BIRD
With Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora, Michael Zelniker, Samuel E. Wright, Keith David, and Damon Whitaker.
Two telling documents that we have about Charlie Parker, both from the early 50s:
(2) On a TV show called Stage Entrance, aired in 1952, newspaper columnist Earl Wilson and jazz critic Leonard Feather present Downbeat awards to Parker and Gillespie, who go on to play a version of the bebop standard “Hot House.” This is the only surviving sound-film record of the greatest jazz musician who ever lived, and though Parker’s solo is not extended, nor one of his best, it’s enough to show his brilliance. The segment can be seen in its entirety (and is, incidentally, the most valuable and instructive thing) in Gary Giddins and Kendrick Simmons’s video documentary Celebrating Bird, released last year to coincide with Giddins’s book of the same title (and currently available on tape).
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Parker’s music does speak louder and stronger than words, and if I’ve lingered over these two fleeting examples of his speech and his anger, it’s mainly to indicate a key element that I find missing in Clint Eastwood’s remarkable depiction of Parker in Bird. While it must be said at the outset that Bird is an extraordinary achievement as a jazz biography, as a portrait of the jazz life, and as a work of screen writing and directorial craft, it is an achievement bounded by specific limits, most of them ideological and/or musical. The film runs a full 161 minutes, and for a commercial release is an unusually serious and uncompromising treatment of its subject. As a Hollywood fiction feature about jazz, it can’t even be said to have competitors, and as confirmation of Eastwood’s status as an ambitious auteur, it clearly surpasses everything else he’s done–even if no small part of this is due to Joel Oliansky’s script, and most likely to Chan Parker’s unpublished memoir, Life in E-Flat, which served as its principal source.
To think our way back to what bebop must have sounded like when it was new–in effect, to unlearn the musical culture that surrounds us today–is a difficult if not impossible task. Thus we can forgive (even if we can’t fully excuse) one of the film’s few musical gaffes: It shows a teenage Parker (played by Whitaker’s brother Damon) being humiliated at a Kansas City jam session for his awkward solo, when the drummer hurls a cymbal at his feet. The incident is historically accurate–Jo Jones was the drummer–but the music being played at this session in the film is already bebop, years before it was developed in New York by Parker, Gillespie, Monk, and Powell. Also, as jazz critic Neil Tesser has pointed out to me, the nature of Parker’s awkwardness here isn’t accurate either. In the session, Parker–a risk taker from the beginning–moved out of the original key and got lost. In the film he errs in the opposite direction, playing a solo that the drummer regards as too simple or cornball.
These complaints apply mainly to the sound-track album. In the film, which has myriad dramatic needs, the technique is much more defensible (indeed, the electric charge and immediacy of “Lester Leaps In” would be partially lost without it). Yet the dramatic needs of Bird take a different kind of toll on the music. By my own rough estimate, more than 90 minutes of the film have to pass before we hear one full Parker solo from beginning to end without interruption or interference (a buoyant, shrieking version of “Cool Blues”). From this standpoint, Bird is less satisfying as a listening experience than Round Midnight, despite the fact that its music is immeasurably better.
