Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

Abstract

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker. By Stanley Crouch. New York: Harper, 2013. 369pp (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-06-200559-5. $27.99 Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker. By Chuck Haddix. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 188.pp (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-25203791-7. $24.95 Charlie "Yardbird" Parker (1920-1955) lived fast and died young. His innovations in bebop jazz, including his exquisite solos on alto saxophone, have made that life worth studying. The two new biographies reviewed here emphasize the roots of Parker's style in his birthplace, Kansas City, Missouri. Chuck Haddix's Bird may be read as a sequel to his 2005 book with Frank Driggs, Kansas City Jazz (Oxford University Press), which in my estimation had superseded Ross Russell's Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest. Haddix presents in seven chapters a straightforward account of the musician's life. Living in Kansas City, Haddix knows and makes full use of his local historical resources; the first three chapters, dealing with Parker's Kansas City beginnings and apprenticeships through 1942, are among the most informed in the book. The remainder of Haddix's narrative tells of Parker and Dizzy Gillespie formulating bebop during World War II, Parker's postwar musical prime, and his physical and mental declines until his 1955 death. For the New York and Los Angeles phases of Parker's career, Haddix has to rely on the research of other writers more than he had for the Kansas City years. Like every writer on Parker for the past forty years, he makes much use of Robert Reisner's Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (Citadel Press, 1962) and Ross Russell's Bird Lives! (Charterhouse, 1973). To his credit, he introduces a sheaf of contemporary reportage on the musician not reprinted in Carl Woideck's The Charlie Parker Companion (Schirmer Books, 1998). On the other hand, Haddix's inconsistent bibliographic citation practice in his endnotes lessens the usefulness of his book as a research springboard. Some books are cited in their reprints but not in the original editions (such as Reisner's Bird, cited only in its 1977 Da Capo reprint). He cites a few of Ross Russell's articles that were originally published in the French magazine Jazz Hot, but he fails to give proper bibliographic citations, acknowledging instead that copies of them may be viewed among the Russell papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; requests for these Jazz Hot articles using these sketchy citations would be returned unfulfilled by library interlibrary loan services. For some strange reason, he cites my correspondence with Russell, but not the book for which the letters were written, The Dial Recordings of Charlie Parker (Greenwood, 1998). That book would have provided him with some detailed bibliographic citations that could have verified Russell's Jazz Hot articles he saw at the Ransom Center, and it would have helped him avoid repeating Russell's erroneous information in Bird Lives! about Parker's Grand Prix du Disque honors. The indexer engaged for this book omits Charlie Parker, perhaps because Parker is mentioned on every page, but the inclusion of his name with some sub-index points would have been useful to locate what Haddix emphasizes about him. While Haddix's Bird is as well suited for general readers as Brian Priestley's Chasin' the Bird (Oxford University Press, 2006, which in turn is a revised edition of that author's Charlie Parker [Spellmount/ Hippocrene Books, 1984]), its uneven documentation may be frustrating to students and researchers who wish to examine the writer's sources. Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning is the first volume of his much-anticipated biography of Parker. His intention for this book is to try to convey nothing less than "the mythical and epic context of Kansas City" (p.337). The title "Kansas City Lightning" refers not to Parker, but to the specific brand of jazz heard in that city during the 1930s. …