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University of South Carolina Press - Chan Parker

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160 pages

English

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A memoir of the Jazz Age and a life profoundly influenced by it

My Life in E-flat is the remarkable memoir of a woman who witnessed some of the most important movements in the history of jazz. Through her autobiography, Chan Parker provides intimate insights into the music and into life with Charlie Parker, the key figure in the development of bebop and one of the most important of all jazz musicians.

Born Beverly Dolores Berg in New York City at the height of the Jazz Age, Parker's father was a producer of vaudeville shows and her mother was a dancer in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Parker became part of the jazz culture as a nightclub dancer and later as the wife of jazz saxophonists Charlie Parker and then Phil Woods.

In a moving and candid portrait of Charlie Parker, the author describes in harrowing detail a man of incredible talent besieged with addictions and self-destructiveness. She painfully recounts his death at the age of 35 while married to her and its effect on her life as well as on the musical world. Parker's honest portrait of one of the most gifted musicians in jazz provides unique insight into the history of the music and the difficulties faced by African American performers during the 1940s.

Parker also reflects on her struggle to find her own voice and on her work with Clint Eastwood on the film biography of Charlie Parker, Bird (1988).

Sujets

Jazz

Duke Ellington

Cab Calloway

Quincy Jones

Max Roach

Memoir

Kim Parker

Multiple signal classification

Popular music

MUSIC

Personal Memoirs

Informations

Publié par	University of South Carolina Press
Date de parution	25 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781643362786
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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My Life in E-flat
My Life in E-flat
Ma vie en mi b mol
Chan Parker

The University of South Carolina Press
1993 Editions Perrin
Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1999
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2022
www.uscpress.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:
Parker, Chan.
[Ma vie en mi bemol. English]
My life in E-flat / Chan Parker.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-57003-245-9 (pbk.)
1. Parker, Chan. 2. Dancers United States Biography. 3. Parker, Charlie, 1920-1955. I. Title. II. Title: My life in E-flat
GV1785.P27713 A3 1999
792.8 092-ddc21
[B] 98-19682
ISBN 978-1-64336-278-6 (ebook)
C ONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Prologue
P ART I. V IVACE
1. Allegro
2. Bebop
3. Yatag
4. Theme
5. Interlude
6. Coda
7. Prelude
8. Scherzo
P ART II. D A C APO
9. Chaconne
10. Modulation
11. Ostinato
12. Alto Ego
P ART III. A NDANTINO
13. Caesura
14. Largo
15. Inversions
16. Reprise
17. Fortissimo
18. Finale
Index
I LLUSTRATIONS
Joseph Hiatt Jr. and Minerva (front row), Uncle Alva, Mina, Nell
Mildred O Violet Lankton, Glennwood, Iowa, 1905
My mother, about 1920
Mamie Brodis, my nurse
With my parents: I was then about three years old
Johnny Bothwell, my first alto saxophonist
Dave Tough
Kim, Bill Heyer, and me
At the Club Iceland, 1947
Bird, about 1949
Baird, Pree, Kim, 1953
Only extant painting by Bird: his vision of Pree as an adult, painted after her death, in 1954
Life was so sad after Pree s death!
Kim and Baird at the Bird s Nest, 1955
Phil and me, 1956
Gar, 1959
Recopying the orchestrations of Quincy Jones, 1960. Buddy Catlett on bass, Les Spann on guitar
My singing class at Ramblerny, 1965
The beginning of our life in Europe: Aim e, Phil, Chan, Gar at Kensington Gardens, London
Baird at Cavalaire, 1971
Phil, 1971
Kim and Chan on a trip to Sweden, 1988
Benjamin Alekzander Sellers, son of Kim and Ricky, at Champmotteux, 1985
David Ancker, my musical guru
Cannes, 1988, at the premiere of Bird . Clint Eastwood and Chan in her trademark dress
Mildred at Champmotteux, 1989
Champmotteux, 1988
Mildred in 1991, at the wedding of Gar and Georgann
Chan Parker
P ROLOGUE
There is a house which recurs in my dreams. I am always in a car driving along familiar streets, up the long hill searching for that house on Park Hill Road where I lived as a child. My mother, widowed with two young children, sold real estate during the depression. No one was buying, so we moved into that lovely Victorian white elephant in Westchester, rent free. I don t know how she managed to heat its fifteen rooms, but it was a fairy-tale house to a young girl. Shingled, with turrets, gables, bay windows, gardens, two salons, fireplaces, a dumbwaiter, a central hall between innumerable bedrooms, a game room in the basement, with a full-size professional pool table, and best of all, for me, a finished attic which became my ballroom. Oh, the grand parties I planned; all the snobbiest girls and the most handsome boys would come. In the end, it was the pool room that attracted the boys and where I experienced my first closed-mouth kisses.
In my dreams I sometimes catch a glimpse of that house, but I ve never been able to enter it. Surely, it no longer exists. Does Park Hill Road? Would I have the courage outside of dreams to mount that hill again? I think we leave a part of ourselves in every house we have loved. I measure my years by the houses in which I have lived. So foolish to leave one s precious life in wood and stone. But perhaps that is the rent we pay for our memories, both bitter and sweet.
To deny the past is to limit the future. To deny the past is to deny the seed that brought life, determined our genes and characteristics, the teat which nourished, the culture which formed our soul, our mind, and forged our identity. Of course, we must all find our own way, our own selves. But we cannot deny what formed us, or else we must begin again, newly born without a past and, perhaps, lacking a future. Only a genius can make up a life without past influences or without the joys, sorrows, and all the emotions that are part of every family and which color our lives in every way.
Closed doors and windows let in neither light nor surprises.
My paternal grandparents left Russia when my father was a boy, and the family settled in Gloversville, New Hampshire. My mother s grandparents crossed America in a covered wagon and bought land in Sidney, Iowa. I reversed the direction to return to the continent of my ancestors. It took me half a century to discover there is more to life than an alto saxophone. Now I live in a country not my own, in a house haunted by friendly ghosts whose acquaintance I made over forty years ago.
I live in France, in a small village off the beaten path about seventy kilometers south of Paris in the grain belt. The principal crops are wheat, sunflowers, sugar beets, and colza. In the summer, a bright rectangle of yellow breaks through the sealike green of waving wheat. The roadsides are bordered with red poppies.
In the soft, quiet dusk of a warm early summer s evening in 1975, the door to the courtyard is open. The children are off on quiet pursuits; our collie, Snoopy, is licking her nettle-distressed paws in the sun-sweetened grass now heavy with dew; and Flash, spooky as only a Persian cat can be, is dodging aggressive barn swallows and asserting herself with insouciant fireflies. My mother and I linger over last year s cherries in eau de vie . She starts talking about her own family, reminiscing:
My ancestors came from England, Wales, Scotland, and France in the 1600s. My maternal grandfather, Joseph Hiatt, was only five years old when he crossed the country to Iowa in a covered wagon with his father and brothers. They settled 160 acres adjacent to Sidney. In those days, you could buy land for practically nothing. Later, Joseph Hiatt would meet his future wife, Minerva. She had been kidnapped when she was just a girl and sold as an indentured servant, but she had somehow managed to escape from this form of slavery. Minerva and Joseph Hiatt settled on a portion of land called Hiatfs Addition, in an old house which became a local landmark. They had three children: my mother, Mina, my aunt Nell, and my uncle Alvo .
Mina Hiatt married into the Lankton family from Springfield, Illinois. Her husband, Charles, was proud of the fact that his father, John D. Lankton, often used to sit on Abraham Lincoln s knee. Although many women died in childbirth in those days, Mina gave Charles ten children, five daughters, and then five sons. Lloyd was the oldest son. The eldest daughter, Alice, died before I was born. Cecile was born next, Beulah was third, and Ruby was fourth. Ruby died during the horrible flu epidemic in 1918. I was the fifth child. Then came the twins, Joe and John, who were followed by Harold. By the time Chick, the tenth child, was born, our family had moved from Sidney to Shenandoah, Iowa .
When I was six, we lived in a new house in Sidney. The town had five hundred people then. Like all the kids, I spent most of my summers on the farm with Grandfather and Grandmother Hiatt: They had a big rambling farm and house. I was my grandmother s favorite, so I stayed there more than the others. I remember that they used a horse and buggy. There were other horses and, of course, some pigs and cattle. In the evening I would help my uncle Alvo bring in the cows to be milked. We had to cross a stream to get to the wood. My uncle had made a big swing from a rope so that when we came to the stream, we could swing across to the other side. Oh, it was fun! We loved that .
My grandfather used to do all the plowing and I would bring a pail of fresh water to him in the fields. In the summer, I followed him behind the plow pulling up the cold earth. I ran barefoot behind him and if he plowed up a snake, I d run like hell back to the house. Grandpa used to say that he had known Jesse James when he was working in St. Joseph, Missouri. At that time, my grandfather was an interior decorator and did fancy painting. The lead in the paint was what probably killed him .
That was such a beautiful farm. We could see it across the valley from our house in Sidney, and when it caught fire we watched it burn to the ground. There was no fire department in those days. The farm house was rebuilt, but my grandmother died soon after .
We moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the river from Omaha where I met Cecile Wilson, Ida McAdams, and her sister, Cecilia, who became my best friend. The McAdamses moved to Chicago. In 1917 Cecile Wilson and I went there to visit them. The night the train pulled out of that old station, everyone came to see us off. None of them had been as far as Chicago. There was a theater in Omaha called the Brandeis where all of the big shows played. Harold Ross, one of the boys who bad come to see us off, had taken up theatrics in school. He said, We may see your name in lights one day on the Brandeis Theatre. I was eighteen. They didn t know I wasn t coming back .
In Chicago, Ida McAdams had the coatroom in a club on Clark Street. We lived upstairs in the hotel. She asked if I would help her in the club for a while. It was a great spot: th