Charlie Parker was just nineteen when he left Kansas City on a freight train headed for Chicago in the fall of 1939. In the Windy City, he had to pawn his alto sax—his only possession—so that he could hitch a ride on a band bus to New York City. An old K.C. cohort, tenor player Prof Smith, bumped into Parker on a Manhattan street corner shortly after his arrival. “He sure did look awful when he got in,” Smith recalled. Parker was dressed in rags, and noted Smith, “he’d worn his shoes so long that his legs had swollen up.” It was an inauspicious beginning for a man whose name would become synonymous with cool.
When Charlie Parker was eleven his father was stabbed to death by a hooker in a drunken brawl. Parker hardly knew him. When he was fifteen, he asked his doting mother for a saxophone. Working the graveyard shift cleaning a local Western Union office, she scraped together forty-five dollars for a threadbare, twenty-year-old pawnshop sax held together by rubber bands.
His mother said Charlie was a bright child, but the only thing he ever worked at was music. He got his first horn when he joined the Lincoln High School marching band. During the Prohibition-era mayoral reign of a musclebound liquor vendor named Tom Pendergast, the nightclubs and dance halls of Kansas City’s red-light district, the lawless Combat Zone, featured African-American jazz bands ’round the clock. Night after night, Parker saw his momma off to work on the trolley car, then lied his way into the Club Reno or any one of a dozen other nightspots to drink in the saxophone glories of his heroes: “the Rabbit,” Johnny Hodges, from Duke Ellington’s Orchestra; “the Hawk,” Coleman Hawkins; and Parker’s main man, “the President,” Lester Young. Parker acquired a phonograph with a setscrew that allowed him to slow down the turntable so he could steep himself in Young’s blues-drenched nuances. When people heard Charlie Parker play, they said he sounded like Lester Young, only twice as fast.
When Parker was fifteen, a girlfriend, Rebecca Ruffin, a woman four years his senior, moved in with him and his mother. Parker and Ruffin had a son the next year. If Parker’s mother hoped the birth of her first grandchild would straighten out her unruly son, she was surely disappointed. When she was three months pregnant, Rebecca discovered her husband in their bedroom with the blinds drawn, shooting heroin. Calmly rewrapping around his neck the tie he’d just used to raise a vein, Parker came over, kissed her goodnight, and said that he had to go to work.
The jam session, Ralph Ellison writes in Shadow and Act, is a school where “it is more meaningful to speak, not of a course of study, of grades and degrees, but of apprenticeships, ordeals, initiation ceremonies.” The first session Charlie Parker ever got into was at Kansas City’s High Hat Club, which featured a gong like the one Ted Mack used on his network radio show, The Original Amateur Hour. When he got mixed up while playing the chorus of Coleman Hawkins’s hit “Body and Soul,” Parker was gonged. He spent the next two years woodshedding in the backwaters of the Ozarks before making his way to New York. One night in December 1939, during a jam session at Dan Wall’s Chili House, an all-night restaurant on Seventh Avenue and 139th Street in Harlem, he experienced a sudden epiphany: “I could play the thing I was hearing. I came alive!”
One day in 1940, Dizzy Gillespie, a trumpet player in Cab Calloway’s horn section, was in Kansas City for a show at the Booker T. Washington Hotel when a local musician friend “pulled his coat” about a saxophone player named Charlie Parker. In his memoir, To Be or Not to Bop, Gillespie remembers that first encounter. Though he was only twenty-two, Gillespie had played around New York with saxophone giants like Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young.
Charlie Parker wasn’t interested in how he looked. The suit he was wearing looked like it had been slept in, his tie like it had been tied with a pair of pliers. But the fastidious Gillespie was “astounded” by what Charlie Parker could play. “Those other guys I had been playing with weren’t my colleagues,” he remembered. “But the moment I heard Charlie Parker, I said, there is my colleague.” Miles Davis explained the relationship to Quincy Troupe like this: “Bird was bebop’s spirit, Dizzy was its head and its hands.”
Dizzy Gillespie, 1948.