Bird Is the Word: Quotes By and About Charlie Parker

“I can play all I know in eight bars.” —Charlie Parker “You could look at Bird’s life and see just how much his music was connected to the way he lived. … You just stood there with your mouth open and listened to him discuss books with somebody or philosophy or religion or science,

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“I can play all I know in eight bars.” —Charlie Parker “You could look at Bird’s life and see just how much his music was connected to the way he lived. … You just stood there with your mouth open and listened to him discuss books with somebody or philosophy or religion or science, things like that. Thorough. A little while later, you might see him over in a corner somewhere drinking wine out of a paper sack with some juicehead. Now that’s what you hear when you listen to him play. He can reach the most intellectual and difficult levels of music, then he can turn around — now watch this — and play the most lowdown, funky blue you ever want to hear. That’s a long road for somebody else, from that high intelligence all the way over to those blues, but for Charlie Parker it wasn’t half a block; it was right next door.” —Earl Coleman “I remember one night I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December 1939. … I’d been getting bored with the stereotyped changes (harmonies) that were being used all the time, and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night I was working over “Cherokee,” and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.” —Charlie Parker https://youtu.be/ScDulXx8InA “If Parker was bebop’s inspiration, the Pied Piper of modern jazz, Gillespie pulled the style into shape like a master craftsman. But if Gillespie was the showman who knew how to sell the new music to skeptics, Parker accrued the saintly aura of a martyr whose every solo demanded preservation and analysis, whose improvisations suggested an emotional density that best captured the agitated temper of the times.” —Gary Giddins “What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience.” —Henry Rollins “During 1945, we used to go down almost every night to catch Diz and Bird wherever they were playing. We felt that if we missed hearing them play, we were missing something important. Man, the shit they were playing and doing was going down so fast, you just had to be there in person to catch it.” —Miles Davis “When word got around where [Parker] was playing, they came to check him out. Motherfuckers peeked and backed right up. Those of us who were affected the strongest felt we’d be willing to do anything to warm ourselves by that fire, get some of that grease pumping through our veins. He fucked up all our minds. It was where the ultimate truth was.” —Hampton Hawes “Bird himself was almost a god. People followed him around everywhere. He had an entourage. All kinds of women were around Bird, and big-time dope dealers and people giving him all kinds of gifts. Bird thought this was way it was supposed to be. So he just took and took. He began missing sets and whole gigs.” —Miles Davis

“Sensitive and thoroughly aware of the terrifying cost of his art and his public image, he had to bear not only the dismemberment occasioned by rival musicians who imitated every nuance of his style — often with far greater financial return — but the imitation of his every self-destructive excess of personal conduct by those who had in no sense earned the right of such license. Worse, it was these who formed his cult” —Ralph Ellison “Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle or when he is juiced is a plain, straight liar. When I get too much to drink, I can’t even finger well, let alone play decent ideas.” —Charlie Parker “I want to say something about Charlie Parker, his importance in the picture. As great as we all think Bud Powell is, where would he be without Bird? He’s the first one that should remember it — he himself told me that Bird showed him the way to a means of expression. George Shearing shows a good deal of personality, but it's still a take-off on Parker. You take Groovin’ High or pick at random any five records by well-known boppers, and compare the ideas and phrases. You’ll see that if Charlie Parker wanted to invoke plagiarism laws, he could sue almost anyone who’s made a record in the last 10 years. If I were Bird, I’d have all the best boppers in the country thrown into jail.” —Lennie Tristano, 1951 “There was not a lot of rock ’n’ roll in the house. Our parents didn't think it was very groovy, and I tend to agree with them. If you grew up with Charlie Parker, Bill Haley wasn’t very hip.” —Elvis Costello “I don’t care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would never have written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker would have never played anything but swing music.” —Charlie Parker “Like his spiritual brother Dylan Thomas, who died a year or so earlier, Parker was labyrinthine. He was a tragic figure who helplessly consumed himself, and at the same time he was a demon who presided gleefully over the wreckage of his life. He was an original and fertile musician who had reached the edge of self-parody. He was an irresistibly attractive man who bit almost every hand that fed him. He lived outside convention (he probably never voted or paid an income tax), yet, though totally apolitical, he presaged, in his drives and fierce independence, the coming of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver. And he was, albeit succored by a cult, largely unknown during his life.” —Whitney Balliett, from The New Yorker, February 1976 “Charlie Parker looked like Buddha. Charlie Parker, who recently died laughing at a juggler on TV after weeks of strain and sickness, was called the perfect musician. And his expression on his face was as calm, beautiful and profound as the image of the Buddha represented in the East — the lidded eyes, the expression that says: All is well. This is what Charlie Parker said when he played: All is well.” —Jack Kerouac “Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” —Charlie Parker https://youtu.be/JfMJCq1-jAU