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I was first introduced to Charlie "Bird" Parker on the corner of 55th and Madison Ave—in the jazz archives housed in the building that I worked at in New York City. Although I'd already been turned on to jazz by the trombone player in a band I'd played with at university, I wasn't ready for it in my early twenties. I really didn't start "feeling it" until I moved to NYC to work at a record company where I availed myself of a grip of recordings made by the greats like Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, etc...Since I got all my tunes for free, I sampled everything I could get my hands on from Dylan's Blonde on Blonde to Public Enemy's Greatest Misses LP. And then there was the jazz catalogue, which required some heavy lifting—there was so much of it to ingest, I couldn't do it all in a couple of sittings, this was going to take some sort of syllabus, or so I thought.

I soon got into the habit of reading bios I found lying around, and parsing through the pages for the names of significant singles, LPs and whatnot—it took a while before I started to get a clue but, in hindsight, I now see that the research enhanced my listening pleasure exponentially. A lot of people I'd met who'd been bitten by the jazz bug could be musical snobs, to put it mildly —probably taking their cues from old school critics like Stanley Crouch or the lot who scribed for DownBeat magazine back in the day— but occasionally I'd meet an enthusiast who was coming in from the cold on the jazz scene also, who was trying to get a toehold on the "vibe" from between the vinyl grooves as they went along, as was I, learning in that amateurish way that either deepens one's affinity for the subject-matter of study or sours them on it completely. I opted on the former, which was also Nat Henthoff's approach.

I think in order to truly "feel" jazz, you've got to possess the facility to absorb a little history, the shit you won't find on album jackets, buried in the lore of the players' lives, where all those cats were coming from creatively and biographically. While the whole aura of the jazz idiom has become imbued with the cliché of "urban-ness", most of the genre's trailblazers—like Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Mose Allison and Charlie Parker— were from the deep South, as am I. I felt a connection to Bird while thumbing through the pages of his back story in Kansas City, how he'd recognized early on that he was wanted to be someplace else... someplace more germane to his sensibilities... I guess we all felt that way while experiencing that one-of-a-kind hell that adolescence can be. Very few of us, however, have the minerals to follow through and act on those youthful impulses, because we let our lives get in the way; get tied down by the accoutrements of adulthood.

Before I realized it, I got sucked into Charlie Parker's world while listening to a live recording of a performance he'd cut in 1945 with Dizzy Gillespie at the Town Hall in New York and it was all over..."Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts" I listened and read and got reborn on the ontological level; I was shown a new facet of being.

A little clarification's in order.

In 1945 Charlie Parker was 25 years old, Gillespie was a couple of years older, and they were at the top of their game, weaving pastiches of notation while hacking, in unison, deeper into the sonic hinterlands leaving those without the chops light years behind—intentionally. "Go hard or go home." They were doing what they felt had to be done to take the genre to the next logical step in craftsmanship and were unrepentant. "Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts." Taken contextually, it's east to see that Bird and Dizzy had plans. The train was pulling out of the station. Initially, the stalwarts accustomed to big band swingers like the Glenn Miller Orchestra loathed bebop, either because they saw it as undanceable or pretentious, but Parker and his bebop brethren forged ahead anyhow. Hindsight 20/20 and all that, what can you say? The task these cats had set for themselves took a hell of a lot of power—both of the will and skill.

More context: In the early days of jazz, when it bubbled up from under speakeasy door cracks after gestating in the womb of the blues, artists like Sidney Bechet, Satchmo, Lester Young on up to Duke Ellington had helped introduce jazz to the masses up North in places like Chicago, D.C., Philadelphia and NYC, and soon enough white acts like Miller and Benny Goodman began to appropriate the new style while watering it down into what became a pop-ish; a formulaic hit parade, pasting a Caucasian face on it to make it palatable for mainstream (white) consumption. Don't get me wrong, a grip of black music would've been lost if people like Glenn, Benny, Artie Shaw and later Dave Brubeck and others didn't serve as racial conduits. After the tastemakers who ran the handful of labels began to realize that "race records" (black music) could make them lots of scratch, this phenomenon would repeat itself many times in the future in other genres with acts like Bill Haley & the Comets, Elvis, The Beatles, Pat Boone, The Righteous Brothers, Paul Butterfield, the Rolling Stones and more recently the Beastie Boys and Eminem and...Whatever, we've been there and bought the t-shirt.

When one considers the harsh racial climate of the '40s , the difficulty black artists had trying to procure paying gigs and the requisite union cards needed for getting session work (which most didn't), simplifying their idiom into jazz-lite did not bode well either fiscally or from an aesthetic perspective. Bird, Dizzy and co. knew this, acted on it and thus their concoction of stylistically challenging note-stacking and tandem riffing which helped them carve off a piece of the codified jazz paradigm and knead it into the subgenre that they christened bebop. Together, they careened into the vastness of the vanguard while simultaneously leaving those who lacked the stones or vision bobbing in the ripples of their wake as they cut swaths of sound onstage during the witching hours in smoky nightclubs all over America.

Songs like Gillespie's "Shaw Nuff," "Hot House" and "Groovin' High," and later Bird's "Ornithology," left a labyrinthine trail of cleft notes for me to follow decades later, pulling my ears in directions I'd yet to travel while staring at my bedroom ceiling in my tiny apartment back on the Upper West Side of Central Park. I followed in earnest and haven't stopped. Contrary to what those "star-bellied sneetches" (as Dr. Suess would call 'em) of the jazz world might imply, one doesn't have to be an encyclopedia of musicology to appreciate the "message between the blue notes" of a jazz song. That said, a proper dose of background helps throw everything you hear into sharper relief in a whomever's world you're listening to was living in when he cut whatever you're listening to. Besides, most of those self-styled "aficionados" are dilettantes (or at least started out as such)—they just won't admit it. Nobody knows everything about anything.

That's one of the first lessons you learn: when you're listening closely to a really tight outfit "breathing" together, all that pretension is eviscerated, the nut gets cracked open and something else reveals itself. You know it when it happens too...that's jazz, yo. I came into this world a decade and change after Charlie Parker had moved on, and I wasn't really feeling him/ his music until I'd gathered a gaggle of troubles and vices of my very own, which required me to unlock a couple of tumblers within...and then I couldn't get enough. It was in my DNA, like a primordial insect sealed in amber, and it made me follow the example given me, then stand in front of the looking glass and acknowledge things about me that I don't like to talk about at parties.

Charlie Parker's personal lifestyle choices left a lot to be desired; his many stays in psychiatric wards on both coasts, his lifelong struggle with heroin, then alcohol when he quit doping, and then his return to horse, which inevitably abbreviated his stay on the planet. I guess some spirits have to move through this world faster than others, and those of us not in the fast lane only get to see them streak past like comets in a fleeting blur of sound and light. And there are still others of us who hadn't the chance to merge onto that fray at all, and can only rubberneck at the tread marks, flames and smoke that these travelers leave behind in a smoldering, crumpled heap of tangled remains; the glowing aftermath of a life lived four times the speed of most.

To apply the word "genius" to Charlie Parker would be a misnomer, because although he had more talent in his pinky than an entire octet, I think that what he had was a heightened sense of intuition which he embraced fully and used to alter the direction of the music he loved to play, forcing it to evolve. Going beyond the latter and all that that might encapsulate, Bird was, above all else, human. The ease with which he accepted his foibles, infused them with his life experiences, smelted it all together as his muse and spun it out of the loom of his saxophone's bell is mind-blowing because he lived hard and the way he played was a metaphor for his lifestyle.

Bird's solos have been reverse engineered and picked apart by thousands of aspiring artists searching for their voices by tracing the blueprint of Parker's quest for the same thing. They often try to no avail—maybe because they couldn't lather up their necks for the cutting board and Occam's Razor. It's all well and good to live vicariously through the exploits of those you admire, but "eventually" you're going to have to float out into the abyss of the real, tethered to the gossamer twine of whatever really matters to you&mdash your truth (and only you can know what that is)...Bird taught me that the hard lessons come straight at you from the deep, dark crevices in your soul and without warning. I think he knew this all too well, so whether he was kicking junk in the bathroom of a Harlem flop house or sitting in the great room of a baroness' mansion, he had to be him. That last forced those around him (and those he'd never meet) to either accept him or get left behind, which he ultimately did anyway when he overdosed in 1955. What a waste.

In closing, saxphonically speaking (and in broad strokes for brevity), Charlie Parker was the concrete pavement on a bridge extending from the roots of jazz in New Orleans and Bechet and Armstrong and Young to the days of Davis, Coltrane, Artie Shaw&si=rhino">Julian "Cannonball" Adderly, Coleman and Yusef Lateef. The latter artists, in turn, formed the mile markers that takes the listener to players like Gato Barbieri, Grover Washington, Jr., both Wynton and Branford Marsalis and (dare I type it) Kenny G and Dave Koz. That last two have created an angry froth among "tech-heads" (like Parker and Gillespie themselves were back in the day) but maybe it might compel some group of young machers in the future to turn "cool jazz" on its ear and make it (once again) hip to be challenging. To thin out the herd of popsters by forcing their audiences (yet again) to follow them down the rabbit hole and return the genre to the level of sophistication that it was at back in Bird's day instead of the beastly elevator pap that it has become...I'm still a believer.

The simple fact that the music Parker cut sixty years ago is still influencing musicians, painters, writers, actors, architects and whomever else is telling. While today he'd probably get written off as a basket case, a junkie or worse, I don't think it would matter to Parker in the least. Despite the fact that he grew up in the Jim Crow South and died in the segregated North, his muse couldn't be squelched; he broke on through anyway. Sometimes you got to listen to the metronome ticking within and fuck the mea culpa angle. Charlie "Bird" Parker had a hand in teaching me about that last little bit, and for that I'll always be grateful—Happy Birthday Bird! You're gone but certainly not forgotten.

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