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As Bird soloed over Rhythm Changes on his famous tune “Moose the Mooche”, the music deafened itself as the thought of how Charlie Parker had to lead his life consumed me. My music teacher had always told me the stories behind the standards and tunes he taught me- “Moose the Mooche” was a simple tune that followed the same chord changes as the George Gershwin song, “I Got Rhythm”, eventually shortening the chord changes to the name “Rhythm Changes”. This tune’s story was far different from the late night ideas that jazz musicians had, coming to their friends at midnight to play the new blues head they came up with- this tune told a story about the deep troubles Bird had to face in his career.
Charlie “Yardbird” Parker was a talented jazz alto saxophonist known for fathering “bebop”, a subgenre of jazz that was characterized by its fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, and mainly hinged on rhythm and embellishment to get the sound Bird intended. The idea for the tune “Moose the Mooche” sprouted from the name of Charlie Parker’s drug dealer in LA- Bird suffered from a heroin addiction that prevented him from living out a long career, turning away many bar owners and jazz clubs from giving him a gig. He led a short life, dying at just 34 years old.
Bird, born as a black man in the 1920s, economically struggled to make it along. Black jazz musicians were not given many opportunities to perform due to the color of their skin, and many bars would rather hire all-white bands to take their place. One of his most famous albums, “Now’s The Time”, sold to the record company for a meager $50, though it would end up making jazz history. Bird did not have proper financial resources to fight for a better deal, so he found himself stuck. The racism, discrimination, and abuse he also faced playing for white audiences as a black man was horrific, causing Bird to have to resort to a way of drawing out his emotions.
Life problems in jazz causing substance abuse trace back all the way to Louis Armstrong- Armstrong would smoke marijuana before every single one of his gigs. In an interview, Louis claimed that “it makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro”. Many jazz musicians would seek drugs as a gateway to escape from the time-consuming and stressful life of a gigging musician.
Situations like these didn’t only entangle instrumentalists too- one of the most famous vocalists in jazz, Billie Holiday, too, struggled with addiction for similar reasons. Billie Holiday found herself entangled in the vines of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and opium. Billie Holiday spent the last month of her life detained at the hospital for narcotic possession, dying on her deathbed while still technically in arrest. Her song “Strange Fruit”, bringing light to the lynchings of black people occuring in the south were silenced by the pain she felt herself evidently- Harry Anslinger, former commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was able to silence Billie’s message through her charges on narcotic possession.
In an interview with WNYC, Billie Holiday’s grief and pain is channeled from her childhood. Johann Hari, author of “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Day of War on Drugs” said, “She had a heroin addiction because she’d been chronically raped as a child and she was trying to deal with the grief and the pain of that. And also, she was resisting white supremacy. And when she insisted on continuing on her right as an American citizen to sing ‘Strange Fruit,’ Anslinger resolves to destroy her.”
The drug usage that had been synonymous with the hard, economically-challenged lifestyle of a jazz musician has eased up as our society has moved forward from discrimination. The terrible systematic oppression and trapping that black jazz musicians had to face justified the substance abuse that had racked their lives. The message of jazz as a human art form, though freer, is still restricted by the financial instability of life as a jazz musician. I hope to see change in that.
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