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Profiles: Charlie Parker--you just can't fake it
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"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."
- Charlie Parker
This view of music assumes a basic fact of artistic expression: you just can’t fake it. One can amass formidable technical skill and master an instrument, but only an artist can do something meaningful with that knowledge.
Such a quote might recall rock musicians who lived fast and hard, messing with hard drugs and the law and dying young. It could be said, for example, that Nirvana’s greatness was born of Kurt Cobain’s drug-addled, self-destructive personality, or that Jimi Hendrix’s innovations derived from his indulgence in psychedelic drugs. But no artistic figure truly personifies this quotation more than the man who uttered it. Charlie Parker was a jazz saxophonist who revolutionized the way his instrument could be played; his solos were aggressive and chaotic and so was his lifestyle. When he died at 34, the coroner took him to be almost 60 (Koch 260).
Charlie Parker’s habits took root in his early teenage years. He became infatuated with music and the saxophone, dropping out of school to join the musicians union when he was just fourteen (Priestly, 14). Kansas City was a music town, and Parker was able to connect with many local players who would smuggle him into clubs and pass him joints. Musically, he was a disciplined student who challenged himself and learned rapidly, but “intellectually and emotionally, he was still running before he had learned to walk” (Priestly, 18).
After a near fatal automobile accident in 1936, Parker also began to use heroin, conning the doctors into thinking it was to help him cope with the pain of his injuries. This became a life-long dependency for him, as did his enormous appetite for both food and alcohol. 
After multiple ulcer sieges, he was told he would die if he did not stop drinking, yet he refused to curtail his alcohol intake.
Perhaps it was a response to events in his life; he had shaky emotional relationships and even witnessed the death of one of his children. It is possible that he was hurt by critical responses to his playing. Though after his death he was pronounced one of the most influential musicians of all time, in his lifetime he was mostly ignored by the public (Feather 82).
Others speculate it was a response to severe racism of his time. "He talked about things I wasn't to read until yeras later in books by Malcolm X and Cleaver," says pianist Hampton Hawes. "[But] he couldn't come up with an answer. So he stayed high" (Koch 8).
Although by the end of his career Parker was often too incapacitated to play his instrument, his experimental playing pioneered a new movement in jazz and left an outstanding legacy throughout the music world. His style was so unrestrained that he needed to extend the boundaries of the chord progression over which he played. He built on chords’ extended intervals, such as ninths, elevenths and thirteenths. The result was improvisation founded on harmonic structure instead of melody, which, combined with his often-accelerated tempos, became the basis for what is called “bebop.”
Listening to Parker’s solos on the saxophone, you can hear his wild personality and flailing emotions. It is understandable that many in the jazz world at the time were not ready to accept his new musical conception. Against a norm of danceable swing, reliant on familiar musical themes, Parker experimented with chord changes, syncopation, and melody, founding a musical system that he describes as having “no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug," like the Jazz of his time. "And that’s why bop is more flexible” (Woideck, 105).
Though bebop would eventually be studied in conservatories dedicated to mastering its musical complexities, the untrained ear does not hear inverted chords, diminished 5ths, and such. It does, however, hear the noise and the man behind it. In a track like “The Bird,” the piano begins with a recognizable melodic introduction. Parker’s alto sax does not come in on a discernible beat; it merges fluidly with the piano as if dragged in accidentally. He stays on this melody for hardly a measure before he trails off into wild explorations of notes and rhythm. As he jumps up and down scales with the ease of a gymnast, he often bends into the higher notes, giving his tone a growl, a gravelly strain, like that of a voice struggling to hit notes out of its range. All of the instruments take solos, but Parker’s are by far the most dynamic. He often returns to identifiable melodies and riffs to bring the listener back on track before throwing everything into disarray once again. As disorderly as it sounds, Parker always seems to have complete control over his instrument. The beauty of his improvisation is that his playing almost certainly reflects the darts and turns of his thoughts and emotions at that specific time.
Most fans would say that Charlie Parker’s genius extends beyond virtuosity. He was able to channel his pain, his joy, and his sense perceptions into a single solo, depending on where he was at the moment physically and emotionally. His lifestyle was reckless and destructive, but as Lawrence Koch argues in Yardbird Suite, “perhaps the moving beauty that Parker, the musician, created would never have existed if it were not for the evil in Parker, the man” (261). He could often bring audiences to laughter and tears in a single solo by communicating his own feelings. Because he lived it, it came out of his horn.
Books/articles on this subject, cited here:
Feather, Leonard. "Parker Finally Finds Peace." Down Beat, April 20, 1955. The Charlie Parker Companion, edited by Woideck, Carl. Schirmer Books. New York, 1998.
Koch, Lawrence O. Yardbird Suite: A Compendium of the Music and Life of Charlie Parker. Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Bowling Green, OH 1988.
Priestly, Brian. Chasin' the Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker. Oxford University Press, New York 2005.
Woideck, Carl. Charlie Parker: His Music and His Life. University of Michigan Press, 1996.
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