Charlie Parker: Born in the Cutting Sessions

Charles Parker Junior was born in Kansas City, Kansas on August twenty-ninth, nineteen twenty, and grew up across the river on the Missouri side, where his mother moved the family when he was seven. He started playing alto saxophone at age eleven or twelve, joined the musician's union at fifteen, and spent the next several years doing what every young musician in Kansas City did: sitting in on cutting sessions at the after-hours clubs around Eighteenth and Vine, watching the older men play, and getting cut down by them when his technique failed.

He was cut badly, by his own account and by the accounts of musicians who were there. At a session at the Reno Club, the drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal across the room in the direction of the teenage Parker, the traditional signal that a musician was not ready and should sit down. Parker went home. He spent the next year practicing, sometimes twelve or fourteen hours a day, until he had rebuilt his approach from the foundation. He came back to the sessions. He was not cut again.

What he was developing, in the Kansas City clubs through the late nineteen thirties, was not yet bebop, but it contained the seeds of it. He was hearing the riff-based Kansas City swing style and hearing past it, running the harmonic implications of chord changes at speeds and with a melodic sophistication that the style had not required before. When he went to New York around nineteen thirty-nine and began sitting in at Harlem clubs, he had already worked out most of what would become bebop. The music he would record with Dizzy Gillespie beginning in nineteen forty-five would permanently alter what jazz was.

Parker died on March twelfth, nineteen fifty-five, in New York. He was thirty-four years old. The coroner who examined him guessed he was somewhere between fifty and sixty. The coroner's official cause of death was lobar pneumonia, with cirrhosis and a heart attack also noted. He had spent himself at full speed.