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Charlie (Bird) Parker Flies Again
| Article
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13798 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1988 |
748 Words |
| Author
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Armstrong Rollins
Armstrong Rollins writes on the arts and lives in New York
City. |
With the arrival of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker on the musical scene in the early 1940s, the relationship of authentic jazz to the enthusiastic listening public began to change. Intellectuals gave it at most a grudging acknowledgement. A Rhapsody in Blue might find its way into the classical repertoire. A Benny Goodman might get a booking at Carnegie Hall. But most of the young preferred swing, the big bands, and crooners, before turning their all-consuming attention to the rhythms of rock and roll.
Parker and Gillespie, like many other jazz musicians, could have assured themselves of steady incomes by joining big bands. Instead, they chose to play in small groups like those of Jay McShann or Billy Eckstine, or else set up small groups of their own with a few of their friends. There they developed the distinctive modern, complex, improvisational style of jazz, with its variations on themes, its lengthy solos, its adlibbing references, that—glorious though it may sound—seems to have attracted more champions than listeners.
Pursuit of Perfection
The sort of life this imposed on the musicians, with its demands for maximum alertness in the small hours of the morning, constant traveling, and never-ending, restless creativity, led in many cases to addictions to drugs. But there are contrasts. Of the two founders of modern jazz—two men who played together ore than almost anyone since the days of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong—one, Charlie Parker, has taken his place in folklore as the drug-addicted, alcoholic, spendthrift artist who died in pursuit of perfection. The other, Dizzy Gillespie, with a lifetime of productivity, punctuality, and monogamy behind him, appears, implausibly, to embody the Thomas Mann ideal of the artist as a good bourgeois.
The contrast between these two men is one of the fascinating themes of Clint Eastwood's Bird. The film traces the last ten years of Charlie Parker's life, years during which he established his ascendancy in the jazz world and ensured his own destruction in the process. (A doctor examining his corpse estimated him to be in his mid-fifties. At the time of his death he was thirty-four.)
Forest Whitaker plays Parker and Samuel E. Wright, Gillespie. Both perform splendidly, although the script doesn't entirely escape clich?. Parker is a tiresome brat; Gillespie is too good for this world. But the music richly compensates. Eastwood made no attempt to find a modern musician capable of
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