One Hundred Years of Bird: Kansas City Celebrates Charlie Parker Centennial

Charlie Parker, the Kansas City jazz musician, built an international reputation before he died in 1955 at just 34 years old. It’s taken Kansas City almost twice that long to build a monument of remembrance to match Parker’s achievement.

But if it arguably took longer than it should have for that to occur, it is occurring in 2020 upon the centennial of Parker’s birth. This summer various Kansas City institutions, as part of “Spotlight 2020: Charlie Parker,” will be hosting events honoring the artist whose early death didn’t stop him from re-imagining the music that is considered America’s one true art form.

“There were a lot of great musicians who came out of Kansas City’s jazz era, but it seems that Charlie Parker was the one who was totally outside the box,” said James McGee, secretary of the Mutual Musicians Foundation, the Kansas City organization that maintains the memory of the community’s legacy jazz musicians. “He revolutionized jazz, not only in how it was performed but how it was listened to. Charlie Parker changed the psychology of people, how they viewed things.”

Legend not ignored

The scale of this year’s Parker centennial observance counters a stubborn Kansas City-specific narrative that holds the musician sometimes disdained his home town – many of whose residents, in turn, seemed allegedly indifferent to Parker’s seismic impact, much better appreciated elsewhere.

Maybe there’s some evidence to support the latter allegation.

The New York townhouse that Parker occupied in the early 1950s became listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, as well as the city’s own historic register five years later.

The street on which the residence stands received a new name - Charlie Parker Place- in 1992.

Meanwhile, two Kansas City homes in the 1500 block of Olive Street the younger Parker shared with his mother Addie have long been demolished.

A bronze plaque marking Parker’s grave in Lincoln Cemetery- off Blue Ridge Boulevard, between East Truman Road and Independence Avenue - disappeared in the early 1990s. In 1993, a Kansas City Star reporter regarded the nameless grave as a metaphor for the alleged local disinterest in Parker’s legacy. “Parker Legend Ignored,” the front-page headline read.

A replacement monument soon installed included the likeness of a tenor saxophone – not the alto saxophone that Parker is today associated with around the world. But this narrative of supposed neglect doesn’t hold up in 2020, with a centennial schedule that includes about 20 events across the community and sanctioned by Jampol Artist Management, Inc., the licensing organization that also administrates the legacies of rock icons Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.

“Charlie Parker was the one thing we found that united of all the various organizations in Kansas City,” said Jon McGraw, president of Kansas City Jazz ALIVE, the local organization coordinating centennial events. “Even during our COVID-19 era, Kansas City comes out for Charlie Parker.”

Parker’s gift to the world was the “Bebop” variety of jazz that he and others had begun to fashion by the 1940s. With peers like Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and others, Parker not only changed jazz, he likely fired the aspirations of those musicians who heard in his music a personal challenge, said McGee, who also is a member of the Jackson County Historical Society Board of Directors.

“This wasn’t just some notes on a page that somebody was recycling,” McGee said. “It was a whole new invention, something the listener had to pay attention to. Just on a musical level, Charlie Parker let musicians know that ‘Hey, you can take something and innovate with it, and maybe that could be your mark on the world.

Kansas City as “finishing school”

Charlie Parker, Jr., was born August 29, 1920, the son of Charles and Adelaide “Addie” Parker, in Kansas City, Kansas. The family moved to the Missouri side in 1927. According to Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker, published by Kansas City jazz scholar Chuck Haddix, the family lived in two Midtown apartments. Young Charlie walked to the Westport district to attend Penn School, established in 1868 and considered the first school west of the Mississippi River to be devoted to the instruction of Black students. (Both Midtown apartment buildings have been renovated.) He was in the fifth grade, Haddix writes, when Parker’s mother bought him his first alto saxophone.

In 1932, Addie Parker separated from her husband and moved with her son to the 1500 block of Olive Street, northeast of the 18th and Vine area. He enrolled in Lincoln High School in 1933 and studied music there, and Addie bought her son a second alto sax. In a few years Parker was finding paying work inside the crowded grid of night clubs and dance halls that thrived in the 1930s during the reign of Kansas City machine boss Tom Pendergast.

The skill level of the musicians was high and the listeners – and musicians – benefited. “When musicians came up through Kansas City, it was understood that they would have to get there and mix it up with people like (pianist and bandleader) Jay McShann and (pianist and composer) Mary Lou Williams,” said Rashida Phillips, executive director of Kansas City’s American Jazz Museum. “I feel Kansas City was something of a finishing school, in that it was understood that once you, as a musician, left here - you were ready.”

In 1939, Tom Pendergast pleaded guilty to tax evasion and reported to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. The next year Kansas City voters elected a new mayor who had promoted a clean-up platform, using the symbol of a broom. Soon, much of Kansas City’s jazz culture began being swept away. Parker, meanwhile, began working on the East Coast, ultimately settling in New York. There he helped create a form of jazz identified as Bebop, defined by one dictionary as “characterized by harmonic complexity, convoluted melodic lines, and constant shifting of accent and often played at very rapid tempos.”

Parker, still in his 20s, sometimes known as “Yardbird” or just “Bird,” became a national figure. In 1949 admirers named a New York nightclub “Birdland” in his honor. He also struggled with addiction. After being seriously injured in a 1936 car accident while on his way to an engagement in the Missouri Ozarks, Parker received medical treatment that included heroin, Haddix writes.

Parker battled substance abuse as well as mental illness before he died March 12, 1955 in a New York hotel.

Following a memorial service for Parker, his mother had her son’s body returned to Kansas City and buried in a plot she purchased at Lincoln Cemetery, then one of only three Jackson County burial grounds established specifically for Black families.

Parker’s memorial services attracted about 200 people to the Watkins Brothers funeral home, according to The Kansas City Call, a Black weekly newspaper. “There’s this myth that Charlie Parker didn’t appreciate Kansas City, and it’s just not true,” Haddix said recently. “He had been a big star in Kansas City. He’d been a star soloist with the Jay McShann and Harlan Leonard bands. He had been referred to as the ‘Saxophone Supreme’ in ads in The Kansas City Call.

“When he would tour the west coast, he often stopped in Kansas City to play gigs. He would stay with his mother and spend time with friends. He had a connection with Kansas City his whole career.”