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Charlie Parker at 100: Like Mozart, he transformed an art form and his music has never stopped

There may not be many causes for celebration these days, but surely one is this year’s Charlie Parker centennial.

In his too short, too fast, too hard, too brilliant 34 years, Parker transformed an art form, no less than Mozart or Chopin or Gershwin did in their similarly brief time among us. Like those revolutionaries, Parker played his instrument – alto saxophone – with astonishing virtuosity. But Parker also did as much as anyone (and more than most) to forge a musical language, one that dominated 20th century jazz and continues to influence it in the 21st.

The world calls it “bebop,” but of course that term cannot begin to capture the rhythmic volatility, melodic intricacy, harmonic innovation and instrumental prowess Parker compressed into his outrageously complex solos. Listen to him take flight – a torrent of ideas soaring freely – and it’s no wonder he’s known and revered around the world simply as Bird.

But it’s critical to remember that his instrumental prowess and musical breakthroughs were not the result of innate genius alone. Unlike the prodigy Mozart, Parker — born Aug. 29, 1920 — came to music comparatively late, as a teenager, struggling to play alto and baritone saxophones in Kansas City, Missouri, joints.

“I was doing all right until I tried doing double tempo on ‘Body and Soul,'” he recalled of an early session at the High Hat, at 22nd and Vine. “Everybody fell out laughing. I went home and cried and didn’t play again for three months. Even before that time, I tried playing a job at the Orchid Room with my friend Robert Simpson, and they threw us out.”

Such humiliations may have driven Parker to try to attain a kind of perfection on alto saxophone. Like trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s stratospheric solos or pianist Art Tatum’s all-over-the-keyboard wizardry or vocalist Ella Fitzgerald’s phenomenally fleet and unerring scat, Parker’s work reached technical and expressive heights not matched before or since.

The first time pianist-bandleader Jay McShann encountered Parker, when the saxophonist was still a teenager in the 1930s, McShann couldn’t believe his ears.

“I had just gotten to Kansas City a couple weeks before, and I happened to be coming through 12th Street, when I heard this sound I simply hadn’t heard before,” McShann told me in 1990. “I immediately had to go in and see who it was, and it was Bird, though that’s not what anyone called him. So I went right up to him and said, ‘Man, where have you been? I thought I had met all the cats in Kansas City.’

“And Bird said, ‘No, you haven’t met me. I just got back to town. I live here, but I’ve been down in the Ozarks with George Lee’s band. I wanted to go down there to do some woodshedding.”

McShann soon hired him and was startled at his artistic evolution.

“He was the blowing cat in the band, developing so fast you couldn’t even measure his potential,” McShann said. “I can remember once when we were having rehearsals, Bird told me: ‘Man, I can’t make rehearsals tomorrow because I need to go do a little woodshedding. That old John Jackson sitting next to me is making me look bad.’

“All I could say was, ‘What do you mean?’ Because Bird already was doing things I never heard anybody else doing. Although there were plenty good alto players around – Benny Carter, Willie Smith – Bird was revolutionizing everything. He was coming up with things nobody else did; and the more he blew, the more he came up with.

“But Bird insisted: ‘I’ve got to go off and brush up on my reading, because old J.J. is blowing rings around me.’ … Sure enough, a few nights later, when we’re playing Kansas State University, we started out on this new arrangement we had been over three or four different times. And Bird cut right through it – on his first time. He could do anything he wanted. He would take a motif and expand on it and keep on expanding and expanding.”

Parker wasn’t merely embellishing familiar melodies in the swing tradition of the day. He was transforming them, taking snippets of a tune and building new musical structures upon it. Harmonically, he was venturing into what musicians call ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, tritones and whatnot, finding new melodic possibilities in those rarefied realms.

Suddenly jazz was sounding different than before – more rhythmically volatile, more harmonically ornate, more turbulent and mercurial and surprising.

“For us jazz musicians, the arrival of Bird was like a new god being born,” drummer Roy Haynes told me in 1990. “When I played with him onstage, it really seemed as if the drums played themselves. He was so strong, so persuasive, that there simply wasn’t that much effort that I had to exert. He had this way of turning everything inside out – melodies, harmonies, rhythms – that was so powerful, all you could do was play along.”

Parker’s music brought a generation of innovators along with him, among them visionaries such as drummers Max Roach and Kenny Clarke, pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, bassist Oscar Pettiford and singer-bandleader Billy Eckstine (whose 1940s bands included, at various points, Parker, Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Miles Davis, Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan and other bebop luminaries).

Nearly everyone of note followed in Parker’s and Gillespie’s wake.

Or, as Chicago tenor saxophone legend Von Freeman once put it to me, “Bird became the epitome of what every improvising musician wanted to be. In other words, the big secret of improvisation – if you want to call it a secret – is that everybody wants to be able to play, instantly and spontaneously, the music they hear inside. Bird could do that as well as anyone I’ve ever heard or worked with.”

It’s no secret that young musicians tried to absorb not only Parker’s methods but his way of life, including his dependence on drugs. Parker tried to dissuade his acolytes from taking on his troubles, to little avail.

Conventional wisdom that Bird’s addictions represented a desire to destroy himself may be a bit too glib, at least as far as pianist McShann was concerned.

“He wasn’t nearly as self-destructive as people generally think,” McShann told me. “All Bird wanted to do was to live. He enjoyed living, he loved living, and he wanted to live as much as he possibly could. … He lived it up so much, and so fast, because he didn’t want to miss nothing. That’s the thing of it. He didn’t want to miss nothing.

“So that’s the thing that killed him – how much he loved living.”

Regardless of whether one buys that analysis, there’s no mistaking the joy and fervor of Parker’s music, which squeezed every drop of life out of every fast-flying note.

He died on March 12, 1955, a young man in a badly aged body.

Yet his music remains remarkably current. You can’t go into a jazz club today and not hear it, and I don’t mean just in the form of his landmark compositions, such as “Confirmation” and “Donna Lee,” “Now’s the Time” and “Scrapple from the Apple,” “Billie’s Bounce” and “Parker’s Mood.” The very syntax of Parker’s work – its careening lines and angular melodic leaps, its breakneck tempos and extraordinarily complex harmonic structures, its sudden stops and starts and hairpin twists and turns – emerge constantly from other people’s horns.

Various jazz languages have emerged since Parker’s death, yet his idiom flourishes at the heart of the best of them.

And maybe always will.

Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.

hreich@chicagotribune.com