Greenwich Village, 1958.
Ruby’s chasing poets like Kerouac, but does she even know he’s at Birdland? Kerouac calls it “the
bop joint” and talks about Lester
Young and seeing “eternity on his huge eyelids” in On the
Road.
Couple years ago when I was ten my dad took me to see Charlie Parker there. Did you know Birdland was named for him? They called him Bird or Yardbird – either because he was free as a bird or because he hit a chicken (aka yard bird) accidentally while he was driving on tour.
I was lucky enough to
see him before he died. If I played sax for a hundred years, and I want to, I
don’t think I could ever play like Charlie did. He invented this new way of
improvising, playing the higher intervals of a chord and then backing them up.
Charlie didn’t just play notes, though, he made you feel
what he was playing. “If you don’t live it,” he said, “it won’t come out your
horn.”
Which is funny, since the sax is really a woodwind. Anyway, Parker and Dizzy
Gillespie invented bop and that’s what my dad’s friend Les is teaching me. I
have an alto sax but one of these days I’m getting a bari. I would love to play
baritone. You have to play every day, maybe hours, to be anywhere near as fine
as the cats playing Birdland.
Sometimes Ruby and I get together and she reads a poem out
loud and then I play along with it. One of these days we might play at Gaslight or
somewhere. (She calls it the Scene in The
Beat on Ruby’s Street.) Readers are saying they want to know more about me,
that’s why I’m writing you here.
But you know, kids like Ruby don’t want to write about their
big brothers and I don’t blame her, I mean, I don’t spend most of my time
thinking about my kid sister, either. What I will say is I don’t mind having her
around, she digs music and knows what I mean about Charlie. And one of these
days when she’s a little older I’ll bring her to Birdland with Gary Daddy-o.
That’s what Ruby calls him, makes me laugh.
Here’s the thing about Parker. He had all this Sad inside
and that kinda sidelined him, made him hole up in his room with junk and all.
Sometimes you have to get away from things, away from yourself even, but the
junk was part of what took Parker out, and now he can’t play anymore, and we
all got the Sad from missing him.
If I had chops like Parker I think my junk would be the sax.
I don’t want to judge him though, I just want to listen to him, listen to his
recordings and find out what made him so cool. Ruby says I know already and
maybe she’s right. He said not to play the saxophone, just to “let it play you.”
That's what I want to do.
--Ray Tabeata
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