Review by Choice Review
Balancing historical research and anecdotal information, Haddix artfully crafts a rich context for understanding the musical genius--and enigma--that was Bird. The story unfolds chronologically; the author acknowledges the musician's less savory connections with substance abuse, rampant sexuality, and racism--taking care not to fall into voyeurism--but gives equal time to Parker's attempts to get clean and his dedication to his family. In short, the book neither deifies nor vilifies Parker, but presents him as a human being whose artistry never quite managed to triumph over the complexities of the time and of his particular circumstances. It should be noted that the book is primarily a biography; it provides few details about Parker's musicality beyond references as to whether a particular performance was virtuosic or less successful. But the book's pacing, numerous quotes from other musicians, and references to legal practices of the time make it hard to put down. --Cherilee Wadsworth Walker, Kansas City Kansas Community 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
This short biography by Kansas City-based Haddix is an attempt to separate the life from the considerable legend of jazz innovator and bebop pioneer Charlie Yardbird Parker. Haddix's fine introduction recapitulates the complexities and contradictions in the protean Parker and suggests the overwhelming task the author has set for himself a task also being tackled by notable jazz critic Stanley Crouch, whose Kansas City Lightning, the first of a two-volume biography of Parker, also appears in October. Haddix has done prodigious research, drawing on the copious jazz literature as well as previously published conversations with Parker's former associates and friends, but seems to have initiated rather little interviewing himself in trying to accomplish his ambitious goal. His book is nonetheless, by virtue of its impressive detail, a notable addition to the extensive Music in American Life series and offers a good, brief life story of a sadly brief (if full) life. Though this volume won't command the interest that Crouch's account will, most Charlie Parker devotees will treat the appearance, in the same month, of two books about their idol as a very good thing indeed.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Director of the Marr Sound Archives Haddix (co-author of Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop) methodically follows Charlie Parker from his start playing with "more enthusiasm than talent" in Kansas City clubs, to his peak as one of the preeminent forces in bebop, and then his early death at age 34. In his short career Parker played with-and rivaled-many of the mid-century jazz greats: He mentored by Count Basie, absorbed Art Tatum's technique while busing tables at Jimmy's Chicken Shack where Tatum would perform. Parker and played with and eventually competed against Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, among and others. Music was Parker's compulsion, but he also developed an addiction to heroin at an early age, and he needed the needle as badly as the tunes, between these loves, the ladies in his life rarely fared well. Haddix provides a valuable sense of the cross-pollination that occurred in jazz during the 40s and 50s, as players brought new musical ideas from coast to coast, or even just block to block. He also manages to keep straight who played what with who and when, a remarkable feat in itself. The book's meticulous approach is also it's weakness, as it sometimes fails to capture the spontaneity of Parker's music, something thrilling enough that people would sometimes forget the transgressions of the addict in the hope of hearing more of the musician. 12 b&w photos. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
