Six months later, Parker was in Dallas recording with McShann for a Decca session as well as playing alto, Charlie arranged ‘Hootie Blues’. The first time that anyone outside of a club heard Charlie blow his horn was in November 1940, when the McShann Combo was heard on a Wichita radio station. It was Charlie Parker, just come in from Kansas City.” Parker was eighteen years old.īy 1940, Parker had separated from his wife and joined pianist Jay McShann’s Band, writing arrangements as well as leading the sax section. According to Eckstine: “He blew the hell out of that thing. He asks Goon Gardner, ‘Say man can I come up and blow your horn?'” Goon was more interested in a woman at the bar, so he just handed over his sax. According to Billy Eckstine: “A guy comes up that looks like he just got off a freight car the raggedest guy. The 65 Club, like many of the clubs, had a breakfast dance at which musicians from all over town came to hang out. Sometime around the end of 1938, Parker went to Chicago. Having got inside the music’s DNA, he was able to break free and become a brilliant improviser. The pianist with the band taught him about harmony and Charlie listened endlessly to records to dissect the solos and learn them off by heart. It was around the summer of 1937 that he got a permanent job at a holiday resort in the Ozark Mountains where he, at last, began to master the rudiments of proper playing. Even then his love of improvisation drove him on, and on one occasion he tried jamming with some of Count Basie‘s band, but this ended in humiliation when Jo Jones, Basie’s drummer, dropped his cymbal on the floor to indicate that the session was over and young Charlie was not good enough he held a grudge against the Basie band forevermore. Eventually, his office-cleaner mother scraped together enough to buy Charlie a beaten-up second-hand alto sax.īy the time he was sixteen, Charlie was married but playing around Kansas City wherever and whenever he could. He was besotted with music and the life of the musicians he saw around 12 th Street and Vine. By the time he was fourteen, Charlie’s father had left, leaving his doting mother to bring up Charlie, and they were living in the ‘jazz district’ of Kansas City. By all accounts, he had a decent childhood despite the fact that his father was more interested in gambling than parenting. Born to a teenage mother, his father had once worked in a travelling minstrel show. hailed from the jazz well that was Kansas City.
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