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Rating: Loverman - Hollywood 1946, the Last Flight of the Sparrowhawk
Charlie Parker was the greatest musician in the history of modern jazz. No one, even today, has the courage to question this statement. He advanced this music from every point of view: melodic, rhythmic, harmonic. He sparked in all the musicians who came after him the need to completely reconsider their art, because art works that way—it grows and evolves if someone poses problems. The music of Charlie Parker poses problems, and his solos' transcriptions are studied in all jazz schools.
In some respects, his story resembles that of Mozart, in the sense that both shone with such a dazzling light that no one has ever been able to fully explain it. If we also consider that Parker was a heroin addict for most of his life, the matter becomes even more complicated. The word "genius" is a patch to solve what escapes attempts of explanation by historians and scholars.
As with Mozart, there was no boundary in Parker's art between the creation and execution of music. Moreover, he showed an infinite ability to emotionally communicate with his listeners. Every jazz musician, still today, dreams of getting even slightly close to that degree of empathy with the audience. The aim here is to recount the worst 3 minutes and 23 seconds of his career according to one half of the world. According to the other half, the best. To do so, we must start where it all began. Kansas City.
Charlie Parker was born in Kansas City on August 29, 1920. In 1933, his mother gave him his first saxophone, and he began studying music. It was in 1935 that Parker decided to dedicate himself professionally and definitively to music, joining the union of professional musicians. One night that year, in the shadow of one of those filthy jazz clubs full of gangsters and dealers, someone offered him heroin. That's how, in Kansas City in 1935, at just 15, his career as a musician and addict began.
The idea of identifying Bird's (Charlie Parker's perennial nickname) addiction as the prevailing key to understanding his story repulses me, I swear. But it is undeniable that his life was dramatically and constantly marked by drugs and alcohol. Like some sort of disease contracted as a boy, a disease he had resigned himself to never recovering from. Let's be clear, Bird's life, which ended in 1953 at just 33 years old, was a real hell. Hell on earth. No other words come to mind.
But Bird wasn't the only one shooting up in the dressing room before the concert. Almost all the great jazz artists of that era, including female singers, had problems with heroin addiction. They got high like damned souls. Infernal lives that ended quickly and badly. The punk kids of 1977 seemed like Franciscan monks in comparison. The greater they were artistically, the more they endured nightmare lives. A sociological phenomenon that would continue until the '70s, leaving many victims along the way.
But why? How is a "plague" of such proportions possible? And why jazz musicians in particular? I have an idea. At its core is a broken dream and a prospect of resignation.
In that 1945, black people had returned from the front precisely like white people: they had fought in the Second World War and participated in the defense of the homeland by shedding their share of blood. They saw this sacrifice as a good reason to demand and obtain, once and for all, the end of discrimination and acquisition of human rights and equality. For African Americans, it was a decisive moment. Even the arts, music, and literature felt called to responsibility on the matter.
Precisely in 1945, Bird found himself at the center of a group of musicians—Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk—engaged in a great artistic maneuver: they were trying to transform jazz music, taking it from a merely "picturesque" phenomenon for the African American community to elevating it to a language with its full artistic dignity. These musicians had in mind a complex, thoughtful, and bold aesthetic system to refine through a series of progressive renewals and improvements. Bebop, modern jazz, aimed to compete with Ravel and Stravinsky.
The act of offering the entire world, including that of whites, a new modern artistic language capable of leaving a mark in the history of 20th-century music—a language devised and refined exclusively within African American culture—appeared as a truly revolutionary gesture. In short, this music could have been an instrument of revolution in the fight for civil rights. Perhaps even the pivot itself of the revolution.
It is thus that jazz took on a responsibility that was not solely musical but of social struggle. It took very few years to verify the substantial failure of this dream. Racial discrimination persisted; indeed, it worsened. Jazz was certainly recognized as an art form, and this was thanks to characters like Bird, but it became clear it wasn't capable of achieving social revolutions. Maybe artistic revolutions, but nothing more. Then came internal currents, dispersal streams—from bebop to hard bop, from hard bop to cool, from cool to free jazz, and then west coast jazz, bossa nova, soul jazz, jazz rock, fusion. And between different currents, there were disputes, controversies, insults.
Those who would have liked to be the standard-bearers of the great revolution were labeled "The great soloists" of their era. Soloists! A strong school was missing. They were isolated phenomena, each clinging to the lifeline of their inspiration, their genius. A global design was absent. The fact is that no revolutions occurred. There was certainly a struggle for equality between blacks and whites, but victory was not even remotely in sight. And within that struggle, jazz could do very little.
I believe this is the framework within which to attempt to explain, on a collective level, the phenomenon of heroin and addiction among these artists. Heroin as the only possible way to communicate to the world the failure of an exhilarating design. Heroin as a stigma of defeat and resignation.
Then, of course, the stories of each individual, the personal dimension, the neighborhoods where one grew up, those Bronx alleys shaded by fire escapes clinging to old crowded and unhealthy buildings, and then Harlem with its filthy jazz clubs, the bad influences, things of this nature counted. But I don't think I'm wrong in identifying in this great disappointment in the potentials of the bebop revolution the framework within which to inscribe the phenomenon of fatal vice of heroin among all these musicians. In any case, the description of the general picture avoids us from falling into the error of qualifying Bird as the "cursed genius," an unbearable and misleading cliché. No musician was ever so dramatically immersed in his era, in his time, as Bird, so immersed as to bear its stigmas.
Now that his greatness and his cross are clear, let's return to the story of the worst or best 3 minutes, depending on the point of view, of Bird's career.
Towards the end of 1945, Bird was living in New York and had become, in the jazz world, a living legend. Other artists considered him a kind of demigod. In the fall, his friend and great trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie received an offer to perform in a club in Los Angeles. It was an excellent engagement and, despite everything he knew about Charlie and his drug problems, Gillespie chose to have Parker as a soloist and invited him to come to California with him. Thus began one of the most tragic and sad periods of Charlie Parker's life.
The phenomenon is well known among drug users. A drug addict is lost outside of his hometown. The "circles" of the new city do not let him in because distrust prevails over any other reason in that environment. The outsider struggles terribly to find his doses. If he ever finds them, he is forced to pay through the nose, because, in that environment, along with distrust, selfishness reigns. They exploit the state of need.
So Bird in California soon found it difficult to obtain his daily drugs. The only dealer he had found, who would become the most famous dealer in the world because Bird would name a very famous piece after him, Emry Byrd, known as "Moose the Mooche," was not always available. Then when Moose the Mooche was arrested, Bird's situation plunged tragically.
Bird couldn't find heroin and resorted to large quantities of alcohol to cope with withdrawal symptoms. Then he disappeared from the scene. The trumpet player colleague Howard McGhee found him living in a converted garage without heating. Parker lived in dampness and semi-darkness like a rat, and was literally frightening. McGhee took him home, where Bird stayed with him and his wife Dorothy.
To quickly find money, Parker and McGhee convinced producer Ross Russell, owner of the Dial record label, to organize an extra recording session and to advance Bird the proceeds of the rights immediately. Naturally, having the greatest saxophonist of the time in one's recording studio was a luxury not to be missed, and Russell willingly accepted the proposal. Thus, the most tragic recording session of all time was born, taking place in the Dial studios in Hollywood, California, on July 29, 1946.
In the studio, waiting for Parker, besides Ross Russell, behind the glass, were Marvin Freeman, Russell's partner in Dial Records, his brother Richard, a psychiatrist strongly wanted by Russell, very concerned about Parker's psychological and physical state, and journalist and "Billboard" correspondent Elliott Grennard, who would later publish a famous short story about the incident titled "Sparrow's Last Jump."
The musicians, besides Parker, were his friend Howard McGhee on trumpet, Jimmy Bunn on piano, Bob Kesterson on bass, and Roy Porter on drums. Top-notch boppers. Parker arrived very late. He showed up in a condition that immediately worried everyone present. Later Parker would declare, "I had to drink a liter of whiskey to get through the session."
During the session, Bird was barely able to blow into the saxophone and press the keys, and he was affected by muscle spasms causing involuntary movements while he tried to play. The first big mistake, however, was made by psychiatrist Richard Freeman, who administered Parke six pheno-barbital tablets, probably to control the spasms, but the drug mixed with alcohol, worsening things.
They recorded the first four tracks: two fast pieces and two slow ones. In the upbeat tracks, Parker struggled to follow the ensemble passages. At the time of the solos, he managed to produce surreal interrupted fragments of melody. The effect was terrifying. In the slow tracks, Bird obtained a bit more continuity, although the results were equally unsettling to listen to.
The session seemed doomed to failure. It was unlistenable material that humiliated Bird's greatness. They didn't even attempt further takes of the performed tracks: good on the first try, so to speak. All present were embarrassed, and Parker himself realized that his psychological and physical state was incompatible with producing music. Silence reigned in the studio for a couple of minutes, then suddenly Bird asked to play "Loverman."
Loverman was a beautiful and melancholic song, composed in 1941 by three talented songwriters, Davis, Sherman, and Ramirez, just before their departure to the front. The song had been entrusted to Billie Holiday, who recorded a splendid version in 1945. The record was very successful, and "Loverman" had become a standard performed by many jazz musicians. Bird's proposal was accepted by everyone, although no one believed that sad afternoon would bear any more fruit. The detailed description of the performance was perfectly presented by the session's patron Ross Russell in his book "Bird Lives!" (besides, cinematographically, in the film "Bird" by Clint Eastwood). It is worth quoting Russell's words.
« There was a long piano introduction ("long," in bebop of the time, meant 7 seconds!), deemed interminable, by Jimmy Bunn, marking time while waiting for the saxophone. Charlie had missed the entry. With a few bars of delay, he finally came in. Charlie's sound had regained strength. It was shrill, full of anguish. In it, there was something heart-breaking. The phrases were choked with bitterness and frustration from the months spent in California. The successive notes had a sad, solemn grandeur. It seemed that Charlie played robotically; he was no longer a thinking musician. Those were the painful notes of a nightmare, coming from a deep subterranean level. There was a final strange phrase, suspended, unfinished, and then silence."
During Parker's solo, which lasted only a few seconds, the trumpeter McGhee listened with bowed head, fully aware of the human wreckage and pain screaming from those saxophone notes. When the piece ended, there was a moment of silence; those in the control room were embarrassed, disturbed, deeply moved. Russell said something like "Okay Charlie, very good" on the intercom. Parker, in response, unhooked the saxophone and threw it against the glass. Bird was then accompanied to the hotel. But the madness wasn't over yet, the evening was still long.
That night there were quite a few people in the hotel lobby. A board meeting of I don’t know what had just ended. Piano bar music, people chatting while sipping brandy, soft lights. Suddenly everyone fell silent; in three seconds silence fell: Charlie Parker had calmly crossed the hall heading to the bar counter to order whiskey. Calmly, but also completely naked. Then the fire alarm broke the silence.
When McGhee arrived at the hotel, the police had already arrived and taken Parker to Camarillo Hospital. There, reached by the trumpeter, Parker was found relatively lucid: "I'm fine, man. Give me my clothes, I’m ready to go out." McGhee had to explain to him that he was under arrest and things were not so simple. Moreover, Parker, before going down to the lounge with his privates out, had set fire to a mattress (perhaps involuntarily with a cigarette, who knows), triggering a fire. McGhee, however, from the malicious glances and a couple of chuckles from the policemen, got the feeling Bird had been arrested for exhibitionism.
Indeed, before the judge, Parker was accused of acts against decency, resisting arrest, and arson. He was lucky to find a jazz-devoted judge, astounded to find himself in front of none other than Charlie Parker, the living legend, as the defendant. Bird got six months to be spent at Camarillo Hospital, the lightest possible penalty provided for those offenses. At the end of the hearing, the judge, somewhat awkwardly and without drawing too much attention, had also obtained an autograph on a photo from Parker.
In the hospital, Bird regained his health thanks to regular meals, physical activity, and the impossibility of using drugs. Ross Russell and his musician colleagues from Los Angeles visited him. It was a good period for Charlie Parker, but a formidable one for Camarillo Hospital and its patients, who were fortunate enough to frequently hear small impromptu concerts in the dining hall. Small concerts, but with Charlie "Bird" Parker, the jazz legend, on saxophone. Such a stroke of luck doesn't come every day.
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