On many if not all accounts the single most astonishing Charlie Parker performance extant is an almost entirely improvised piece known as "Ko Ko." It was recorded in New York City on November 26, 1945, about three-and-a-half months after the fateful decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally ended the Second World War.

"Ko Ko" is based on the chord changes to a popular song called "Cherokee," which Charlie Barnet's big band had turned into a hit in 1939. On an aborted first take Bird's 1945 quintet even begins with the copyrighted melody line, but is quickly stopped by a whistling sound engineer, concerned about royalty payments.

As many sources attest, "Cherokee" was Charlie Parker's all-time favourite hit-parade tune. And Gerry Mulligan's memoirs also have something to add here:

Somebody sent me a little bit of tape that had Bird playing at home when he must have been maybe seventeen years old or something with a friend of his, a guitar player, and of course he was playing "Cherokee." This was his number, man, he worked on that thing for years. Somebody said that when he did "Ko Ko." It was not just a little accident that it came out the way it did. He had been layin' for that thing for twenty years anyway. The solo he played on that is like a masterpiece in itself.

Following the conventions of such memoirs, Mulligan is not expecting us to take his words altogether literally. Charlie Parker was only 25 when he recorded "Ko Ko." If he had been laying for the thing for exactly as long as 20 years, that would be since he was five years old in 1925. At this point "Cherokee" had not been written, and Parker's interest in music was confined to listening to his father play the piano. Mulligan makes a nice point in any case. (And when Bird died at 34, even the attending physician took him for a much older man.)

"Cherokee"'s main attraction for Charlie Parker no doubt lay in its alluring harmonic progressions. Yet some still quite provocative aspects of the American multicultural heritage that is also a part of the history of jazz might be read into his long fascination with the song as well.

Jazz is finally not just "black music," and in more than one sense. Duke Ellington, apparently, was a biological mixture of all three American races whose future together the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville raised doubts about in the first half of the 19^th century — Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. And among other things "Cherokee" is a tribute of sorts to Native America.

Charlie Parker's own mother was "of African-American-Choctaw descent." And he grew up in a region of the USA that still had memories of the Cherokee first nation's "Trail of Tears," in the earlier life of the Republic. There is a Cherokee County in the southeast corner of the State of Kansas. Bird may have heard something about the Trail of Tears on the streets of Kansas City, Missouri. It was another good reason for learning the blues.

The song "Cherokee"'s sentimentally spiritual melody line also more directly evokes the surviving aboriginal mystique in American popular culture during the first half of the 20^th century. And this is agreeably ironic. Charlie Barnet from New York City, leader of "the blackest white band of them all," made it a hit on the radio and in record stores — "No. 15 in the fall of 1939." But it was the British big band leader Ray Noble who wrote both the tune, and its gentle lyric in praise of romantic multiculturalism. ("Sweet Indian maiden, Since I first met you, I can't forget you, Cherokee sweetheart," etc.)

The prospect of increasing miscegenation in the global village still unsettles many people of all races in all parts of the world. Some in the early 21^st century would no doubt want to proscribe Ray Noble's song of the late 1930s, as a culturally dysfunctional expression of the imperial European male's unseemly patriarchal lust for Native women.

There may even be at least something to this. But it is a key principle in the music of democracy that as little as possible ought to be proscribed. Or, as the legend has Bird say again: "They teach you there's a boundary line to music, but, man, there's no boundary line to art." In any event, it is part of real-world American history that multicultural lust has ultimately radiated in all directions. And it was certainly a part of Charlie Parker's Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s. (His first two wives, for one thing, were black, and the second two white.)

In the midst of all the appalling history it has also engendered, the positive power of sexual attraction in overcoming racial and cultural prejudice does not figure in de Tocqueville's writing from the first half of the 19^th century. A century or so later, during his last short years Charlie Parker became a father of mixed-race children.

Back at the Trail of Tears, Bird would pay another musical tribute to his mother's ties with the aboriginal cultures of North America, in an intriguing 12-bar blues tune of his own called "Mohawk." There are more pedestrian explanations of this song title. But in real life both the Mohawk and the Cherokee are Iroquoian-speaking peoples, with more important roles in American history since Christopher Columbus than once imagined. Some Charlie Parker thoughts and wisdom about this Native heritage may be another part of what makes his finest elaboration of his favourite hit-parade tune such an astonishing masterpiece of American popular culture. And some powerful artistic apprehension of the most indigenous roots of modern America probably has something to do with what Bird's most colourful biographer, Ross Russell, called "the religious ecstasy of Parker's music."