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The first two sections (“Origins” and “Early Work”) are particularly illuminating. Bradley traces Parker’s family history from its origins in the Kingdom of Nri (present-day Nigeria) to the Carolinas (where his enslaved ancestors were brought) to Harlem (where his parents met, at the Savoy Ballroom), to the Claremont Projects in the South Bronx (where Parker and his brother grew up). Drawing on extensive interviews, Bradley explores the blossoming of Parker’s aesthetic consciousness in the face of obstacles posed by poverty and structural racism in his living and school environments. He describes Parker’s nascent explorations into music and the bass; his discovery of avant-garde film; his introduction to the Black Arts Movement; his predisposition towards the ’60s and ’70s avant-garde; his introductions to and early associations with like-minded musicians.
Furthermore, Bradley painstakingly contextualizes Parker’s early personal development with descriptions of the infrastructure within which he and his partners operated, both in the Bronx and Harlem, but most consequentially on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Parker moved in 1975 with his new wife, the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker.
There’s an interesting chapter on Parker’s transformative association with Cecil Taylor during the 1980s, when both musicians began to intersect with the creme de la creme of Europe’s free jazz community. The five thorough chapters in the final section (“Toward the Universal”) address the evolution Parker’s post-1990 activity as a leader, drawing heavily on Parker’s personal testimony and written works; interviews with close associates like Matthew Shipp, Cooper-Moore, Leena Conquest, Dave Burrell, David Sewelson, and Steve Swell; and various clips and ephemera.
This reader has some criticisms. For one thing, my uncorrected page proof copy contained a number of factual errors that denote Bradley’s unfamiliarity with the broader timeline of jazz history and the quotidian particulars of life in downtown Manhattan during the period in question. Bassist Walter Page is confused with trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page; Nathan’s, a fast food hotdogs and fries counter, is described several times as a restaurant where Parker rendezvoused with friends – minor points, to be sure, but “the devil is in the details,” and the misrepresentations are jarring.
Hopefully, Bradley will correct these and several other inaccuracies found in the galleys. Hopefully, too, Bradley will flesh out his descriptions of such important figures as Campbell, Jordan and Anderson, which read like just-the-facts Wikipedia entries or hagiographic press releases. Perhaps he’ll flesh out Kowald’s role as co-founder of the first “Sound Unity Festival” (which later morphed into the Vision Festival); the impact on Parker’s development of sound-and-silence-oriented AACM music or the Euro-free-improv scene; where the various “Downtown”-Lower East Side musical factions during the 1980s and 1990s intersected and diverged.
In a sense, the book’s great strength – that Parker trusted Bradley sufficiently to grant numerous interviews and access to his archives – is also its weakness. Bradley’s deep respect for his subject is palpable. So is his keen awareness that he is a white historian chronicling a Black practitioner of a Black art form, as he noted in a recent interview on 