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CDs of Charlie Parker
The Essential Charlie Parker /
Charlie Parker: A Studio Chronicle 1940-1948 /
Charlie Parker with Strings /
Diz 'N Bird at Carnegie Hall /
The Best of Charlie Parker /
Jazz at Massey Hall /
Boss Bird
South of the Border /
Confirmation /
Ornithology /
YardBird Suite
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Bird and the Beats
By Ted Joans
This is a bit about the Beats and The Bird.
It is not my total recall of all that happened during my street
schooling nights and days (1951-1961) in New York City,
especially the fabulous borough of Manhattan’s Greenwich’s
Village. When I arrived in that “madhattan” scene it was on
the eve of a revolution, Bird was an important part (if not THE
most important part) of that united stated American fine art
revolution. His followers were musicians and legions of
hipsters.
I “enrolled” first years in Harlem, the
streets of that mighty active district were swinging then, also
it was not dangerous. Thus Jack Kerouac and other white hipsters
who sought first hand knowledge of true Blues people (read Leroi
Jones’ book) could pay some dues in the night and day classes
of Harlem with a certain amount of impunity. There were black
cats on the scene then that should have been given Ph.D.’s in
Hipsterism.
These men (and women) knew more about the
how/who/what/where/why and when of the human condition than all
the four square walled university professors on earth. Babs
Gonzales should have been so awarded and rewarded, plus
seriously listened to and published. Cats like Babs taught me
and many others. Those hip ladies and hipper-than-thou gents
were often seen in all the jazz clubs, jazz concerts, and hip
parties. Some made their living by hustling, others had
offensive “jobs” downtown. Pool halls were class rooms often
frequented, so were barber shops (and “beauty salon”
parlors).
I sold used records that I obtained from juke
box companies and made all the Harlem rounds, met some of the
best minds of yesteryears and my generation. These people taught
me the genius of survival, after all I had just graduated from
Indiana University with a B.A. in the Fine Art of painting, but
that hadn’t prepared me for taking a bite of the Apple!
After a year in Harlem I “graduated” to
further my studies elsewhere, I being a painter (by academic
schooling) chose Greenwich Village U.S.A. The vileness of The
village that prevails nowadays did not exist so openly. There
were “real’ giants of the Fine Arts down there wayback in
them Fifties. My second week in the Village I met Jackson
Pollock, the Abe Lincoln of American painting. He dug jazz.
Writer Robert G. Reisner befriended me because my complete
devotion to Charlie Parker could naturally match his. Reisner
had one of the most complete bop records collections.
He introduced me to Marhall Stearns who at
that time was teaching a course in Jazz History at the New
School for Social Research I also heard W.E.B. Dubois lecture at
the now defunct Jefferson School of Social Science. Edgar Varese
introduced me to the great sculptor Alexander Calder. I gave him
a copy of my book of beat poems. The jazz clubs in the Village
were flourishing, but there were not as many as there are now.
Harlem had more Black music in those years.
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Now, I better backtrack a bit, and
hip you to my first time of live-ear-hear Bird. It was
in Louisville Kentucky at a skating rink for Black
people (although some hip whites frequented the place).
Bird was playing with Jay McShann’s orchestra. If I
remember well, I do believe that Don DeMichael (former
(Downbeat ed) was in the small intense group of
“ofays” on hand that crowded night. I am positive
that he did witness Dizz’s big band starring Chano
Pozo at Dixieland where I spent some dues years before
migrating a bit farther north to Indiana. All the great
Black bands came through Indianapolis and Louisville,
and many of the bop giants and other jazz giants were
working in those On The Road orchestras. |
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When I met Miles Davis he was with Billy
Eckstine, when I met Fats Navarro he was with Lionel Hampton,
when I met Kenny Dorham he was with, when I met, when I met, ad
infinitum. That was my early jazz schooling, ask Dexter Gordon
(he calls me “the last of the great hipsters”). Lee Konitz,
or Dizzy Gillespie, the latter I attempted to imitate during a
brief period of bopping around on the trumpet. Nuff said about
my side of the fence, the time has come to deal with the Beat
generation and its indebtedness to Bird.
The young people who became what Time-Life
pronounced “the beat generation” grew up with contemporary
jazz. Of course there was schmaltzy pop corn music nightly and
daily being dished out for white America’s consumption, but
wise ofays fished around in the deep dark waters of jazz. At the
beginning there was only a small minority interested in poetry,
jazz, and contemporary painting. But the hipsters spread the
contagious words about what was really happening that had
positive values.
Some of the poets often “preached” their
poems, or attempted to “blow” the poem as they were playing
a sax or trumpet. All these poets were on Bird or Prez. The
latter was the bridge that many poets crossed into Bird’s
land, thus arriving hip. I for one, made “blowing” my poems
into a profession, thanks to Langston Hughes, who was jazz
poetry founder. Old Kenneth Rexroth was like the Paul Whiteman
of jazz poetry and Kenneth Patchen was the Bix Beiderbecke.
Patchen was hip enough to do an album with Charlie Mingus’
early group.
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San Francisco was the first place
that the Beat generation started doing great poetry
readings in clubs and coffee shops. It was in Frisco
that Allen Ginsberg first exploded his masterpiece Howl
on the world. That long hard dues paid poem was
influenced by Lester Young’s tenor sax solos. Ginsberg,
a great poet, is not a jazz poet. He is influenced by
jazz in certain poems and often in the way that he reads
his poetry. Todays he has started On the Road to blues.
In fact John Hammond has cut an album of Ginsburg’s
blues poetry. He reads well but his singing is terrible.
The album has yet to be released. |
Back in the good/ole-bad/old days we often
read our poems with jazz recordings. It wasn’t rare to see a
poet walking to his coffee shop reading gig carrying a portable
phonograph and an attaché case full of poetry and a few
records. Bird was our main man of music, and many of us used his
recordings to fly on. Jack Kerouac was the first white poet that
I met that was hip to bird, and Stanley Gould, a New York born
hipster knew Bird personally before any of us.
These two white cats along with poet Gregory
Corso (who published in his first book of poem The Vestal
Lady On Brattle, perhaps the greatest poem yet dedicated to
Charlie Parker) were the true Bird watchers in the Village at
that time. Allen Ginsburg, like early Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
didn’t consistently fly on Bird swinging wings. Poets Steve
Tropp and his wife Gloria were religiously into jazz. Bird was
divine to them, and Bird could do no wrong. Other poets that
were influenced by Bird were Jim Lyons, Donald Brandt, Joel
Axelrod, Tom Postell, Dan Propper, Howard Hart, Jack Micheline,
Philip Lamantia, Robert Cordier, and badass Ray Bremser who was
the fastest word singer/swinger in the Village.
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There were of course some square
poets on the scene at that time, for example, William
Morris from London. This turkey read and pretended
poetry backed by recordings from Dave Brubeck. Dick
Woods from Mississippi was sorta jazzabilly poet, and a
living stereotype of Life-Time beatnik. Mixed in with
the beat generation poets were the conventional poets;
most of their poetry was still kissing Europe’s flabby
dead ass. These poets didn’t dig Bird or any kind of
jazz. They fucked their fingers academically instead of
getting into something with soul. But many of these
stone head hyenas are now editors in the lofty toilets
of the publishing world. |
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“Jazz got along without the sax for 25
years, spent the next 15 years trying to get along with it, and
took 10 years deciding to discard it altogether. It’s clear
now that, except on extraordinary occasions involving
extraordinary musicians, there’s no place in hot jazz for the
saxophone.” This perfidious piece of shit was written by John
Lucas in Jazz Record 1947. This earless dude perhaps was blind
also, for couldn’t he see the shadows of The hawk, Prez, Ben,
and Bird swooping all of the place in 1947 and years before
that??
It was the job of the poets to counterattack
all this dumb dumbness. If this john John Lucas is still on
earth, will he please read Leroi Jones’ 1963 prose bit titled
“Three Ways to Play the Saxophone.” Here dear reader I shall
scatter some little riffs at random, full of facts and feathers:
James Dean, hip movie actor sat digging Bird blowing at the
Montmartre Club on West 4th Street in the Village,
accompanied by the lovely hipstress Stella P., both completely
caught up in ornithological travels, all the while
new-comer-to-the-actor-world Steve McQueen sat digging Bird and
dean whilst photographer WeeGee attempted to photograph the
entire hip happening.
August 1979 in San Francisco, poets Nancy
Joyce Peters, Philip Lamantia, and tedjoans do a homage reading
to Charlie Parker. The private affair was packed with poets and
hipsters. Bird Lives presentations have also happened in
Holland, Germany, and France, even a few times in Africa. The
poets take the words for homage to Bird. If there be a Bird of
the spoken word, then we must place the hip laurel on the poet
Bob Kaufman. He is the poet who consistently writes about Bird
in his poetry, and he lives Birdlore (but no junk!). Bob gave
his first son the name Parker.
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The other Bobs who indulged wisely in
the flaming feathers of Charlie Parker back in those
Beat G days were Bob Parent, a very good photographer
and hipster, unlike Fred MacDarrah who wasn’t hip at
all to jazz or Bird, but Fred did produce two valid
books: The Beat Scene and The Artists World, plus
started a lucrative business of Rent A Beatnik. Another
Bob was Robert C. Reisner, a hipster who taught jazz at
Brooklyn College and ran the hippest weekend jazz club
in New York at that Beat G time: The Open Door, at the
corner of west Broadway and 4th Street, in
the Village. Gilbert Milstein for being hip enough to
recognize the merits and the avant garde living
conditions Kerouac’s On the Road warned
America. He reviewed the book for the N.Y. Times Book
Review 1957. |
Max Gordon who allowed Jack Kerouac to do an
automatic happening down there in his Holy hollow of jazz: The
Village Vanguard.
Here I advise the reader to place Manhattan
Transfer’s “Birdland” on their machine and dig it while
reading the following. 1951, we dug Bird and his group playing
nightly at Birdland, opposite was Lee Konitz and his group. We
dug, wrote poems and some did paintings, and others like Bob
Reisner wrote serious articles in Playboy and Esquire on Bird
much later. Many of the Beats would only leave the Village to go
to hear or to score for soulfood in Harlem.
Bird was the personification of many things
for poets and hipsters of the Beat G. The hipsters knew that
America extracts great prices from its mythical figures,
therefore the heavy dues Bird paid. We, especially myself
personally, attempted to alleviate some of the hassles for Bird
by at least giving him a key to my #4 Barrow Street (one room
cold water) flat, where Bashner, a saintly hip philosopher
(later Bird’s road manager) dwelled.
I also gave big costume balls to raise money
for rent. At one such party Bird attended, it was dedicated to
surrealism, Dada, and the Mau Mau. Bird arrived late but he
hastily improvised his own Mau Mau image, plus aided other
hipsters. He insisted that we play no recordings of his, or
Dizzy Gillespie “his worthy constituent.” So we played other
hip things even popular stuff of Slim Gaillard, Harry The
Hipster Gibson and Louis Jordan. Life magazine cover girl Vicki
Dugan was the Queen of the affair. Montgomery Clift took
invitations at the door for awhile. It was held in a
photographer’s studio and we earned enough money to pay rent
for a year.
A few years before I’d seen Bird coming to
Washington Square Park with his family. Chan was a very hip
woman and was envied by many hipper-than-thou chicks, black and
white. Bird seemed to be happier during that time. The Beat
G.’s indebtedness to Bird was, shall we say, enormously
underrated by many writers, such as Norman Mailer in his White
Negro, a book that was needed (for squares) and heeded. But
mailer was not hip, although he surrounded himself with hipsters
like Bill Walker, Dick Dabney, and Lester Blackston. Mailer’s
book of poetry is perhaps the worst to ever be published by a
bigtime publishing house. We laughed before his face.
Hipster Sy Krim was hipper than Mailer, he
therefore wrote some very wise bits on the Beat G., plus he put
out the very first Beat anthology that became a “Beat
Seller.” Herbert Gold was typical of the misunderstanding of
what the beat scene was all about, he too, perhaps never heard
or deeply dug Bird. Gold wrote in his “Beat Mystique” 1958
for Playboy: “Hipsterism began in a complex effort of the
Negro to escape his self-imposed role of happy-go-lucky animal.
A few highly self-conscious urban Negro men sought to imitate
‘white’ diffidence, or coolness, or beatness.” For gold
Gold was dumber than Lucas of 1947.
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No one who was ever touched by Bird
was ever the same. Too bad that many of America’s to
pop writers at the Bird time never deeply dug the man
and his music. Painters Harvey Cropper and Walter
Williams tried to turn Bird onto the art of painting,
but his efforts are nowhere near his genius in music. I
once asked him to write some poems, but he had no eyes
for writing poetry. He dug all the arts and I never
heard him put anybody down, no matter what scene they
were into. He gladly had time for beggars as well as
young idolizing musicians. He took from those he loved
as well as from those he only had just met. Bird shared
his great music with the world, so the world owed him,
and he never collected. He understood what the Bird G.
was about at the core, that we wanted to be a swinging
group of NEW people, like his music, intent on
international joy. |
We broke out of America’s squareness just
as Bird had done. We as an unorganized movement of individuals
freed ourselves of the sickness of mass consumerism and pop
culture conformity.
We were a bit luckier than the Woodstock
hippies (who followed one decade later) for the mass media was
ready and waiting for them, this evil international business
steered them into a fashionable vogue, and have controlled every
direction that youth has turned ever since, with few exceptions.
An international conspiracy was pulled on the hippies’ ears
musically. They all got cheated aesthetically (excluding the
Beatles and Bob Dylan) and they have yet to recover. Jazz is the
only music (in its pure unadulterated form, therefore no
Con-fusion) that can save them from violent stress-filled
future, and jazz could restore their audio senses. Bird was a
bringer of beautiful music, an alto saxophone
Poetry. Spontaneous poetry, the essential of
that poetry was to share it by living it, not in disrespect of
self and others, but in complete active state of embracing the
marvelous. Live like a Bird solo, which is an audio cyclical
surreality. “Bird Lives,” we wrote on the walls of New York
City wayback when we learned that he had gone-on/flown on. But
he had turned an entire generation of poets and hipsters all
over the earth ON to SOMETHING OF GREAT VALUE: To freedom!!
Source: Coda ( June 1981)
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update 7 October 2007 |
