Golden Nuggets

Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, born 100 years ago on 29th August 1920, wasn’t just a blazingly talented jazz saxophonist. He really lived the life, too; his death from pneumonia at the age of 34 came after years of mental illness, attempted suicides and drug addiction.

Like Herman Goering before him, Parker first got hooked after taking morphine to treat an injury. In November 1936, a bus carrying the 16-year-old musical prodigy (already married to the first of his three wives) crashed into a tree en route to a show in Missouri. He broke three ribs and fractured his spine.

The accident brought two important results: Parker’s insurance company paid out for a new alto sax, and his doctor put him on morphine. He promptly got addicted to both.

You could rhapsodise about Parker’s mastery of searingly fast solos, or his introduction of revolutionary time signatures and chord sequences, or the relentless energy of his music as a whole.

You could linger on his pioneering use of phrasing and tone that were as startling in their way as those of Jimi Hendrix 20 years later.

Or you could talk about the way Parker took the sweet, danceable tunes of a Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller and thoroughly shook them up for the postwar generation.

But perhaps the best overview came from Miles Davis, who knew a thing or two about the subject. ‘You can tell the history of jazz in four words,’ Davis said. ‘Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.’ CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD