Watchin’ the Bird

by Brian Priestley

It was a strange experience, watching a recent television documentary on Charlie Parker and the music I immersed myself in for nearly two years. Originally, I hoped my book would be finished in time for the 50th anniversary last year of its subject’s premature death. Instead, the U.S. release of my Chasin’ The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker turned out to be almost simultaneous with the BBC premiere of its own production, The Charlie Parker Story.

The difficulty for anyone working on a filmed documentary of Parker is that there’s almost nothing extant of the saxophonist himself on video – two short solos for a project by his sometime producer Norman Granz, and an equally short appearance taped from live tv in the early 1950s. The paucity of material speaks volumes about the way that “modern jazz” was seen back then, which was not at all, unless you ventured into the nightspots and occasional concerts that gave it a home. The situation was already considerably changed from the “swing era” of a decade earlier when the star bandleaders (at least the white ones such as Benny Goodman, Harry James and Artie Shaw) were courted and promoted by Hollywood.

It was a different story when young black musicians, such as Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, emerged after World War II playing a more complex, uncompromisingly self-referential style originally tagged with the appellation “bebop”. That name (like that of the “dada” art movement) signaled its practitioners’ contempt for respectability, and sent a warning to the casual fan that they demanded to be taken seriously. That Parker himself was also a complex personality, whose ambivalence about public acceptance and personal responsibility led directly to a life foreshortened by self-destructive addictions, prevented him achieving even the elder-statesman status of the mature Gillespie.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that it took an awful long time for Parker’s music to be noticed by the mass media. After an earlier plan was put on ice in the 1970s, he got the full Hollywood treatment in 1987 when Clint Eastwood directed Bird, with Forest Whitaker playing the title-role. The jazz critics and cognoscenti had their reservations about the result, and so also did many musicians who had worked with Parker, such as Gillespie, Miles Davis and drummer Max Roach. These figures, important in their own right, previously had similar problems with the first mainstream book on the subject, Bird Lives! by Ross Russell but, as with the Eastwood film, it was a question of attitude and tone.

Despite the flaws in early portrayals of Parker in the media, their lack of real respect and understanding for the musician himself seems less prevalent these days. At least, the BBC piece had a couple of OUP authors, namely Gary Giddins, Ira Gitler and Chuck Haddix, whose spoken contributions were invaluable. I suppose it’s inevitable that the creation of silent scenes featuring out-of-focus actors – in what might be called the Simon Schama school of tv history – upset some viewers. But the preponderance of talking heads, and the miming of key episodes of the saxophonist’s life, may be a small price to pay for getting him on television at all.