At HarperCollins, my working team has included my editor, Calvert Morgan; his assistant, Kathleen Baumer; jacket designer Milan Bozic; managing editor Keith Hollaman; and publicist Gregory Henry. We were brought together by my agent, Georges Borchardt. I thank them all, and the many others not mentioned by name, who made such demands on my sensibility and intelligence.
Sources
Besides the in-person interviews noted in the Acknowledgments, other sources consulted in research for this book include:
Armstrong, Louis. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. Boston: Da Capo,
1986.
Baker, David N., ed. New Perspectives in Jazz. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.
Basie, Count, with Murray, Albert. Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie. New York: Da Capo, 2002.
Bergreen, Lawrence. Capone: The Man and the Era. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Blesh, Rudi, and Janis, Harriet. They All Played Ragtime, New York: Oak
Publications, 1974.
Burroughs, John. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of
the FBI, 1933-34. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Bushell, Garvin. Jazz from the Beginning. New York: Da Capo, 1998.
Calasso, Roberto. La Folie Baudelaire. Translated by Alastair McEwen. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
_____. Tiepolo Pink. New York: Knopf, 2009.
Caplan, David. Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Cardullo, Bert, ed. Jean Renoir: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi,
2005.
Crouch, Stanley. Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. New York: Basic Civitas,
2007.
Dary, David. Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries. Lawrence, KA: University
of Kansas Press, 1989.
Dexter, Dave. Jazz Cavalcade: The Inside Story of Jazz. Whitefish, MN: Literary
Licensing, 2011.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002.
Driggs, Frank, and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A
History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race
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_____. The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994.
Durham, Philip, and Jones, Everett L. The Negro Cowboys. Bison Books, 1983.
Ellison, Ralph. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings. Robert O’Meally,
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Viking Press, 2010.
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Giddins, Gary. Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker. New York: Birch Tree Books, 1987.
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Johnson, Stephen. Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy. Amherst & Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.
Jones, Papa Jo. Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones. Edited by Paul
Devlin. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Katz, William Loren. The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History of the African American Role in the Westward Expansion of the United States. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
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Cambridge University Press, 1990.
_____. Conversations with the Blues. New York: Horizon Press, 1983.
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Russell, Ross. Bird Lives. New York: Da Capo, 1996.
_____. Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest. New York: Da Capo, 1973.
Smith, Willie “The Lion,” Music on My Mind. New York: Da Capo, 1978.
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Norton, 1997.
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Tolland, John. The Dillinger Days. Boston: Da Capo, 1995
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Ward, Geoffrey. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. New
York: Vintage, 2006.
Webb, Walter Prescott. The Great Plains. University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
Weil, Simone. War and the Iliad. New York: New York Review Books, 2005.
Woideck, Carl. The Charlie Parker Companion. New York: Schirmer, 1998.
_____. Charlie Parker: His Music and Life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1998.
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.
Page
5-36: This account of Charlie Parker’s arrival in New York with the Jay McShann Orchestra was reconstructed from interviews with McShann, Gene Ramey, Oliver Todd, John Tumoni, Panama Francis, and others. McShann’s memory for dialogue was especially useful.
19: The image of “knives being thrown at the audience” belongs to trumpeter
Johnny Carisi, as told to Loren Schoenberg.
19: Charlie Parker’s nickname “Bird,” short for “Yardbird,” is the subject of continuing and probably irresolvable speculation. Some believe that “yardbird” was slang for an unreliable person. Jay McShann told Robert Reisner that “yardbird” was the saxophonist’s slang for chicken, one of his favorite meals. Once, McShann recalled, when the car Charlie was traveling in hit a chicken in the road, he shouted to the driver: “No, stop! Go back and pick up that yardbird.” The bird was brought back to the hotel and cooked up for the band. Reisner, Bird, 150.
20-21: Panama Francis and Gene Ramey, taped interviews, 1981.
; 22-27: Ramey, McShann, Ralph Ellison, and John Tumoni in interviews and
in conversation.
27: Oliver Todd, taped interview, 1981.
28: Jay McShann, taped interview, 1981.
29: Orville Minor, taped interview, 1981.
30-36: Ramey, Howard McGee, Jay McShann, taped interviews. Also drew on
conversation with Chubby Jackson, the Blue Note, New York, NY.
37-42: For background material on the Great Plains, I drew on Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains; William Loren Katz, The Black West; Philip Durham and
Everett L. Jones, The Negro Cowboys; and David Dary, Cowboy Culture.
42-43: Rebecca Parker, taped interviews, 1981, and untaped conversations throughout the 1980s. Addie Parker told Robert Reisner that Charles Sr. “was playing and singing on the vaudeville stages around Kansas City” when they met. Reisner, Bird, 159.
43: Addie Parker’s maiden name appears variously as “Boxley” or “Boxely,” or “Boyley,” “Bayley,” or “Bailey.” See Giddins, Celebrating Bird, 26.
44: Addie Parker to Robert Reisner, in Bird, 159.
44-46: Edward Reeves, taped interview, 1981.
47: Addie Parker to Robert Reisner, in Bird, 163.
48-49: Edward Reeves and Sterling Bryant, taped interviews, 1981.
50-51: Edward Reeves, Rebecca Parker, Ophelia Ruffin Handy, taped interviews, 1981. Rebecca’s age is difficult to pin down; to the author and other interviewers (see Giddins, 34) she gave her birth year as 1920, though Addie Parker told Robert Reisner that she was several years older (Reisner, 158ff).
52: Ophelia Ruffin Handy, taped interview, 1981.
53: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981.
54-57: Rebecca Parker, ibid.
60: John Tumino, taped interview, 1981, and later conversations.
60-61: Bushell, Jazz from the Beginning.
62: Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, 5.
63: Emma Bea Crouch, untaped conversations.
63: Wallis, Michael. Pretty Boy, 226.
64-65: Edward Reeves, taped interview, 1981.
66-67: Burroughs, John, Public Enemies, 51ff; Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 168ff.
68-70: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981
77: Ophelia Ruffin and Rebecca Parker, taped interviews, 1981.
78: The rumor may be apocryphal. See Caplan, Questions of Possibility, 9, 141–2.
80-81: Ralph Ellison, untaped telephone conversation.
80-82: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981; detail of the forty-five-dollar alto comes from Addie Parker to Robert Reisner, in Bird, 166.
83: Edward Mayfield, Jr. to Robert Reisner, in Bird, 142; Julian Hamilton, taped interview, 1981.
85: Harlan Leonard quoted in Russell, Ross, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest.
87: Marshall Stearns and Jim Maher, radio interview with Parker, 1953. Slightly differing transcriptions appear in Woideck, The Charlie Parker Companion, 93, and at http://www.plosin.com/milesAhead/BirdInterviews.html#500500. The interview itself is available on New Bird — Rare Live Recordings & Interviews, Swan Records/The Orchard, 1999/2010.
88: Addie Parker to Robert Reisner, in Bird, 162.
89-90: Fred Dooley, taped interview. 1981. Lawrence Keyes told Robert Reisner that his first band was called the Deans of Swing (Bird, 129). However, in Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History, Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix present contemporary evidence suggesting that, when Charlie Parker was a member in the summer of 1935, Keyes’s original band was called the Ten Chords of Rhythm (or simply the Chords of Rhythm, after expanding to twelve pieces). Driggs and Haddix, 164-5.
91-92: Ophelia Ruffin Handy, taped interview, 1981.
93-94: Rebecca Parker and Oliver Todd, taped interviews, 1981.
100-1: Billy Eckstine, conversations at Blue Note, New York, NY, 1985.
102-4: This account draws on Ward, Unforgivable Blackness.
104: Hughes, Autobiography, 315.
104-09: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981.
105: Charlie’s union card, reproduced at http://www.birdlives.co.uk/index.php/adolescence.html, shows that he paid his first union dues just seven days before he proposed to Rebecca (though the Bird Lives site gives the number as four). The original marriage certificate, completed by hand (reproduced at http://www.birdlives.co.uk/index.php/adolescence.html), gives Charlie Parker’s age as “under twenty-one” and Rebecca’s as “over eighteen.” Giddins reproduces a 1961 typewritten copy (Celebrating Bird, 43).
114: Jean Renoir, in Jean Renoir: Interviews, 164.
114: Earl Coleman, taped interview, 1985.
116: Hermann Broch, “The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff,” in War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, 109.
119: Bushell, Jazz from the Beginning, 25.
119: Bob Redcross, taped interview at Blue Note, New York, NY, 1985.
121-22: Gene Ramey, taped interview, 1981
123-26: Southern, The Music of Black Americans; Crouch, Considering Genius, 217.
127: Johnson, Stephen. Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, 98.
130-31: Blesh and Janis, They All Played Ragtime, 38.
131-32: Harry “Sweets” Edison, interviews about Kansas City and Lester Young, 1985 and thereafter.
132-36: Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 19.
138-40: Bushell, Jazz from the Beginning; Russell, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest, 40.
141: Gene Ramey on Page “balancing” the rhythm section, taped interview, 1981.
142-43: Basie and Murray, Good Morning Blues, 120.
143: Oliver Todd, taped interview, Kansas City, 1981.
145: Hammond, John. “Kansas City: A Hotbed for Fine Swing Musicians—Andy Kirk and Count Basie’s Elegant Music Spoils City for Out-of-Town Name Brands.” Down Beat, September 1936.
146: Oliver Todd, taped interview about Charlie Parker and Robert Simpson.
147: Lawrence Keyes and Rebecca Parker, taped interviews, 1981.
148: Clarence Davis, Gene Ramey, taped interviews, 1981.
151: Ellison, Living with Music, 60.
151-54: Gene Ramey, on the night he and Countess Johnson heard Charlie Parker humiliated by Jo Jones, taped interview, 1981.
155: John Jackson, telephone interview, 1981.
157-59: Lester Young, final interview, 1959. Available in Porter, A Lester Young Reader, 173.
160: Eddie Barefield, taped interviews, conducted at his home in the Bronx and at the Village Vanguard, New York, 1981 and thereafter.
160-61: Frank Wess, interview about Lester Young and the 1930s jam sessions, New York, NY, 1985.
163-72: Clarence Davis and Rebecca Parker, taped interviews, 1981.
165: The “woman piano player” Davis mentions was likely George Lee’s sister, the singer Julia Lee.
180-81: Clarence Davis, taped interview, 1981.
182: Roy Eldridge, conversations, New York, NY, 1985-90.
184: Horowitz anecdote: Loren Schoenberg, conversation.
186: Gene Ramey, taped interview, 1981.
187: Gazzaway, Don. “Buster and Bird: Conversations with Buster Smith,” The Jazz Review, 1960.
188-93: Buster Smith, taped interview, Dallas, 1981.
193: Russell, Ross. Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest, 80.
194-95: Ralph Ellison, conversations.
196-98: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.
198-99: Ralph Ellison, conversations.
200-202: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.
202-203: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.
203: Although Ira Alexander “Bus” Smith was actually Bennie Moten’s nephew, the bandleader treated him like his little brother, and the idea stuck. “Bennie kept referring to me as his kid brother, so I legalized the name Moten,” he recalls in an interview quoted in Driggs and Haddix, Kansas City Jazz, 94.
203-204: Jay McShann, taped interview,
1981.
204: Orville Minor, interview, 1981.
205: Orville Minor, interview, 1981.
206-207: Oliver Todd, interview, 1981.
210: As he worked on refining his own bracing, vibrato-free tone, Parker must have been affected by Smith’s sound. In his September 1936 Down Beat article about Kansas City, John Hammond singled Smith out: “his technique is unlimited and his tone quite free from the cloying quality which colored alto men took over from the Lombardo tribe.” Quoted in Driggs and Haddix, Kansas City Jazz, 145.
211: Orville Minor, interview, 1981.
212: Doris Parker, interviews, New York, NY, 1985–2000.
213: Clarence Davis, interview, 1981.
213: Gene Ramey, interview.
214: Buddy Jones to Robert Reisner, in Bird, 124.
214-16: Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Sign of Four, in The Complete Sherlock
Holmes. New York: Doubleday.
216: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.
217: Gene Ramey, interview, 1981.
218: Orville Minor on “smokers,” interview, 1981.
219-21: Jay McShann, interview.
222-23: Gene Ramey, interview, 1981; Jay McShann, interview, 1981.
226: Clarence Davis, taped interview, 1981.
227: Tommy Douglas to Robert Reisner, in Bird, 82-3. Parker was likely closer to
seventeen years old when he played with Douglas.
227: Jay McShann, interview.
228: Gene Ramey, interview.
229-236: Rebecca Parker, taped interview, 1981.
237-241: Jay McShann, interview.
241: Harlan Leonard in Russell, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest, 174.
242: Gene Ramey, taped interview, 1981.
243-45: Junior Williams, interview, 1985.
245-46: Buster Smith, interview, 1981.
247-248: Gene Ramey and Jay McShann, interviews, 1981.
249: Addie Parker, quoted in Reisner, Bird, 163.
249-52: Buster Smith, taped interview, 1981.
253-55: Rebecca Parker, interview, 1981.
265: Rebecca Parker, interview, 1981.
268: A former Cotton Club dancer, interviewed for Village Voice article about The Cotton Club, a film by Francis Ford Coppola, 1984. The dancer recalled traveling to Chicago, where he saw Louis Armstrong at a gangster club in Cicero, IL.
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