(1988) Producer Clint Eastwood, a jazz votary, directed this affective account of the life of Charles Christopher Parker Jr (1920-1955), aka Yardbird or just Bird. I'll play for you just the melody of this complex composition. For the figures that thread through it, extending the chord changes, stretching the present backward through the past, you'll have to hear for yourself.

Addicted to heroin since he was fifteen, in the last year of his life, the prodigious Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker), bebop saxophonist and composer, struggled to hold onto his sanity, his wife Chan Richardson Parker (Diane Venora) and two children (his two-year-old daughter Pree has recently died), his health (cirrhosis of the liver, bleeding ulcers, weakened heart), his complex style of playing jazz (rock'n'roll as represented by Buster Franklin's performance at the Parliament in New York City has taken the stage by rage), and a musical career.

After being laughed off the stage as a youngster in Kansas City in the presence of Buster Franklin, Charlie "from just around" figures out a new way of improvisation on his sax, backing singer Violet Welles - violet, violins, violence, well what else - transforming "Cherokee" into something else, making things fit. Eight years later in New York he takes over Don Byas's place as tenor saxophonist in Dizzy Gillespie's band, becoming the Yardbird.

In the winter bebop invasion of Hollywood in 1946, Bird alone suffers a mental breakdown and is hospitalized after the tour ends abruptly (poor reception of the band's unfamiliar sound and a radio ban on music that perverts young minds), from drugs and unfamiliar surroundings. In Paris the audiences are crazy about jazz; in Europe he could live comfortably (not richly) and be treated as a man, but he returns to the Big Apple where a club has been named Birdland in his honor.

Dizzy ((Samuel E. Wright) and Duke Ellington make a living as musicians, but junkies can't. "I can kick," Bird insists. He forms a quintet, which includes white trumpeter Red Rodney Chudnick (Michael Zelniker), formerly with Gene Krupa's group, whom he calls Albino Red, for a musical tour of the Deep South. After Red gets sentenced to a year in prison for possession, Bird performs and records with strings.

After Bird's New York cabaret license is suspended for drug abuse, he asks Dizzy for his secret: Don't give them the satisfaction of being right about you, of leaving you with nothing more than people talking about you when you're dead.

Retired from being gorgeous, the one-time dancer, white half-Jewish Chan, who pregnant had demurred from accompanying him on his first trip to California - "Hunt for drugs during the day and lead the applause at night?" - has remained loyal as wife and mother; she would write a memoir, My Life in E-Flat.

On his way to Boston for a gig, Charlie gets caught in traffix without his ax, reaching for the ninth on a tonic, but he can't make it fit.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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