Intellectually, all saxophonists understand that Charlie Parker had to pay his dues just like anyone else. We’ve heard the stories about a high-school-age Parker learning to play on a clunky old artifact of an alto saxophone held together by rubber bands; about his mortification when drummer Jo Jones “gonged” him by skittering a cymbal across the floor at a jam session; about Parker woodshedding for 13-hour stints in the Ozarks, developing his formidable technique. In theory at least, we know that Bird wasn’t born with an alto sax in his hands. He had a learning curve just like the rest of us mere mortals. There was even–and I realize this will leave many of you in a state of shock and denial, but it’s nevertheless true–a time when Bird sucked.

We know these things. Personally, though, I still find the idea of Charlie Parker as a novice hard to wrap my mind around.

So reading the book “Charlie Parker: His Music and Life”* by Carl Woideck has proved not only enlightening, but also reassuring. Musical genius though he was, Bird was still just a very human, flawed possessor of a God-given gift that he worked hard to develop. Seen in that light, Parker represents not an unattainable ideal, but a waymaker, a teacher, and an inspiration who encourages the rest of us to keep at it; to push past our personal limitations; to practice, practice, and practice some more.

A number of excellent biographies have been written on Charlie Parker, providing fascinating glimpses into his quirky personality, immense talent, and tragic excesses. Rather than merely adding one more book to the firmament of Charlie Parker life stories, Woideck has taken a different approach, focusing on the development of Bird as a musician. Woideck’s tome offers eye-opening and profitable insights into the different phases of Charlie Parker’s music, from Parker’s apprenticeship with Kansas City saxophonist Buster Smith, to his tenures with the Jay McShann and Fletcher Henderson big bands, to his co-development of new musical concepts with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, to his peak playing years in the late 40s, to his latter period in the 50s, when Parker’s sense that he had taken the bebop approach as far as he could left him groping for a new direction even as his addictions increasingly took their toll.

A glance at the table of contents reveals the book’s logical, easy-to-follow organization. Part one offers a brief biographical sketch of Bird, creating a context for the examination of his musicianship that follows. Part two explores Parker’s music in four different periods: 1940-43, 1944-46, 1947-49, and 1950-55.

Woideck substantiates his discussion of Parker’s musical trajectory and playing style with copious analyses of Bird solos, using excerpts from such tunes as “Honey and Body,” “Embraceable You,” “Ko Ko,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “Body and Soul,” “Swingmatism,” and many more to illustrate Bird’s changing palette of nuances and techniques.

This is easily the most comprehensive exploration of Parker’s music that I’ve come across, made all the more so by appendices that provide a select discography and four complete solo transcriptions: “Honey and Body,” “Oh, Lady Be Good!” “Parker’s Mood (take 5), and “Just Friends.” Being myself an alto sax man like Bird, I could wish that the solos had been transcribed in the Eb alto key that Parker played them in. However, from a standpoint of general usefulness to all musicians, it’s understandable that the transcriptions and discussion examples appear in concert pitch.

Painstakingly researched and written with clarity and crispness, “Charlie Parker: His Music and Life” is a fascinating and enriching book for any musician, and a must-read for alto saxophonists.

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* (C)1996 by the University of Michigan, pub. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.

If there is one name that is synonymous with the alto saxophone, it’s Charlie Parker. For that matter, no jazz musician of any kind–saxophonist, trumpet player, bassist, pianist, you name it–can explore the craft without becoming keenly aware of, if not at some point deeply immersed in, the music of Bird. If Dizzy Gillespie was the clown prince of the bebop school, Charlie Parker was its pied piper, a quirky and unpredictable genius whose God-given creative torch burned too brightly to be quickly extinguished by the excesses that eventually overcame him.

Some jazz musicians grow up with Parker played regularly at home as a vital part of the musical ambiance. Others discover Parker’s music later in life. I fall into the latter category. Ours was not a particularly musical household, though Mom loved the Nutcracker Suite and Dad dug his Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Sidney Bechet records.  My own musical tastes, once they began to develop, naturally tended toward the rock of the seventies, particularly art rock bands such as Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, and Pink Floydd.

I did have the advantage of playing in a big band beginning in the eighth grade. That experience gave me an invaluable exposure to the music of Basie and Ellington, and to the American songbook at large. But bebop? What was that?

Then came my first year at Aquinas College, and a course on modern music appreciation with Dr. Bruce Early. The class covered plenty of ground, as I recall, including the music of some of my favorite rock bands. Inevitably, we got into the various kinds of jazz, which was Bruce’s real thrust with the class. Dixieland I was familiar with, and as for big band swing, I had been playing that since junior high school. But suddenly, jazz began to take on deeper dimensions for me. And one day, Bruce dropped a record onto the turntable, and out of the speakers came the most unbelievable saxophone music I had ever heard. It was blazing. Brilliant. Blinding. Beautiful. Wild, yet–though I wouldn’t have thought of the description at the time–wonderfully logical.

That was my first exposure to Charlie Parker, and it left me stunned. How on earth could anyone play a saxophone like that?

I didn’t have ears enough to comprehend what it was that I had heard. I only knew that it pointed toward possibilities on the alto sax that I had never dreamed of. It was like stepping through a door out of a tiny room and discovering an entire mountain range on the other side.

Fortunately, I was too young and too dumb to feel utterly overwhelmed. That’s probably why I’m still playing the saxophone today. Some contemporaries of Parker weren’t so fortunate. I read of one saxophonist who, after hearing Bird in flight, pitched his horn into the river in despair. Today I understand that sentiment a little better–because, now that I’m more than twice as old as Parker was when he first lit his fire and greased his skillet, I still can’t cook the way he could. I have, however, learned a lot from him, and continue to learn.

If Bird hadn’t been given to the monstrous indulgences that eventually destroyed him, I wonder, as many musicians have wondered, what else he might have accomplished. Would bebop have been his apogee, his singular torch against whose sun-like flame all his future achievements would have paled? Or would it have been the spark to still brighter creative expressions? Dizzy is still with us; had Bird’s life been other than what it was, he might be here, too. But it wasn’t and he’s not, and all we can do is speculate on what might have been or might not have been–and absorb the alto saxophonist’s legacy. In the words of Charles Mingus, “If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats.”