How we heard the Great Bird

The year was 1947 or early 1948.

My memory of that concert when I was 16 is how unsatisfactory it was. Just Charlie up there on an empty stage together with, I think, just a bassist, perhaps a whole rhythm section. No real ensemble, and it didn't sound like the little gems of 10" 78-rpm records (3 minutes max.) that I was used to! Also the shuffling and talking and yelling of a whole crowded movie-theater full of (mostly Black) fans was very distracting. I was sitting (standing?) with my 19-year-old brother Richard and one or two of his jazz friends (my brother played bebop piano) off in a box seat at the side of the huge stage (there were no other places left for us). Behind us in the hallway there was a kind of continual struggle and chasing and yelling -- this was caused by the black City of Chicago police officers running after and searching drug suspects. Yes, that was a "big problem", as the authorities saw it, even in those days. Some idea of how this concert sounded can be got from the opening sound track of the movie BIRD.

So my experience with Parker is really just through his records. My brother, on the other hand, played two weeks with Sonny Stitt, one whole night with Dizzie Gillespie, and about 1 hour with Bird himself. The occasion of the playing with Bird was that the regular piano player got too drunk to play, and Bird yelled into the audience "Is there somebody who can play that thing?" (meaning the piano). My brother rushed to the stage, and there he was backing up the Master! I only learned about this event forty years after it happened. His playing with Bird must have been about 1950, in a small bar in Chicago, and my brother was supposed to be studying psychology at that time. He eventually devoted his life to (classical) music, went to Julliard, got a doctorate from Michigan, and is now a composer and author of short stories.