The high life and hard times of Charlie Parker
Many millions of words have been written on the history of jazz, but according to the music's greatest minimalist, Miles Davis, they could all be boiled down to just four - 'Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker'.
Like a lot of Davis' authoritative pronouncements, this one, though uncharacteristically modest, is reasonably obvious nonsense. We can all supply our own lengthy lists of artists - with Davis included on most of them - who have made contributions that require recognition.
It is also wrong to suppose, although many people do, that Armstrong invented jazz or that Parker invented bebop, but there is a simple truth underlying Davis' assertion: whoever else changed the music, nobody changed it half as much as those two.
Fifty years ago next Saturday Charlie Parker died, and as soon as the news got out graffiti artists started painting 'Bird Lives!' on walls in New York. In a way that was and is true - jazz is still assimilating his legacy. Even at the time pianist Lennie Tristano, commenting on the legions of Parker imitators, said: 'He could sue almost anybody who has made a record in the last 10 years'.
The main thing Armstrong and Parker had in common was genius. Both had original vision and vaulting imagination, allied to what at the time appeared to be superhuman levels of virtuosity.
Technically they have since been equalled - even, though rarely, surpassed - but no players before or since have been able to break the mould of music and remake it in their own image in a comparable way. Modern jazz does not end with Charlie Parker but it certainly starts with him.
Many who wished they had Bird's genius figured that his lifestyle was the next best thing, and although he repeatedly begged them not to, followed him into heroin addiction.
A junkie from the age of 17, Parker himself had no romantic illusions about the nature of a habit which often led him to pawn his horns to pay for the drug.
His addiction dogged him through the peak of his career when he was making best-selling records and playing to packed houses, and because of it he enjoyed none of the material advantages of success. According to one story, he once showed a friend the serially punctured veins on each of his arms, and said: 'This is my Cadillac and this is my house'.
Unfortunately, he was a man of prodigious appetites. Trumpeter Kenny Dorham said simply, 'He had to have a lot of everything', and although the 'Bird' nickname has come to be associated with his improvisational flights, he was in fact given it because of his gluttonous fondness for fried chicken.
Clint Eastwood's controversial biopic graphically recorded his cocktail of bad habits eventually taking their toll. When a doctor was called to examine Parker's body at the friend's apartment where he died, he estimated his age at around 60. He was 34.
Fifty years on the myth looms as large as the music, and Parker's innovations are part of the language of jazz, but he remains astonishing to listen to.
On the classic sides for the Savoy and Dial labels - as important to jazz as Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens - Parker's performances remain unsurpassed: just listen to Now's the Time, Ko-Ko, and Ornithology.
Some of the sides from that period were cut with Parker very much the worse for wear - most famously Lover Man for which he had to be virtually held in front of the microphone - but the artist was still able to function unerringly, even while the man was disintegrating.
Parker's later recordings for Verve are a subject for much critical debate - while nobody has seriously argued that they measure up to the best of the Savoy and Dial sides, they are far from disposable, and some at least have a place in any serious jazz collection.
Certainly they, and the mass of other material that has gradually been unearthed and released over the past half century, demonstrate beyond any doubt that whatever context Parker appeared in - Latin, with strings - he remained triumphantly himself, and although some situations are markedly better than others, there's none in which he's not worth hearing.
One way to acquire a good representative sample of his music on all the labels he recorded for is to pick up Rhino's two-disc compilation, Yardbird Suite: The Ultimate Collection, before deciding how much further you wish to go. Modern jazz as we know it would not exist without some of these sides.
Whether Parker would have been able to cut them if he had applied the same discipline to his life as to his art we'll never know, but it's a shame we're marking the 50th anniversary of his death this year rather than celebrating his 84th birthday.
