Customer Reviews

Bird Lives!: The High Life And Hard Times Of Charlie (yardbird) Parker

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Ross Russell was the president of Dial records when Parker was in California. He recorded several sides while there, but Mr Russell, an obvious fan of Parker, makes a huge effort to desribe Parker's whole spectacular and at the same time tragic life and career. When I read this book, I literally could not put it down.
Parker was a great clown and entertainer, something which Clint Eastwood's disappointing movie "Bird" never portrayed, instead sticking to the sad and seedy sections of the great Parker's life. I read this book years before the film came out, and I was shocked because I knew Eastwood to be a big jazz fan.
Anyhow, every major event in Parker's short life is chronicled, giving an excellent narrative of an extraordinary career.
Miled Davis in his autobiography said that Bird was a con, a cheat, and that Ross Russell exploited him. Nonetheless, this book presents many facets to describe Parker's life, in vivid detail. I'd call this essential for any true jazz fan to understand the man, his music, and the truly monumental and unsurpassed contribution Parker made to all music. Also revealed are all the main players of the time and their relation to the music and the man.
Also, there are three books I recommend (in this order) to anyone who really wants the inside scoop on the jazz life: Bird Lives, Miles Davis' in-your-face-autobiography, and Albert Goldman's biography of Lenny Bruce. All three books can be read as companion pieces and give a realistic portrait of 3 of the most influential people of the 20th century and the world that created them. At the same time all three books provide an excellent reality check to anyone contemplating a heroin habit!

I've read hundreds of jazz histories, and Ross Russell's original classic, "Bird Lives!", remains among my favorite. I read it again this week, in fact. Are there more thorough Parker biographies? Well, sure. But Ross Russell was there. He created Dial Records for the purposes of recording Parker. Also, Russell (a pulp writer in his young years) always had literary aspirations, and his writing has that fun, hard-boiled style of the 1930s. Ross was a product of his literary times. I hope this book never goes out of print.

Granted, I'm biased. In the early 1990s, when Ross was in his 90s and living alone in a trailer in the California desert, he and I corresponded frequently. I was writing a chapter on Dial Records for a book, and Ross was so encouraging and helpful. He had an amazing life to ups and downs. Ross was a very funny guy, and that humor runs throughout "Bird Lives!" With Bird, you either laughed or cried. Ross did a fair amount of both.

Read "Bird Lives!" with an open mind, and ignore the bandwagon of critics who attack it. There's no substitute for fascinating first-person accounts, and Ross' personal experiences with the saxophone madman leave every jazz historian green with envy.

I found this book pretty hard to put down. It reads like a fun, well-written novel, the main character of which is a fascinating and charming--but insulting and heroin-shooting--musical genius. This leads to the question: Is everything in this book "true"? I have no idea, not being an authority on Parker, but, at least for now, I don't care all that much. Ross Russell does a decent job of painting a portrait of Bird, at least in broad strokes, and the reader gains the sense that the book is more or less true, generally speaking. Russell did, after all, know Parker (even if he had a not-so-great relationship with him), and much of what is covered in the book is documented elsewhere. The book does, though, have its share of nitpicking critics.

I appreciate Russell's knowledge of Parker's main contributions to jazz. Given my limited knowledge of Parker, Russell has a good sense of the artist at his prime; he knows, for example, that Parker was at his best in the late forties and around 1950, and he discusses why this and that record ("Koko," "Lover Man," etc.) is particualrly important. Though Russell admires Parker tremendously (he insinuates and says outright that Bird is the greatest practitioner of jazz ever), he isn't afraid to show his ugly sides as a person--his tendency to put on airs, be crude and irresponsible, etc.

Above all, Russell gives us a good idea why Parker is (I would say, after Armstrong and Ellington) the greatest figure in jazz of the 20th century. He brings the reader into the solos themselves, as much as a writer can without splitting hairs. I recommend this book to anyone even remotely inteserested in jazz, Parker, bebop, or culture of the U.S., mid-20th-century.

Charlie Parker was one of the most influential and important musicians of the 20th century. His musical creations and innovations shaped the face of jazz in many profound ways. In his hands the alto saxophone transcended being a mere instrument and became a means of spreading love and hope. In this classic biography we see all sides and facets of this complex and truly brilliant man. He was; a practical joker, womanizer, alcoholic, heroin addict, charming con man and over-eater extraordinaire. A legend is brought marvelously to life here, unlike in Clint Eastwood's well-intentioned but depressingly one-sided movie "Bird."

For me, this book is one of those experiences that are about as good as it gets with your clothes on. Not only do we get to discover the genius of Parker, but we're taken on the journey with a brilliant writer. Here, Bird does indeed live. Russell vividly captures the essence of the man, the music and the times, and this book is as much a tribute to his superb literary talent as it is to Parker's prodigous musical gifts. A rare combination. If you haven't yet read it, I envy you. They don't get any better than this.

This book is a very fun book to read. It's written in novel form, as well, and you can just think of how Parker's life must have been like. But the problem is with Russell, that he seems to be building his book too much around myths. This makes the book fun too read, but you can just wonder if it's true or not. For example, Russell made Benedetti a much better sax player than he originally was, which makes us so incredibly impressed over Charlie PArker, that it's unbelievable. But don't get me wrong, Charlie Parker is a jazz titan, and he really knew his stuff, but if Russell had documented every source of information, lots of things, I believe, would have been erased. Then the book would be a bit more boring. But read it, because it describes the atomesphere of the late-40s America, very well.

This is the best book I have ever read and I am only 14 1/2. I am a huge charlie parker fan because I play the alto sax. I think the author wrote this book very well talking about other famous musicians and how they contributed to his fame.

This book is historical fiction, not biography, a novel, and a badly written one at that. Ross Russell recorded Parker for Dial records, and also exploited him by releasing sides that show Parker breaking down, for which Bird never forgave him.. Conveniently for Russell, Bird died young, so he could weave this fiction out of his life, exploiting him again for money. Just try the opening scene, an imaginary fable of an encounter between Parker and Dean Benedetti, who, while real, is a cardboard, fictional composite in this book. To begin with, there was no wire recorder. If you're looking for good bios of Bird, try Gary Giddin's book, Gillespie's "To Be Or Not To Bop," Phil Schaap's exhaustive liner notes for the two collections he mastered and produced; the complete Parker on Verve and the complete Dean Benedetti tapes. Yes, they exist, and they begin to set the record of this sorry book straight. Avoid like the plague.

This was the first biography of Bird to be published, and is problematic due to the self-admitted difficulty of the author in understanding his subject, due in part to a commercial, sometimes adversarial relationship.

I bought this book when it first came out, while I was still in the throes of a serious case of Birdolatry. I still consider him a stupendous genius, but I think I have a more nuanced appreciation of Bird the man. Like many of his admirers, I was initially seduced not just by the thrilling music but also by the legend of Bird the ultimate hipster, the existentialist living always for the moment, the man of enormous appetites who indulged them all without regard for society's opinion or personal consequences. And all of these things were indeed true about Bird, but do not begin to completely describe him.

Ross Russell met Bird at a time when he was already a legend among cognoscenti but had only begun to achieve wider commercial recognition. Bird's recordings for Russell's Dial label were the first to fully document his genius. Bird could not have been an easy artist to work with, given his lack of concern with legal niceties like contracts and the constant financial and personal pressures imposed by his addiction to heroin. Nonetheless for the most part Russell did his best to ensure that Bird got a fair shake with regard to royalties. Unfortunately, this was completely overshadowed by his decision to release the recordings from the infamous Lover Man date of July 29, 1946, the day a very sick Bird suffered a breakdown and ultimately had to be committed to Camarillo State mental hospital for 6 months. This decision cannot be defended and led in later years to an estrangement between Bird and Russell. The recordings are a remarkable testament to Bird's ability to transmute his life experiences into music, and to play virtuoso-level saxophone even under the most extreme physical conditions, but Russell had no right to publish these intimate personal documents without the artist's permission. The fact that he did so speaks volumes about his perspective on Bird.

The real problem is that Russell was unable to get past his fixations on Bird the genius musician, Pied Piper of the Beat Generation, and sexual superman to see the real human being, however flawed. No doubt Bird was a difficult person to figure out. He was capable of assuming many different personae depending on the situation and who he was dealing with. This was in part a survival skill based on being black in a still very racist America, and partly a mechanism to allow his drug addiction to exist side by side with his musical career and his personal life.

Russell concludes by labelling Bird a "classic sociopath". Unfortunately this description does not fit someone who practiced his instrument up to 12 hours a day and was on a constant search for artistic perfection. What needs to be kept in mind is that although drug addiction is a typical feature of the sociopathic personality, drug addiction can also lead to sociopathic behavior in people who are not by nature sociopaths. I suspect in Bird's case it was the latter, not the former. Russell's biases toward Bird are also well documented in his one-dimensional fictional portrayal in the novel "The Sound".

To anyone who wants to learn about this remarkable man, I recommend Robert Reisner's "Bird, the Legend of Charlie Parker", a compilation of recollections from many different people who knew and worked with Bird. Taken together they paint a picture of a complicated, contradictory but real person whose music transcended all his personal shortcomings.

By the way, the first chapter of Bird Lives, while exciting reading, is completely fictional. The recordings of Dean Benedetti were eventually found by Clint Eastwood during the making of the movie Bird, and do not include anything recorded at Billy Berg's, or for that matter anything recorded surreptitiously in a bathroom or anywhere else. Also, they're not particularly high quality either musically or sonically.

Though it's been 20 yrs, it seems like I read this book yesterday. Not only an indepth insight into one of the greatest artists in history, the book captures the feel of 'The Street' during the Bebop era, and also of the tortured man who re-shaped our music. I recommend you take the bandstand with Bird and write the publisher so that they might print more copies. An example of the books insight is how Russell describes Dean Benedetti who gave up his career as a sideman on alto sax to follow Parker around with a wire recorder only recording Bird's solos and noone else's. Such was his commitment to the music and so is mine. Enjoy!