less a human being, without being white or black…I’ve played for months on end at the Montmartre in Copenhagen…now I've never in my life played three or four months continually at a place in the U.S. The opportunity to work regularly in the same spot gives you the kind of feeling you need to stretch out, relax, and at the same time develop musically without having those job-to-job worries hanging over your head.”—Tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, from an interview in Downbeat, quoted in Dan Morgenstern, Living With Jazz: A Reader, edited by Sheldon Meyer (2004)

Today would have been the 90^th birthday of Dexter Gordon. Even by osmosis, he seemed linked to the world of jazz, as his father was a Los Angeles-based physician to the likes of Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington. He was known first as a pioneer translator of the bebop style to the tenor sax, then, in his 60s, as ill health began to overcome him, as an actor, with an Oscar-nominated turn as musician Dale Turner in Round Midnight (1986).

The character might have been an amalgam of real-life prototypes Lester Young and Bud Powell, but Gordon, to an extraordinary degree, infused his own soulfulness and magnificent battered presence into the part. It wasn’t only that Turner’s struggle with substance abuse mirrored his own, but also that the tenor saxman identified with the character. After all, as the above quote makes clear, Gordon, like Turner, felt a dignity abroad that, as an African-American and working jazz musician, he could not achieve for years on his native ground.

(Photo of Dexter Gordon in Amsterdam in 1980, taken by Albert Kok.)

This Day in Jazz History (Thelonious Monk, Bebop Pioneer, Dies)

February 17, 1982— After years of progressive withdrawal— first from recordings, then from concerts, then from the company of fellow jazzmen— pianist-composer Thelonious Monk died at age 64 in Englewood, NJ, from complications of a stroke. Once the subject of a Time Magazine cover story— one of only four jazz musicians accorded that honor at the time— he spent his last years in seclusion at the Weehawken, NJ home of longtime patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.

The life and work of the composer of such standards as “Round Midnight” and “Straight, No Chaser” fascinates me for reasons extending beyond the off-center songs that amazed and perplexed jazz aficionados in the postwar years.

There was, for instance, his association with Bergen County, NJ, where I live. Not only did he die in my hometown, but one of his most fascinating tunes (one that has ended up on my iPod), the May 1954 recording “Hackensack,” from his Criss-Cross LP, takes its name from the location of his studio (maintained by engineer Rudy Van Gelder, a kind of Zelig who always seemed to be around every major jazz recording). On his blog, recording artist and Grammy-winning producer Joe Henry hailed “Hackensack” for “its playful melody, its willful dissonance, and its swinging take on the blues.”

Van Gelder would go on to establish a new, state-of-the-art facility in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, in 1959, but the Hackensack original was the spot of Orrin Keepnews’ indelible introduction to the offbeat ways of Monk. The Riverside record producer had enlisted the services of estimable musicians Kenny Clarke and Oscar Pettiford on his first project with Monk. The group was to go from the music label’s midtown Manhattan offices across the Hudson to Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio.

“I was relieved when Monk arrived almost on time,” Keepnews recalled, in an autobiographical piece collected in Robert Gottlieb’s fine anthology Reading Jazz (1996), “just after Pettiford, but Clarke was nowhere to be found. We waited with growing impatience and concern; we telephoned everywhere; eventually Thelonious suggested using a substitute.” Keepnews resisted the idea of using a relative neophyte for this initial session, and Van Gelder agreed to hold off for another day. “Kenny, when finally located, insisted quite convincingly that Monk had told him the date was scheduled for the next day. It was not the last time that Monk was to indicate a lack of concern for such routine things as time and place and passing on the kind of basic information that is important to ordinary people.”

For a time, Monk’s considerable eccentricities encompassed mostly his cavalier disregard for time, his hats, his tendency to dance onstage, his staring into space, and his mumbling. But he would need to be hospitalized for mental illness, and the disease worsened even more dramatically in the late 1960s.

Just what the exact disease was remained indeterminate at the time. Autism, Tourette’s Syndrome, and schizophrenia were commonly suggestged. In a recent biography, Robin D.G. Kelly presents evidence for a diagnosis of manic depression.

Whatever the condition was, pharmacology, then in the comparative dark ages, was in no state to treat it. Thorazine and Lithium were both tried, to no lasting positive effect. In fact, Kelly, while acknowledging in an online Atlantic Monthly interview that Lithium might have helped diminh Monk’s worst episodes, also believes that it “contributed to an unwillingness or a lack of desire to play.”

But in the end, it all comes back to the important thing: the music. Critic Dan Morgenstern, in his book Living With Jazz, notes vividly the nature of Monk’s technique at his creative zenith, before the wayward thoughts in his mind overwhelmed the sounds only he could hear:

“To Monk, the piano was a sounding board. A study should be made of his use of the pedals, both the damping and sustaining one. He used his feet as unorthodoxly as he did his hands, and as percussively. He struck his notes, aware that the piano is a percussion instrument, a big, tunable drum. His technique may have been eccentric, but it was intensely functional….He knew exactly what he wanted from the instrument.”