• Home
  • Bio
  • Epstein's Pancake
  • Breeders
  • Books
  • Other Stuff
    • Journalism
    • Phantom of the Paradise
    • Kiss Daddy Goodnight
    • Stories
  • Blog & Tweets
  • Videos
  • Contact
B J A R N E     R O S T A I N G
Join us on Twitter & Facebook

If you want to read a book, a spectacular book about a spectacular man, try Stanley Crouch’s Kansas City Lightning, the story of  Charley “Bird” Parker

1/19/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Stanley Crouch writes like one of those big pre-emissions V-8s they used to build in Detroit with multiple mammoth carburetors, minimal gas mileage, and no tomorrow if you held the gas pedal down. On American roads they’d obliterate cute little hottie sports cars, and that’s what Crouch has done to jazz writing with Kansas City Lightning, his biography of the legendary Charlie Parker, who personified jazz during that wild WW2 period when be-bop sprang forth to confound the music world.

Parker, a.k.a. Bird, is an unnerving figure, profoundly talented and intelligent. He climbed  as far and as fast in every way as could be done in thirty five years, the quintessential boy from the provinces. He was the bomb. From being thrown off the bandstand in his teens, he became the greatest horn man of his time, and he did it on the very unforgiving alto saxophone. From an obscure ghetto childhood in Kansas City he became a favorite of Nica de Koenigswarter, another legend, a Rothschild who was the patron of all time. Every jazz fan knows the melodrama of Bird’s death while watching TV in the apartment of the Baroness Nica, and instead of that, Crouch gives us his brief, brilliant, fated life: when he died, his work was truly done. People were scrawling Bird Lives! on walls for years afterward, and he did that – no reedman has ever been so influential, dominating, loved and imitated. Everyone wanted to play like Bird, and no one could. I spent years trying.

Jazz books, be they fact or fiction, tend to be on the thin side. Young Man With A Horn does embody some essence of the twenties, but it’s a white book, and jazz is a black music. No matter that Bix Beiderbecke was the Keats of jazz cornet, it was his good friend Louis Armstrong who was the virtuoso, doing impossible things night after night, decade after decade. Bird dominated the same way, picking up where Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins left off, playing with unheard of velocity, sophistication and pure beauty, fusing blues and those nifty mostly Jewish tunes from musicals into something strange and new, and incomprehensible to those for whom Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall Concert was the crowning achievement of jazz music. Bird and bop announced something as shattering to its world as abstract expressionism was to painting.

Crouch delves into Bird’s tortured self and meteoric life, bringing it to the reader as only great biographers can do. Gone is the contentious intellectual of earlier books, debates and forums, and the columnist for the Daily News. The novelist of Don’t The Moon Look Lonesome comes forth, twinned with a tireless, hypnotic researcher who hunkers down in Parker’s home town and tracks down the people around him in childhood and youth. And gets them to tell all. Crouch can be a tedious explainer, but he is so in love with the truth about his subject that this inclination is simply burned away.

Within a few paragraphs, Crouch conveys the feel of the thirties as experienced in wide-open Kansas City, where there was no Great Depression for jazz musicians. There were many bands, epic parties, and fierce proud competition. Kansas City was corrupt under Boss Pendergast, but it was a “boomtown for jazz, with mother lodes of style and gushers of swing.” It was a red-hot creative crucible, as New Orleans and Chicago had been before, with musicians living for the music and finding themselves as artists in the heat of the jams and the chilly woodsheds where they practiced. Bands battled, great rooms full of people danced, and Jay McShann had the boss band. In it was the skinny 21 year old Parker with his soaring, searing alto, about to reinvent the music. Only a musician can fully appreciate the taste and texture of that, and Crouch was one himself back before he became an American oracle – a jazz drummer on the New York scene of the sixties and seventies, later booking bands into the Tin Palace and making it a cultural nexus.

He captures Parker’s charm in talking a cop out of a ticket in Central Park as McShann’s battered band arrives New York on its way to the Woodside Hotel, immortalized in Count Basie’s Jumpin at the Woodside. In hardly any words at all he creates Harlem for us, a Harlem no less vivid than that of Chester Himes. Then he captures the junk-sick chill when Bird immediately leaves the hotel, a chill that haunted Parker almost all his life and created a generation of junky musicians who thought that was his secret.

Here and throughout, the book is a fascinating picture of the jazz life, of musicians eating and joking and hanging out, an uber-family in which Parker was both a legend and a notorious moneyless addict. The rich texture and detailing are amazing. Why were there two bandstands at the Savoy ballroom? So bands could battle without the distraction of one band leaving the stand and another setting up. Who went to the Savoy? Lana Turner, Greta Garbo, and, and, and… Did black real estate agent Charlie Buchanan own the Savoy ballroom where McShann would wipe out the Lucky Millinder band? Not really – it was two Jewish brothers re-named Gale. Does it matter? Definitely, because the music business and the music itself involves this ethnic relationship. The tens of thousands of black musicians schooling themselves on I Got Rhythm chords were studying George Gershwyn. Louis Armstrong’s career was crucially expedited and sustained by a Jewish manager who saved hin from the mob. Rich, relevant detail is a Crouch gift. Only academics dream of researching as he did, and this book is anything but academic. It leaps off the page.

How did Bird come to be? Who was he? Crouch infiltrates Kansas City as only a New York hustler on a mission could do. He goes back into the family bloodlines (totally hybridized, American style). He looks into the grandparents, and dwells a moment on Parker’s handsome, charming, hard-drinking hell-raising dad. And his mother, his all-important mother, who eventually gave up on his dad and put everything into her son, whose innocent promise is written into the shy, hopeful photograph that opens the book. He notes his Roman Catholic schooling, notoriously the best and most disciplined generally available, and details his upbringing as a kind of young prince, dressed to the nines, never allowed to take a part time job. But he also quotes people close to the family who felt there was no love at the core of her devotion. He delves deep into those childhood friends and neighbors, and how the neighborhood operated, and tells about his very serious relationship with first wife, with whom he was in love from boyhood, and about his very different half-white brother. It’s like Mark Twain on life in Hannibal, Missouri – pure America without much money to corrupt it.

There is very little Crouch failed to uncover about the nascent Bird, including his love of  Sherlock Holmes (who was devoted to injecting cocaine), or about the grown man who who could never kick his habit for long. We see him in flush times, and we see him learning to hop a train, showing up in Chicago broke with no horn, half-starved, in funky old clothes. We see his chameleon ability to fit in anywhere very quickly through his gift for mimicry. And we see his inescapable genius as it evolved through intense creative relationships with musicians long forgotten. No one I ever met heard of Biddy Fleet, but Crouch did, and tells us how they shared an extended exploration of difficult tunes that other players avoided – which leads to his legendary breakthrough with Cherokee, a tricky tune that fascinated him and liberated him.

Crouch shows us a man changing his world as surely as Van Gogh in Arles or Beethoven in Vienna. We see him up close, and what he went through to do it. Kansas City Lightning is biography of the highest level, written about a musician, by a musician who also happens to be a very powerful writer. It’s also loaded with pungent history of all kinds. American history that jumps off the page and grabs you.


0 Comments

SOUTH PARK BY THE SEA: GOVERNOR CARTMAN (NJ) BETRAYED BY AIDE, TAKES VENGEANCE, BREAKS NEWS CONFERENCE RECORD

1/19/2014

0 Comments

 
Many people over thirty just can’t take South Park. Too funky, too outrageous, too smart, too true. Like Roseanne back in the last century, it breaks a lot of rules, most of which no longer rule. Eric Cartman dominates the show, a driven demonic fat boy who will happily cause cataclysmic catastrophes and then offer ridiculous explanations. He dreams big, knows no fear, and has to be stage center at all costs.

Cartman often prevails. People pay attention to him because of his imagination and  energy. Greedy and petty, he was born ethically corrupt. His daring unfettered demented intelligence is hypnotic. He is the charismatic leader who can’t be trusted, which the other kids know, but they follow him anyway, because South Park is every innocent ignorant town in our land, goodhearted and not clever, believing what it sees on the tube, an isolated never-never land in the Rockies, always a step behind. 

It’s too small for the post-puberty Cartman. He’s migrated to the big bad tri state area, changed his name to Chris Christie, and damned if he didn’t get his greedy self elected governor of New Jersey! Now he’s the brute he always wanted to be, still telling those whoppers, still cruel and vengeful, but able to enforce his will on his fiefdom. He still thinks big, and he’s learned a lot. He’s the biggest, the smartest, the most dangerous, and unfortunately, the best man to have around in a crisis. He’s swift, decisive and unnerving. In the dearth of qualified contenders, he is expected to run for the Presidency.

Cartman/Christie’s current whopper is that he had no idea what a top aide was up to when she paralyzed the town of Fort Lee by bleeping with the George Washington Bridge lanes to Fort Lee, ostensibly for a study that never happened. She and she alone did this awesome thing! What a gal! If you believe that, the governor may offer to sell you that bridge. Christie/Cartman being a total hands-on guy, it’s beyond ridiculous. The fallout is toxic and still building, going awesome, breaking press-conference records. This hissy-fit attack on Fort Lee involves interstate commerce, and thus the federal government, which is not yet within his fiefdom.

Whatever happens, the governor is not going down alone for this classic Cartman cock-up. He fired his gal Friday, and now his associates are resigning right, left and center, hiding behind their lawyers, taking the Fifth and like that. With a little luck and muscle, he’ll wiggle out somehow and be wanting your support in 2016. 

If you think that’s funny, it’s not. Sad to say, Christie/Cartman may be as good as anyone willing to run for public office when it comes to sheer executiveness, which we haven’t seen much of in this century. Whether you want the fat kid to have the total power he craves (and access to the nuclear football) is the question. Whatever else, Obie is sane.

It’s Gresham’s Law applied to politics: bad politicians driving out the good the way bad money drives out the good. The Washingtons, Lincolns, Roosevelts and Kennedys are gone. No Eisenhower in sight. Pencil neck shooting guard in the White House, Cartman on the other side impersonating Charles Barkley. You can’t make this stuff up.



0 Comments
    Tweets by @BjarneRostaing



    Archives

    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2014
    January 2014
    August 2013
    June 2013
    November 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    January 2012
    November 2011
    July 2011

    RSS Feed

 Copyright © 2015 Bjarne Rostaing. All Rights Reserved.                                                                                                                                          Site Design by René Grayre