Review by Choice Review
Crouch, MacArthur Fellowship winner and long-time essayist on jazz and other topics, here tackles one of the two or three most important figures in the history of the music. Those expecting a straight or conventional biography will not find it here. Though Crouch adds to the historical record by including material gained through interviews with key figures in Parker's life--including his first wife, friends from his youth, his mentor Buster Smith--much of this volume is, as the title indicates, about Parker's "times"--and the times leading up to that. So one reads not only about Parker, but also about boxing champion Jack Johnson; Sherlock Holmes's drug use; the infamous Pendergast political machine of Parker's hometown, Kansas City, that created a Midwestern jazz mecca; the history of cinema; hoboing; and other topics both far-flung and more directly related to jazz and Parker. All of this is recounted in Crouch's extraordinarily colorful prose, in a writing style that exhibits some of the unpredictability of jazz improvisation. This volume covers the Bird's life up to 1940; a projected second volume will cover the celebrated latter part of his career. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. K. R. Dietrich Ripon College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
WHEN YOU'RE WRITING about the movies, the film critic and painter Manny Färber said, the language ought to emulate the art. "I don't think you can be mimetic enough," Färber told an interviewer. That is to say, screen violence calls for barbarous prose; romance requires a warmness of tone. This principle could be applied to writing about all the arts, or most of them - including jazz, as the cultural critic and novelist Stanley Crouch has demonstrated with his judicious, strategically crafted new book about Charlie Parker, the revered and immeasurably influential alto saxophonist and composer. "Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker" is, like the music made by its subject in his abbreviated life, free-flowing and severe, volatile, expansive, allusive and indulgent. From bravura sentence to serpentine paragraph, the book is a virtuoso performance of musical-literary mimesis. In jazz history, few figures carry the stature of Parker, who, with his friend and frequent collaborator Dizzy Gillespie, led a movement away from swing and into a realm that was once known as "modern jazz" but came to be identified by its onomatopoeic nickname, bebop. Parker and his colleagues and emulators took jazz out of the ballrooms of the big-band craze and turned it into a daunting and cerebral music centered on the highly personalized work of idiosyncratic soloists - a smallclub chamber art more suited to close listening and thinking than to dancing. Parker, more than anyone, made jazz the music of postwar American intellectualism. In jazz scholarship, few writers have been as devoted to their subjects as Crouch has been to Parker. More than 30 years have elapsed since Crouch began the work that has now borne fruit with "Kansas City Lightning." The early start allowed him to interview valuable sources who have been unavailable to other writers for some time: among them, Billy Eckstine, the singer and bandleader, who had hired Parker for the orchestra later known as the "cradle of bebop" band and who died in 1993; and Ralph Ellison, the novelist and onetime jazz trumpeter, who, before his death in 1994, provided Crouch with insight into how a single-note instrument can employ "discontinuity" to explore harmony in jazz improvisation. More significant, the years provided Crouch with plentiful opportunity to think about the development of Parker's art and to give voice to that thinking in prose befitting the subject. In the first section of "Kansas City Lightning," Crouch lays out, as a dramatic set piece, a battle of the bands between two swing orchestras in the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, a contest between the popular locals, conducted by Lucky Millinder, and the upstarts visiting from Kansas City, led by Jay McShann, in 1942. The latter ensemble featured a 21-year-old named Charlie Parker, then virtually unknown in New York. Crouch, in this section, explains the imperative of personal expression in jazz improvisation: "The point was to work at it and think about it and think about it until you'd produced a tone as recognizable as the texture of your voice." Later in the book, at a point that falls earlier in the chronology of Parker's story, Crouch describes how Parker, as a teenager living in Kansas City, practiced the alto saxophone alone for hours and hours in his house. "True mastery involved learning, not just emoting." "Kansas City Lightning" is a work of considerable learning. Crouch has a great deal to tell us about the world that produced Charlie Parker - so much, in fact, that he does not have room left in his book to cover the part of Parker's life that many readers will probably be most interested in. As the literary scholar Andrew Delbanco did with his book "Melville," Crouch is superb at situating his subject historically through the critical analysis of contextual (and, sometimes, almost extra-contextual) material. In "Kansas City Lightning," we learn not only about the aesthetic freedom that came with the hedonism in Tom Pendergast's infamously corrupt Kansas City; we learn about the quasi-pugilistic competition in the city's great jam sessions, and that has bearing, of a sort, when Crouch writes for several pages about Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight champion, and later takes up Joe Louis. By the time Crouch gets Charlie Parker to New York and his first recordings, we have read all about Scott Joplin, the ragtime master who died three years before Parker was born; about Buddy Bolden, the unrecorded cornetist from the primordial days of New Orleans jazz; about D.W. Griffith, the silent film director, and his role in establishing conceptions of the South in the public imagination; about Lester Young, the tenor saxophonist who played with elegiac grace for the Count Basie band; about Buster Smith, a harmonically advanced alto saxophonist (nicknamed Professor) who foreshadowed and tutored Charlie Parker; and the book is over. It is only 1942, and Parker has just begun to invent the music of his legacy. He has the near whole of his output as a mature artist and 13 years of very hard living ahead of him. (When Parker died at 34 in 1955, the coroner estimated him to be between 50 and 60 years old; such was the abuse to which he had subjected his body through drugs and alcohol.) Ultimately frustrating for all it withholds - or postpones for a follow-up volume - "Kansas City Lightning" provides more ideas and better writing in its 365 pages than any other book about Parker, notwithstanding Gary Giddins's wonderful extended essay with photographs, "Celebrating Bird," published in 1987. Another book about Parker - "Bird," by Chuck Haddix, an archivist for the University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries - has also recently been published, and its benign but bloodless presentation of the facts about Parker's life reminds one of the value of critical analysis and interpretation, however digressive. (The information in Haddix's book is not always accurate, either - it gives the name of Parker's first child as Leon Francis, when it was really Francis Leon. A slip-up on something like that would be negligible in another book aiming to do more than provide factual details.) Not everyone who thinks about jazz thinks the way Crouch does. He is perhaps overly taken with the notion of jazz playing as a kind of macho competition. He refers repeatedly to performances as "battles" and describes band musicians as "combatants," undervaluing the necessities of musical sensitivity and cooperation in the art of group improvisation. His ideas tend to be ideological. But he brings them to the page with forthright eloquence, and his fervor is endearing. In a passage that is not at all atypical of Crouch's writing in "Kansas City Lightning," he effectively presents the whole early history of jazz in one dizzying sentence: "First the cornet, then the trumpet, had dominated early jazz, taking the strutting, pelvic swing of the black marching bands, the melodic richness of the spirituals, the tumbling jauntiness of ragtime, and the belly-to-belly earthiness of the blues, and pulling them together into a music that purported to soothe the mournful soul, to soak the bloomers of listening girls, and generally to cause everyone to kick up a lot of dust." If writing like that takes three decades to do, I'm willing to wait another 30 years for Crouch to finish his work on Charlie Parker. KANSAS CITY LIGHTNING The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker By Stanley Crouch Illustrated. 365 pp. Harper. $27.99. BIRD The Life and Music of Charlie Parker By Chuck Haddix Illustrated. 188 pp. University of Illinois Press. $24.95. DAVID HAJDU is the music criticfor The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 8, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* To jazz lovers, the prospect of music and cultural critic Crouch taking on the life of the iconic Charlie Parker carries the anticipation that fans would have had at the great battles of the jazz bands or the cutting contests vividly described here. Crouch captures with novelistic verve the excitement of that period in covering the early years of Parker's ultimately short life, which contained within it so many warring elements that he has daunted even, perhaps especially, awestruck biographers. Crouch's eyes are wide open, and he lends his considerable talents to a jazz biography that ranks with the very best, including Robin D. G. Kelley on Thelonious Monk. Though extensively researched, this is less academic, informed by Crouch's extensive knowledge and his deft hand with complex elements of American music. The occasional cliche or clunky wording is offset by more frequent profundities, e.g., the double consciousness so fundamental to jazz: the burdens of the soul met by the optimism of the groove. Parker's influences are made clear (Lester Young and Roy Eldridge, sure, but much here on the often-overlooked Buster Smith and guitarist Biddy Fleet), as is the vital context of Parker's hometown, the wide-open and musically fertile Kansas City. This is, it must be noted, the first of two projected volumes. Those waiting expectantly for Crouch's take on Parker's full maturity (and drug-ridden decline, though foreshadowed here) and his classic collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie and others will need to be patient.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With the straight-ahead timing and the ethereal blowing of a great jazzman, Crouch delivers a scorching set in this first of two volumes of his biography of Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, capturing the downbeats and the up-tempo moments of the great saxophonist's life and music. Drawing on interviews with numerous friends, fellow musicians, and family members, Crouch traces Parker's life from his earliest days in Kansas City, Mo., his early romance and eventual marriage to Rebecca Ruffin, and his heroin addiction to his involvement with his mentors Lester Young and Buster Smith. Crouch brings to life the swinging backdrop against which Parker honed his craft: "Kansas City was becoming a kind of kind of experimental laboratory, where the collective possibilities of American rhythm were being refined and expanded on a nightly basis." Parker eventually decides that Kansas City isn't big enough for him, and he rides the rails to Chicago and New York, ending up on Buster Smith's doorstep, eager to absorb all the lessons the big city has to teach him. "By now, he had long since mastered the physical challenges of playing... and become preoccupied with the coordination of mind and muscle necessary to make his own way." As Crouch reminds us, however, "Charlie Parker, no matter how highly talented, was not greater than his idiom. But his work helped to lead the art form to its most penetrating achievement." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A veteran cultural critic and jazz historian tells the simultaneous stories of the rise of jazz and the emergence of one of its brightest comets, Charlie Parker (19201955). Crouch (Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz, 2006, etc.), whose journalism has appeared in just about every major venue and whose books have earned widespread critical appreciation, is uniquely qualified to guide readers on this tour. He begins in Des Moines, Iowa, where Parker, 21, was touring with the Jay McShann Orchestra. Here, we get an early hint of troubles to come when Crouch notes that Parker's "disappearing acts were his specialty." Hard drugs would limit Parker's ascension and eventually bring him down. But Crouch's agenda comprises not just the story of the early Parker. He tells the tales of towns (New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, New York), of ragtime and jazz legends (Scott Joplin, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum and others of lesser name but considerable significance), and of families and friends. We see Parker's impecunious struggles to learn his instrument (alto sax), his repeated visits to the pawn shop (morphine was not free), his experiences of having to borrow other players' instruments, his gift as a musician, his ferocious work ethic (striving to find his own sound) and his transformation into a dweller of the night. We learn, as well, about his youthful love affair that eventually became his first marriage. He became a father and then left his family to pursue his dreams, which no longer included them. Crouch takes us with Parker to Chicago and then to New York City, where he was just about to make it when the story stops. Crouch is a phrasemaker, and the text is chockablock with memorable lines. A friend's death "was like drinking a cup of blues made of razor blades." A story rich in musical history and poignant with dramatic irony.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
