BACK TO KANSAS CITY ...

BIRDHOP is on the road in Kansas City, November 21-25, 2005, exploring the place that made Charlie Parker, 1920-1940, and trying to discover what it is today. We'll be returning with fresh field notes. And current plans call for an accompanying major renewal and re-launch of the website, to help get its first shaky yet determined year moving more briskly.

Meanwhile, we'll be checking out the Blue Monday Jam with Jim Eriksen at the Blue Room in Kansas City on November 21 — trying to discover what has happened to the old Paris of the Plains, 70 years after Charlie Parker began to study music seriously at the legendary corner of 18th and Vine. Later in the week we'll be visiting the Parker gravesite at Blue Summit, just west of Independence, Missouri. ("Contrary to popular belief, Charles ‘Bird' Parker is not buried in Kansas City, Missouri. Lincoln Cemetery is actually located in Blue Summit, Missouri. If Bird actually asked his lady, Chan, ‘not to let anyone bury me in Kansas City,' his request was granted.") Much more to come, once we're back at the usual cyberspace address.

Gone fishin' — MJQ bass player Percy Heath meets maker at 81: Percy Heath — "the last surviving member of the legendary Modern Jazz Quartet" — passed away on Thursday, April 28, 2005, at a hospital in Southampton, NY, on Long Island.

Heath was born in 1923 in Wilmington, North Carolina (on the Cape Fear coast, which may explain his lifetime love of fishing). He spent most of his childhood and early adulthood in Philadelphia. But his birthplace today likes to stress that as a teenager Percy Heath returned to Wilmington, NC to live with his grandmother, and "study at the formidable Williston Industrial (later High) School," where "he graduated second in his class."

During the Second World War he served as one of the first African American fighter pilots with the Tuskegee Airmen. Having also grown up in a talented musical family, when the war ended he bought himself a string bass with his military separation pay. By the late 1940s he was in New York City, where he played with the likes of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie.

In the early 1950s Percy Heath became part of the newly formed Modern Jazz Quartet, along with John Lewis on piano, Milt Jackson, on vibes, and ultimately Connie Kay on drums. ("John told me, ‘Percy, you don't know enough about what we're going to do, so you better get yourself lessons' ... John's music was a challenge and I appreciated it.")

Heath developed into a subtle, highly intelligent, and distinguished contributor to the cool and almost classical music of the tuxedo-clad MJQ, which stayed together for an unusually long time, from 1952 to 1974 — and then frequently worked as a group again in the 1980s and 1990s. When the MJQ first broke up in the 1970s, Heath began to work regularly as well with his brothers Jimmy (saxophone) and Albert (drums).

Percy's brother Albert also briefly served as MJQ drummer after Connie Kay died in 1994. Then the MJQ survivors decided they had grown a little too old for the grueling life of touring musicians. And then Milt Jackson died in 1999, and John Lewis in 2001.

In his last years Percy Heath continued to perform occasionally with his brothers, but spent most of his time at his house in Montauk on Long Island, where he "devoted himself to fishing." His survivors include his wife, June, his sons Percy III, Jason, and Stuart, and his two brothers. He leaves a musical legacy of fine performances on more than 300 records.

Corporate America boosts Chicago Jazz:  Boeing (the airplane people), Bank One, Kraft Foods, and the Chicago Community Trust have just "formed an informal partnership to broaden participation in Chicago's jazz music scene and increase awareness of the accomplished musicians and exciting jazz venues in Chicago."

"To kick off the effort, the partnership will sponsor a series of free jazz concerts this summer in Millennium Park's Jay Pritzker Pavilion, featuring Kurt Elling, Jon Faddis and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, Mambo 911, and the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, among other world-renowned Chicago jazz artists."

If you like jazz at all, you can't help but applaud this promotional scheme, on one side of your face. As Anne Roosevelt, director of community relations activities for Boeing World Headquarters, has explained, "Chicago may have a lot of jazz fans, but they aren't all necessarily fans of Chicago jazz. In fact, not many Chicagoans know that the city has a rich and dynamic jazz culture boasting a cadre of world-class musicians ... Jazz is a unique and important local asset that is highly developed artistically but has been overlooked for the most part by the funding community. We are confident that this effort will help change that."

At the same time, it's hard not to notice how different all this is from the world in which jazz grew up. Consider, e.g., what the character Professor Billy Bones had to say, in Charles Mingus's intriguing 1971 autobiography, Beneath the Underdog: "By my reckoning a good jazz musician has got to turn to pimpdom in order to be free and keep his soul straight. Jelly Roll Morton had seven girls I know of and that's the way he bought the time to write and study and incidentally got diamonds in his teeth and probably his asshole."

In Chicago 2005 things are quite different. Kassie Davis, senior program officer with The Chicago Community Trust, explains how the Trust and Boeing, Bank One, and Kraft Foods hope their partnership will encourage other "corporations, foundations and individuals to increase their philanthropic support of jazz to build audiences for local musicians and increase the capacity of jazz organizations to grow overall."

Or, as Warren Chapman, president of the Bank One Foundation, has put it: "The strategy of the partnership is to coordinate and develop ... existing organizations and their activities in a way that will increase their benefit to the community."

In the words of Amina Dickerson, Kraft Foods' senior director of global community involvement: "Our intent is to enhance, not reinvent ... Our hope is that better coordination and increased, more focused activity will allow the Chicago jazz community to market the music in innovative ways to develop new audiences, encourage up-and-coming talent, and ultimately feed longer-term and more sustainable growth."

What it's also hard not to wonder is just what kind of jazz is going to come out of this kind of economic base? Can it ever match the music that grew out of the quite different world of Professor Billy Bones and Charles Mingus — to say nothing of the likes of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk?

Have we already begun to hear the answer? Or on the simplest truth is anything that promotes jazz nowadays good, as you do have to agree, with one side of your face? And who can complain about the free jazz concerts this summer in Millennium Park's Jay Pritzker Pavilion? Maybe the best thing to do is just take a trip to Chicago to check it all out?

Jazzmouth in Portsmouth ... Portsmouth, New Hampshire — on the Atlantic Ocean north of Boston — will be hosting an intriguing four-day weekend event, this April 14-17. The "first-ever Seacoast Jazz and Poetry Festival," a.k.a. "Jazzmouth," will "combine poets reading their original poetry with accompaniment by jazz musicians."

Featured performers at the festival include "Pulitzer Prize winning poet Charles Simic and Beat legend David Amram, who did music for Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg." Also on hand will be "Groove Bacteria, Portsmouth's premier jazz quartet featuring Larry Simon (electric guitar), Scip Gallant (organ), Mike Barron (drums) and Nate Edgar (bass)" — along with "a host of special guests ... including sax wizard Don Davis."

In modern jazz history Charlie Parker dabbled a little in poetry himself. Jack Kerouac was also an early literary promoter of Bird's music — in such works as On the Road and the poem that begins "Charlie Parker looked like Buddha." And it was New York Beats who spray-painted "Bird Lives" around Manhattan shortly after Parker's untimely death on March 12, 1955. (And then there's Ted Joans's classic short memoir on "Bird and the Beats.")

"Jazzmouth in Portsmouth" will help keep this legacy alive.  And there probably are moments when the first decade of the 21st century feels a little like the 1950s that spawned the Beat generation. Along with live music and spoken poetry, the four-day event will include showings of "two word-and-music inspired films, Pull My Daisy and Poetry In Motion." For more on schedules and prices check out the Seacoast Jazz and Poetry Festival website.

California Dreaming: The Grammy Foundation Grants Program in Santa Monica has recently announced that "nearly $600,000 will be distributed to 19 recipients in 2005."

This includes $40,000 to the Monterey Jazz Festival, to preserve the first decade of its audio recordings, 1958-1969 — "an American treasure of unique and irreplaceable recordings of performances by the greatest jazz musicians of the second half of the 20th century."

It also includes $20,000 to Yale University, to help preserve its Oral History, American Music (OHAM) collection, "which contains oral and video memoirs of some of the most creative musicians of our time," including Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Milt Hinton, Quincy Jones, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Gunther Schuller, Clark Terry, Ben Webster, and Mary Lou Williams.

The Grammy Foundation Grants Program is funded by The Recording Academy. It awards modest amounts to organizations and individuals annually, in support of the "archiving and preservation of the music and recorded sound heritage of the Americas for future generations, as well as research projects related to the impact of music on the human condition." The deadline each year for submitting grant applications is October 1. Applications for funds to be granted in 2006 will be available after May 1, 2005.

"Bird died in March" ... Saturday, March 12, 2005 marked the 50^th anniversary of Charlie Parker's untimely death, at the hotel suite of the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter in New York City.

Many different worthy commemorations were no doubt held by Bird's living admirers in many parts of the world, a half-century later. But the three events most easily discovered on the net suggested that something of his angular struggle for recognition in the flesh lives on. None actually took place on March 12, and none were exactly in the USA where Bird spent most of his life.

On Friday, March 11 BBC Radio in the UK broadcast an hour-long conversation between Julian Joseph and Brian Priestley, "commemorating the 50th anniversary of Charlie Parker's death, on 12th March 1955."

On the same Friday evening, quite a few time zones away, the Granville Island Brewery Taproom in Vancouver, Canada held "sort of a jazz vespers type night," but "instead of readings from the bible we'll talk briefly about Parker's life and influence," accompanied by a local bebop quintet "that is going to blow the roof off the brewhouse!"

A few more time zones away again, on Sunday March 13, the Charlie Parker Society of Japan presented "‘Bird 50' at SOMEDAY in Shinbashi, Tokyo ... Start 18:00."

The very last words may belong to Miles Davis, recalling the actual 1955 event in the late 1980s, not long before his own death: "Bird died in March and that just fucked everyone up. Everyone knew that he was in bad shape ... But it just made me sad ... because, man, he was a genius and he had so much he could have given. But that's the way life is."

High School Confidential in Chicago: This past January the National Endowment for the Arts announced an NEA Jazz in the Schools program. Intended as a resource for high-school history, music, and social studies teachers, the "five-unit, web-based curriculum and DVD toolkit explores jazz as an indigenous American art form and as a means to understand American history."

Ongoing programs at two Chicago-area high schools suggest just how well some branches of public education in the USA today are already rising to the challenge of keeping jazz alive for the newest generations. Evanston Township High School, on the northeastern edge of the city proper, hosts an impressive assortment of young bands. So does New Trier High School, not too much further north in Winnetka. The annual New Trier High School Jazz Festival also also attracts high school and other bands from the wider Chicago area and far beyond.

Jazz at Natalie's in Philadelphia: Go to the Philadelphia Inquirer website, scroll down the page, and click on "Jazz at Natalie's Lounge." It's an affectionate short video clip on one of the most venerable jazz venues extant in the city of brotherly love.

As a longtime Natalie's patron points out, more than a few modern jazz greats started out in Philadelphia. Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, and Gerry Mulligan are just a few leading cases in point. Make sure your sound is on when you click the clip. "Jazz at Natalie's" is well worth a few minutes to see and hear. (And as of the start of March 2005, it's still on the Inquirer website.)

Local Jazz in Toronto: One of BIRDHOP's ambitions is to report intermittently on today's live jazz scene in Toronto — home base of the birdhop editors. Current net resources include:

• Toronto.com on The Rex Hotel — premier venue for local jazz in the city today, down and dirty, the way it ought to be
• Toronto.com on the Top O' the Senator — local and touring groups, more upscale
• The Montreal Bistro and Jazz Club — local and touring groups, also more upscale
• Jazz in Toronto, including calendars for the Rex, Senator, and Bistro
• Canada's premier Jazz Radio Station — JAZZ.FM 91
• Mealnie Maddix on the 50th anniversary of Jazz at Massey Hall — Bird, Diz, Bud Powell, Max Roach, and Mingus in Toronto, 1953.

Kansas City Today: Kansas City in 2005 is not the "Paris of the Plains" that it was in the 1930s, when it incubated Charlie Parker. But the historic 18^th and Vine district in Kansas City, Missouri has recently been redeveloped, with an eye on reviving its musical interest.

The main net resource for the resulting local jazz scene today is the website of the new American Jazz Museum, which now anchors the same neighborhood once haunted by Lester Young, Jay McShann, the teenage Bird himself, and on and on.

The redeveloped 18^th and Vine district is also graced by a giant sculpture of Bird's head, on a public square known as Charlie Parker Memorial Plaza. You can read about the official unveiling of the piece in March 1999 on the Jazzhouse website.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City held an exhibit on the history of the Paris of the Plains at its Miller Nichols Library in 2000-2001. The accompanying website The Jazz Age in Kansas City, 1920-1940 is still online, and offers some insight into the now-vanished time and place in which so much of modern jazz was born.