An increasing trend toward multicultural romance is only an arguably benign and reassuring wave of the future in some parts of North America today. There is no denying that the Yardbird was an alcoholic heroin junkie, whose private life can never qualify as a model for anyone who wants to live beyond early middle age. It might be complained that Charlie Parker can only be any kind of icon for one side in the early 21^st century culture wars.

Yet at the very bottom of everything there are many different sides to these wars, and they often overlap in strange ways. It was Clint Eastwood who turned Charlie Parker's life and music into a mass-market Hollywood movie in 1988. And even Ronald Reagan approved of Clint Eastwood.

Some of Charlie Parker's present-day admirers have complained that Eastwood's Bird is just a bad movie. As usual in such cases, there is much to complain about. It does not come close to a definitive depiction of the real Charlie Parker. But Bird is also a better movie than most of the other movies about jazz. It was remarkable that it was made, and that Clint Eastwood made it, because he so much liked and admired Charlie Parker's music.

This music will perhaps always be a taste of the few and not the many — not entirely unlike the music of Bach, Beethoven, Bartok, Stravinsky, and so forth. But the few in this case can come from many diverse groups in the wider community. As Clint Eastwood's movie does show, the Yardbird's appeal can cut across conflicting cultural stereotypes inside America today. In the wider global village, the Kansas City local government recently made arrangements to greet the visiting president of the Japanese Charlie Parker Society from Tokyo.

For all the torment and trouble of Charlie Parker's private life, his music is essentially optimistic, technologically and in almost every other way too. Once you are cooking yourself, it makes you feel good — encouraged and inspired — to hear Charlie Parker play. His songs are not about despair. You come away from them with a certain guarded hope about the future. Except for a few tunes recorded just before his 1946 crash in California (and released for sale to his enduring regret), this is not the music of a morbid alcoholic drug addict, lost in twisted and self-indulgent obsessions.

The ups and downs of Bird's private torment, and the inevitable increasing physical damage wrought by what the critic Stanley Crouch has called his "gift for self-destruction,"did have an impact on his recorded legacy. Sometimes, and especially during his later years in the 1950s, he was not in his top form on record dates. But even on his bad days it is almost true — with assorted obvious qualifications — that Charlie Parker shared Ronald Reagan's American optimism. Listening to Bird's music, on almost all occasions, you do feel that it is still just "morning in America." (And for African Americans of his generation it was of course still very early in the morning — only barely out of the long, dark, troubled night in slavery, weighing like a nightmare on the brain of the living.)

Charlie Parker put his very best into his music. It is what he would have been himself, if the good bird had finally conquered the bad one forever, and lived on to a ripe old age. At its best, his music is what he said he had always wanted it to be, a little more than a year before his death: "very clean, very precise, as clean as possible anyway ... And, more or less to the people, you know, something they could understand, something that was beautiful."

It seems as well that the Bird whose music many of his comparatively few early admirers heard live in the 1940s and early 1950s is not always the same as the Bird whom much larger numbers of us later discovered, exploring his records (or now CDs) in rooms of our own.

Ross Russell, a sometime controversial Charlie Parker business associate as well as his most colourful biographer, has described listening to the legend at the height of his live career: "An evening with Charlie Parker was not an entertainment. Listening to Charlie was a demanding, moving, often chilling experience — like an evening with Lenny Bruce."

For many in all the subsequent generations, the later second-hand experience with the mere recorded legacy has been different. Charlie Parker's music can indeed be demanding to listen to, as well as to play. But the final reward for making the effort is certainly an entertainment. It is the kind of entertainment that can light your room up brightly, and, for a brief moment, make it a part of the still hopeful high adventure of human progress.

On the bebop theory, it was said by the likes of both Bird and Diz, "music is basically melody, harmony, and rhythm." Dizzy Gillespie once remarked that Charlie Parker's greatest contribution to modern jazz was probably in melody — which remains the ingredient that pulls everything else together. Once you catch on to them Bird's melodies are supremely melodious. They are charged with satirical wit, but its final intent is humourous in a straightforward way. And its ultimate critical intent is disciplined and constructive.

The analogy with the hip stand-up comedy of Lenny Bruce may still make some kinds of sense. Like everyone else of his particular multicultural background, Bird had some very good reasons to complain about the America in which he lived. As Ross Russell and others have urged, there was an almost political side to Charlie Parker that vaguely anticipated the jagged black American radicalism of the 1960s. In other ways as well Bird's music is also a satirical critique of modern American culture at large — like the writing of Thorstein Veblen, who died just before Charles Parker Jr. turned nine years old.

Yet all this remains primarily entertaining. Bird never descends into even musical versions of cheerless political ranting, as Lenny Bruce perhaps sometimes did. And just listening to Charlie Parker's recorded music is not remotely "chilling," except perhaps in the sense that the sheer magnitude of his talent can inspire a very briefly chilling sense of awe. In the end his music is warm and friendly — albeit in a very hip and sophisticated way, highly attuned to the many ironies and paradoxes of the human condition (and always remembering the birth of the blues).

As the legend himself might urge, it is no doubt "a very natural, normal reaction" for different people to have different discoveries of his music. The free and democratic idea is to put "your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom" into everything you do.

What everyone can still altogether agree with the late Ross Russell about is the enduring power and continuing immense fascination and relevance of Bird's music. At the end of his colourful biography Russell notes that in New York City in 1955 (also the year that James Dean died): "Within a few days of Parker's death there appeared among the graffiti on walls in the Village and in subways, scrawled in black crayon or squirted out of pressurized paint canisters, the legend BIRD LIVES!."

You can say, as some do, that this was just the work of wayward beatniks, who were falsely attracted to the bad bird's self-destructive lifestyle, and never really appreciated or understood the good bird's music. Yet a half century later you might also say that Charlie Parker is more alive and well today than when he actually walked the mean streets of Kansas City and Manhattan. And that finally has to be a hopeful sign for the future of America, and the world at large as well.

Other sites and sources

Charlie Parker's recorded legacy can be sampled on a wide assortment of CDs today. One convenient place to start is a four-disc set called Boss Bird, Studio Recordings 1944-1951, recently put together by the UK firm Proper Records. This gives a chronologically arranged and rather tidily organized survey of the full range of Bird's work. Boss Bird can also be purchased through Amazon.com, with prices in US$. (The price over the net from Proper Records in the UK is of course in pounds sterling.)