Jazz...

“The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” was a pervasive text throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras and continued to have influence over the War years and into the modern era. It continues to be quoted today and remains one of the most instantly-recognisable of English texts. We’ve seen that it has inspired illustrators, book designers and publishers, but its influence moves even beyond these. There are many occasions where lines from the “Rubaiyat” have been used as inspiration, or as touchstones to action or cogitation. Here is a musical instance.

Charlie “Bird” Parker lived a life that seems to have taken its cue from Khayyam’s Carpe Diem philosophy. He grew up in hardscrabble conditions and managed to soar above the limits of his origins to become the greatest jazz-player and innovator of all time. He is credited with defining the scope of modern jazz music and for the creation of the bebop style, along with “Dizzy” Gillespie and others. Unfortunately, Parker had serious mental problems stemming from substance abuse issues, involving heroin and painkillers, and his output was thus reduced to a short and intense 15-year period. After dying of an overdose in the New York apartment of his patron Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, the Rothschild heiress and jazz fan, doctors thought they were investigating the body of a man in his late 50s or early 60s; Parker was only 35.

As a black musician in less-than-tolerant times, Parker was exposed to all of the thoughtless cruelty inflicted upon performers of colour during his career, and it is no wonder that he chose to “seize the cup that clears Today of all regrets” in order to keep on going. He was often found to have sold his saxophone or his train tickets in order to pay for his next fix, and these instances were alternatively the making or breaking of him.

Ironically, just as Parker and Gillespie were formalizing the identity of the bebop sound, a two-year strike broke out to address inconsistencies in the payment of royalties received by musical performers. This led to a period where music was forbidden to be recorded for the purposes of re-playing by television or film companies, or for sale as vinyl discs. Some bodies were exempted – such as the authority that created vinyl discs for US troops stationed overseas (so-called “V-discs”) but, for the most part, the creation of bebop was not recorded at its birth and would have to wait until the ban had been lifted to begin its proliferation.

Another ironic instance concerns what was, perhaps, Parker’s greatest live performance. An ad hoc production ensemble somehow convinced Parker, “Dizzy” Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell and Max Roach to play the Massey Hall in Toronto on the 15^th of May in 1953. There were legal, personal and logistical problems galore in getting the five players there (Parker was contractually forbidden to attend – he performed as “Charlie Chan”) and, in the end, a championship boxing bout across the street between “Rocky” Marciano and “Jersey Joe” Walcott meant that the concert was so poorly attended that the producers were unable to pay the musicians for showing up. Nevertheless, it remains a defining moment in the history of jazz and perhaps Charlie Parker’s best live performance. Fortunately, Charles Mingus recorded the event, unbeknownst to many present, and, despite having to later dub in his own bass lines which were lost in the process, managed to capture an ephemeral moment in jazz music.

On top of all this, Parker showed up without his sax, having sold it to buy drugs en route, and he played a borrowed plastic instrument.

Like many performers of the time, Parker felt quite at home in France, where jazz and its performers – regardless of background – were well received. In 1949, he toured there and ended up on the Left Bank of the Seine, holding court for his admirers with the literati of the day. As Geoffrey Haydon has it in his book Quintet of the Year:

“The late-night jam sessions, in the cabarets on the Left Bank of the Seine, were blessed by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Pilgrims flocked across Europe to engage Parker in intellectual debate. Champagne was the all-day drink. Obtaining drugs was no problem. A critic from the ‘Melody Maker’, bible for Great Britain’s syncopated music fans, hastened from London bearing a questionnaire he had compiled on behalf of his readers. Parker, no doubt charmed by the English accent, rewarded each question with a quotation from the ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’”

And there you have it: it seems that FitzGerald’s and Omar’s philosophies were a guiding influence upon the life of Charlie “Bird” Parker and the development of jazz music.

This “Bird of Time” had “but a little way to fly”, but he was on the wing…