According to his fourth wife, Charlie "Bird" Parker — the single most important inventor of modern jazz ("Among the masters he was the master" - MILES DAVIS) — did not want to be buried in Kansas City.

As has been pointed out, in the most exact sense he was not. Today he lies in the Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Summit, just outside the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri. But Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas. For the most part he grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, next door. What an earlier and more romantic (if also more harsh and repressive) age called the "Paris of the Plains," in the 1920s and 1930s, was the strangely fertile point of departure for his ultimate career in New York City, as certainly one of the greatest and most interesting musicians that America has yet produced.

What happens when you take a short trip to Kansas City, Missouri today, to see what has become of the harshly romantic Midwest urban neighborhoods where Charlie Parker spent most of his first 20 years, in the first half of the 20th century? The short answer is that you have a good time, and learn a few new things too. Inevitably, the real old world of Charlie Parker finally eludes you, but the trip is interesting all the same.

The two Kansas Cities ...

Many from other places seem only dimly aware that there are two Kansas Cities. (As Charlie Parker's intriguing mother once put it, apparently not altogether accurately, "I was just in two towns in all my life, the two Kansas Cities; I never cared to go any place either.")

What the US Bureau of the Census now calls the Kansas City metropolitan statistical area (home to almost 2 million people in 2004) straddles the border between the State of Missouri and the State of Kansas. Kansas City, Missouri is the biggest city in the area (at a bit less than half a million people), and has the main metropolitan downtown. Kansas City, Kansas is a kind of suburb of Kansas City, Missouri.

Charles Parker Jr., the son of Addie and Charles Parker Sr., was born early in the morning of Sunday 29 August 1920, at 852 Freeman Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas (a vacant lot today). Exactly what happened to him subsequently in his earlier years has long had mysterious dimensions. But, among many other interesting events that alter and illuminate our time, in the year 2005 the interested public learned a little more about the first decade and a half of his life.

This was the result of fresh research in census and educational records by two men on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean — the American jazz historian Chuck Haddix, in Kansas City itself, and the British jazz historian Llew Walker, based in Surbiton in the Greater London area, in the UK. (And the best short introduction to the subject is a nicely done Sunday, June 26, 2005 piece in the Kansas City Star by Lee Hill Kavanaugh.)

The old received wisdom in "Parker biographies" was that Charles Parker Jr. moved from Kansas City, Kansas to Kansas City, Missouri when he was about seven years old — and perhaps just with his mother, Addie. In Kansas City, Missouri he lived at 1516 Olive Street, conveniently close to a legendary jazz and blues hotbed of the 1920s and 1930s, in the now historic African American cultural center at "18th and Vine."

(And here the young Charlie Parker lived in a house on which his hard-working mother would eventually pay off the mortgage, so that in later life she was, as the mature Bird himself reported in a radio interview, "pretty well situated." Both this young Charlie Parker on Olive Street and his mother Addie also appear as characters in Robert Altman's interesting if imperfect 1996 movie, Kansas City — in which great music performed by young 1990s jazz sharks, impersonating the Paris of the Plains legends 60 years before, finally takes over everything else.)

Like most jazz history written until comparatively recently, this view of things has been based largely on interviews with key participants in the events described. It is essentially an oral history — often gleaned carefully by assiduous journalists and scholars from the men and women who made the history themselves. Oral history of this sort will probably always be one key source for all varieties of the remarkable story of jazz, a.k.a. "the music of democracy."

Yet as time goes by and the more long-term vision settles in, oral history is not always so helpful in getting the exact facts about the past straight. (Who among us can remember exactly what we did last week, and so forth?) Both Chuck Haddix in the USA and Llew Walker in the UK belong to a newer generation of jazz historians, who have begun to explore official public records of earlier eras — some of which have only recently been released by government agencies.

In the case of Charlie Parker's early years in Kansas City, Haddix's and Walker's fresh documentary research has cast some intriguing further light on the older received wisdom.

The very young Bird did move from Kansas City, Kansas to Kansas City, Missouri when he was about seven years old, in 1927. But he did not go directly to the black cultural mecca at 18th and Vine. He first spent a number of years in what was then a largely white 1920s suburban neighborhood known as Westport. And his father as well as his mother may have been a frequent enough presence in the Westport households.

Two Westport apartments still standing today ...

Haddix's and Walker's research has uncovered two flats or apartments in the Westport neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri, inhabited by the youthful Charles Parker Jr. (and his mother and perhaps father too) from the late 1920s to the early 1930s.

The main documents Haddix and Walker have used are decennial census records (1920 and 1930) from the US Bureau of the Census, and then local school records from both Kansas Cities. The reporting of their research on the web is still in something of a state of flux. But it is clear enough that one of the Parkers' two Westport flats was at 109 W 34th Street — just a little west of Main. Subsequently (and it would seem before as well) the family lived slightly further west and south, not too long a walk around the corner, at 3527 Wyandotte Street.

One great difference between these two addresses and both 852 Freeman Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas and 1516 Olive Street in Kansas City, Missouri is that the buildings in which Charlie Parker lived are still standing in Westport today. This may just be because the Westport buildings were newer in the 1920s and 1930s, and have yet to be torn down and replaced with something newer again. But for whatever reasons in the early 21st century 852 Freeman Avenue in Kansas is just a vacant lot. And Addie Parker's old house at 1516 Olive Street, near 18th and Vine, has been demolished to make way for new urban industrial development.

Westport itself had an intriguing role in the earlier history of the Kansas City area, as a legendary jumping off point for all of the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe Trails to the American far West and Pacific Coast (which also accounts for the name, "west port"). But by the 1920s it had become a kind of inner suburb of the original Kansas City, Missouri downtown, further north — up where the Missouri and Kansas Rivers meet. In the late fall of 2005 a sign in front of an apartment building just around another corner from the old Parker family residence at 3527 Wyandotte read "A Touch of Kansas City History Since 1920."

In the late fall of 2005 as well, the former Charlie Parker residence at 3527 Wyandotte was a more impressive structure than the flats at 109 W 34th Street. Both places have been recently repaired and rejuvenated somewhat (apparently just over the summer of 2005). And both appear from the street to be two flats at one address, directly attached to another two flats at the immediately adjacent address.

But the W 34th Street structure originally seems to have been less striking and has now been painted in a vaguely garish red color. The four units a bit around the corner at 3525 and 3527 Wyandotte are adorned by Greek columns. By the late fall of 2005 they were surrounded by a smart wrought-iron fence as well, and boasted small brass plaques at the doorways saying "Yardbird Suites" (an innovation very recently adopted by current owner Brad Menger, after he learned about his property's exotic and important musical past from Chuck Haddix).

What any outsider can tell about any urban neighborhood by just walking through on a sunny fall afternoon is of course strictly limited. If Westport around W 34th and Wyandotte was a largely white area in the 1920s and 1930s, there are at least many more black people around nowadays, as of late November 2005. You can still see white people on the streets too, however, and it may be that the best current cultural characterization of the place is mixed race.

(Which arguably fits Charlie Parker's family of the 1920s and 1930s still better than it may have when they lived there. As explained by the present-day "saxophonist and Instructor of Jazz History" at the University of Oregon, Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker's mother Addie "was of African-American-Choctaw descent, and lived in Oklahoma before moving to Kansas City.")

The renovated Historic Jazz District at 18th and Vine ...

It now seems that the Parker family (and probably just Charles Jr. and his mother Addie?) moved to 1516 Olive Street near the jazz and blues hotbed at 18th and Vine in the early 1930s, just at the edge of the young Charlie Parker's teenage years. And this blends with a story the mature Bird made public himself, to help explain his near-pathological abuse of all of alcohol, tobacco, and heroin (and even fried chicken?) — which resulted in his tragic death at the still tender enough age of 34, in New York City, on March 12, 1955.

The trouble, Bird said, was that his "dissipation" had begun when he was 12 — and flowed from a too-early introduction to "night life." Once appropriate chronological adjustments are made, the old received wisdom still works from here: "Charlie and his mother moved to ... Olive Street ... just a short walk from Kaycee's wide open entertainment district. Charlie's mother, Addie, worked nights and after she would leave for work, Charlie would begin his nightly rounds."

As Robert Altman also quietly urges in his 1996 Kansas City movie, the budding young teenage Bird was not just learning about dissipation on these nightly rounds. He was also learning about a lot of terrific music. And his rounds had a lot to do with what official Kansas City, MO nowadays calls the "Historic Jazz District at 18th and Vine" — at most a 10-minute walk from the house on Olive Street (based on field work by older people in the late fall of 2005).

According to the oral history reported by the New York jazz critic Gary Giddens: "Addie looked the other way" when her only son "disappeared" into the depths of 18th and Vine (as she knew he did when she was working at night). But "she forbade him from walking into the combat zone around Twelfth Street, where many of the best musicians could be heard." As Llew Walker puts it, "Charlie ... did not always abide by his mother's wishes." Yet Addie Parker was a hard-working lady who believed in respectability. And even in the 1920s and 1930s "Kaycee's wide open entertainment district" around 18th and Vine was a more respectable African-American cultural center in wider senses as well, from which the budding teenage Bird also seems to have profited, in various ways.

This may be one of the reasons Addie Parker moved to the district with her son, from Westport, in the early 1930s. And even the latest documentary research by Chuck Haddix and Llew Walker, e.g., confirms that the early teenage Charlie Parker attended Lincoln High School, on Woodland Avenue, up a hill south of 18th Street, not far east of Vine. Here he became involved in an innovative high school music program — pioneered by Major N. Clark Smith from Leavenworth, Kansas, who had "trained many of Kansas City's finest musicians," and carried on in Parker's own day by Alonzo Lewis.

On the older received wisdom, the pre-teenage Charlie Parker had earlier attended Crispus Attucks Elementary School in the 18th and Vine neighborhood. Llew Walker explains: "Charlie, his mother, friends, and even a teacher are all on record as stating that he attended this school. However, the Student Records Office for the Missouri School District, has no records of Charlie at this school? How it entered the consciousness of so many people as being Charlie's alma mater is unclear." (Somehow, it now almost seems, the inventors of the original Bird legend wanted to forget about Bird's earlier years in Westport, where school records do show that he had attended "Penn School ... in the affluent, white Westport district in a former slave settlement called Steptoe, a small but successful black community" — the "first public school for African Americans west of the Mississippi and ... a highly respected school.")

Whatever deeper truth lies behind the legend of the young Charlie Parker at Crispus Attucks Elementary School, it is clear enough that no one attends this school nowadays. In the late fall of 2005 it was a vacant building, with boarded-up windows. In this respect it is different from much of the rest of the "Historic Jazz District at 18th and Vine" today. To start with, Lincoln High School is still going strong, under the somewhat more imposing name of Lincoln College Preparatory Academy. And in the past decade or so much of the rest of the Historic Jazz District at 18th and Vine in Kansas City, MO has been extensively renovated and redeveloped.

To start with here, earlier housing in the eastern end of the neighborhood at Olive Street (including Addie's and Charlie's old house at 1516 Olive) has been torn down to make way for new urban industrial development. A little further west along 18th Street, closer to Vine, there is an attractive new housing development called Parade Park Homes. And then, further along, an entire block on the north side of 18th, right at Vine, has been redeveloped as a "Jazz District" apartment complex, that also includes a new American Jazz Museum (and a companion Negro Leagues Baseball Museum). Across the street the old Gem theater from the 1920s and 1930s has been nicely renovated, and re-opened for business as a concert venue.

The later publicly sponsored phases of this redevelopment have a lot to do with the political skills of Emmanuel Cleaver — first African American mayor of Kansas City, MO from 1991 to 1999, a fixture on City Council before that (1979-1991), and currently Member of the United States House of Representatives for the Fifth Congressional District of Missouri.

Chuck Haddix has summarized the later 20th century struggles of 18th and Vine: "The decline of the historic district began in 1940 with the demise of the Pendergast Machine. Under the rule of political boss Tom Pendergast and his cronies, Kansas City was a wide open town. When the reformers cleaned up the town, they closed many of the clubs that provided work for musicians." At the same time, the "historic district was much more than an entertainment center." Down to the mid 1950s "18th and Vine was the heart of the African American community" in the Kansas City metropolitan area and beyond. And even in the late 1940s and early 1950s such rising young jazz greats as Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Stitt "hung out in the area trying to find the energy or spiritual force behind Charlie Parker. They felt that Kansas City was the driving force behind modern jazz."

By the time of Charlie Parker's own tragic early death in 1955, in New York City, the troubled beginnings of industrial urban renewal had begun to destabilize the 18th and Vine neighborhood in the city of his birth in major ways. And it was not until the exertions of Emmanuel Cleaver and many others finally came to a head in the 1990s that the latest efforts "to restore the 18th and Vine Historic District to its former glory ... to transform streets of memories into streets of dreams once again" began to leave their present-day marks.

Those involved in this latest wave of urban redevelopment have rightly been concerned to stress the impressively large and diverse numbers of people who made the music of the old Paris of the Plains in its Boss Pendergast heyday such a remarkable creation. But they have also been quite clear that by far the greatest and altogether most interesting musician to come out of all the remarkable earlier 20th century cultural ferment was the Charlie Parker who used to live with his mother on Olive Street, in a house long since torn down.

Behind the main building complex that now houses the American Jazz Museum, on the north side of 18th Street just east of Vine, is a grassed-in plot of open space officially known as Charlie Parker Memorial Plaza. In the middle of the plaza is a very large bronze sculpture of Bird's head. As often happens in such cases of public art, not everyone who sees it seems to like the sculpture. (And a person could easily drive along 18th Street at Vine today in a car without noticing Bird's head at all — though probably not someone driving south from 18th on The Paseo.) But no other musician has been so honored in all the restoration and redevelopment that has lately taken place. And when you visit the American Jazz Museum on 18th Street today, the first exhibit you see is on the harshly romantic career of Charlie "Bird" Parker, who was born and spent most of his first 20 years in various parts of his mother's two Kansas Cities.

What does it all mean in the early 21st century?

In the end it is of course impossible for anyone to altogether successfully "restore the 18th and Vine Historic District to its former glory ... to transform streets of memories into streets of dreams once again." Just too much in the broader framework of American life has changed.

As the very interesting Hungarian-American historian from the Philadelphia exurbs, John Lukacs, has explained, the 1920s and 1930s were part of a rare moment in time when mainstream "America was urban and urbane." The ultimate disintegration of Kansas City's old 18th and Vine neighborhood that had set in by the mid 1950s also marked the ultimate triumph of the new age of the automobile and the suburbs (and then even the exurbs beyond the suburbs), all over North America north of the Rio Grande.

One sign of the demise of the historic urban and urbane scene was the disappearance of the electric streetcar public transit systems that once enlivened North American cities — starting about the middle of the 1950s, and in all but a few locations. San Francisco in northern California and Toronto in central Canada are two leading cases of cities where something of the age of the streetcar still survives today (along with a now besieged New Orleans?). But Kansas City's other and more typical experience is suggested in the title of an excellent local book by Monroe Dodd, A Splendid Ride: The Streetcars of Kansas City 1870-1957.

Nowadays, in the early 21st century, the local community people who have worked hard to try to rebuild and revive the Historic Jazz District at 18th and Vine in Kansas City, MO sometimes complain that people from the wider metropolis are reluctant to visit the place. But there also seems to be a contemporary movement of sorts to revive the streetcar in Kansas City. And those from elsewhere who have visited the city recently without automobiles might actually imagine that a new streetcar line from the present downtown bus terminal at 10th and Main, say, down Main Street to 18th, and then across 18th to Vine, would at least make it easier for both tourists and the hip new local downtown loft-dwellers to visit the Historic Jazz District.

Kansas City today is similarly not at all the Midwest jazz mecca that it was in the 1920s and 1930s. (According to the local downtown counter-culture tabloid paper, the most listened-to radio station in the wider metropolis in late 2005 played country western music.) But there is still a local jazz scene in Kansas City today, as in most other North American cities of any size. And part of the idea behind the renovation of the Historic Jazz District at 18th and Vine has been to help stimulate the contemporary local growth and development of "America's classical music."

On the Monday night before Thanksgiving in the late fall of 2005, e.g., the new Blue Room at 18th and Vine — a kind of heritage bar directly attached to the American Jazz Museum, and named after an earlier Blue Room in the Street Hotel of the 1920s and 1930s — held its regular Monday Night Jam. It was open to all aspiring local jazz musicians who showed up and put their names on a sheet of paper at the door, more or less as in the old days when the young teenage Charlie Parker first tried to play in public, in the old African American cultural center.

At this particular Monday Night Jam in 2005, however, all the musicians at the Blue Room were white, with the possible exception of a strong tenor saxophone player who looked vaguely Hispanic. The listening audience was more mixed, but most of the black people were older, and most of the younger people were white. Some musicians on stage were quite accomplished — especially one guitarist. But a few were as inexperienced as the very young Charlie Parker, who on one of his first trials was aggressively urged off the stage by the legendary drummer Jo Jones (and then went home to practice "11 to 15 hours a day," until he became a lot better).

The next night in the fall of 2005, visitors to Kansas City could also attend a regular Tuesday Night Jam at the Phoenix Piano Bar & Grill, on 8th Street in the old downtown, some distance to the north and west of 18th and Vine. The same especially accomplished guitarist from the night before at the Blue Room was on hand again, but this time with other more consistently equal (and swinging) musicians — black and white. And if you were part of the more mixed-race- younger audience you could actually smoke at the bar too, in the old tradition.

The local jazz scene in Kansas City, MO nowadays, a visitor might guess, is more vigorous and even more traditionally African American in the old downtown than it is at 18th and Vine. This too, you might say, could qualify as a legacy from the 1920s and 1930s, when Charlie Parker's mother told him not to visit the 12th Street combat zone to the north, where some of the best musicians played. Kansas City nowadays has also tried to remember all this in a few new street names. When 11th Street crosses The Paseo, e.g., traveling east, it turns into Ella Fitzgerald Lane, which then veers south, down to the intersection of 12th Street and Woodland Avenue (also where the old Lincoln High School* is located, south of 18th Street).

The Phoenix on 8th Street, on the other hand, is considerably west of Ella Fitzgerald Lane, in the heart of the old metropolitan downtown, near where the Missouri and Kansas Rivers meet. In the late fall of 2005 the downtown was in the midst of some major redevelopment, from substantial new office towers to the conversion of old 1920s and 1930s office space into attractive loft apartments for young urban professionals. But even here the still newish Marriott hotel on 12th Street, not far south of the Phoenix, has its own heritage memorials to the great age of jazz in Boss Pendergast's Paris of the Plains.

The Kansas City Marriott Downtown, as it is officially known, boats an assortment of business and social meeting rooms — all named after Kansas City jazz greats from the first half of the 20th century. At the top of the list are the Yardbird Suites, A and B, named after Charlie "Bird" Parker, the most brilliant and innovative musician who finally came out of the old Paris of the Plains. But there is also the Big Joe Turner Room, the Julia Lee Room, the Andy Kirk Room, the Bennie Moten Room, the Mary Lou Williams Room, the Jay McShann Room, and the Lester Young Room. And then last but far from least, there is the Count Basie Ball Room.

(Back down south and east, near 18th and Vine, there is another more obscure but equally interesting heritage memorial to Count Basie — leader of the arguably greatest of all the big swing bands that came out of America in the 20th century, allowing that Duke Ellington was more important as a creative musician, but did not have as technically formidable a band. On the northwest corner of The Paseo and 18th Street there is a small metal plaque embedded in the concrete sidewalk. It simply reads: "William ‘Count' Basie Residence 1929." The site today is occupied by a newish building, housing an organization called "Full Employment Council Inc.")

On the 12th Street sidewalk, right out in front of the Kansas City Marriott Downtown, a series of metal stars are embedded as well — similarly honouring the now alas departed Kansas City jazz greats of the past. There is a star for Charlie Parker here too, along with Lester Young (whose records the teenage Charlie Parker memorized at one point in his development), Count Basie, Andy Kirk, Mary Lou Williams, and others. Whatever else you may or may not want to say, someone or something in the Kansas City of the early 21st century is certainly trying hard to remember its great musical past, and somehow help it contribute to a better future.

It is probably also still true enough that, according to his fourth wife, Charlie Parker himself did not want to be buried in the Kansas City where he was born, and spent most of his first 20 years. By virtually all accounts the mature Bird preferred life in Manhattan. It is said that he called his mother Addie, who resolutely remained in Kansas City, MO, almost every week, on the telephone. But he did not visit her often. And you can no doubt still see various things in Kansas City today that might help account for this kind of preference. What part of the global village in the early 21st century is not struggling with one thing or another (including Manhattan, to say nothing of all of New York City)?

But the right note to end on here is still that quite a few people involved in the public life of Kansas City, MO today are still working hard to remember their city's remarkable musical past, as a way of improving its future. What Andrew Young from Atlanta said on TV about Coretta Scott King, at the sad time of her death in Mexico, at the end of January 2006, seems to fit in this connection too. There are still apparently enough people in Kansas City who believe with Mrs. King that: "With the right efforts on the part of people of goodwill, we will overcome."

Wherever the ghost of Charlie Parker may reside nowadays, it must be somehow pleased.

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* There is apparently another "Lincoln College Preparatory Academy" still further south, on 23rd Street. This may have been where Charlie Parker went to high school in the  1930s, and the one on Woodland may be newer? But the one on Woodland is closer to 18th and Vine. Further investigation will be undertaken at some point soon.