Charlie Parker, Uptown and Down

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
August 24, 2007
Music
Charlie Parker, Uptown and Down
By NATE CHINEN


In "Bird Alone," one of the terse and symbolically charged songs Abbey
Lincoln chose to revisit on her recent album "Abbey Sings Abbey"
(Verve), there are no specific references to Charlie Parker. But any
jazz fan would recognize this alto saxophonist and bebop progenitor,
whose sobriquet was Bird (or Yardbird), in Ms. Lincoln's lyrics. The
airborne creature of the title is untouchable and inscrutable,
"Sending mournful soulful sounds/Soaring over troubled grounds." After
gliding high and swinging low, it vanishes, leaving only a song.

That image provides an apt tribute to Parker, whose mercurial genius
galvanized jazz in the 1940s and '50s, and whose influence endures
more than half a century after his death. An equally fitting homage is
offered by the 15th annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, which takes
place this weekend at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem and Tompkins Square
Park in the East Village, places that bear some relevance to the life
Parker led in New York.

[...]

Lore has it that Parker's initial Harlem sojourn included toiling as a
dishwasher at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, where the fearsome pianist Art
Tatum held court. At another uptown spot, Dan Wall's Chili House,
Parker had what he later described as an epiphany, during one of many
sessions with a guitarist named Biddy Fleet.

In an interview a decade later with Down Beat magazine, Parker
recalled that he had tired of the stereotypical chord voicings then in
use. "I kept thinking there's bound to be something else," he said. "I
could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it." One night in 1939,
improvising over the Ray Noble tune "Cherokee," he brought his idea to
life. "And bop was born," Down Beat added, putting the kicker on a
story so irresistible that Thomas Pynchon slipped it into his epic
novel "Gravity's Rainbow."

[...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/arts/music/24park.html