Hijacking Charlie Parker on His Birthday

August 29, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

I suppose I should feel elated that a New York Times op-ed features both Charlie Parker and Emile Durkheim. But what Arthur Brooks (here) really wants to do is not to celebrate Bird on his birthday but to caution us all against too much individual freedom.

“To be truly free to enjoy the best things in life, set proper moral standards for yourself and live within them as undeviatingly as Charlie Parker did in his music.”

Of course, when Bird, along with Dizzy Gillespie and others, started playing what came to be known as bebop, most listeners rejected the music as too free, too far outside the constraints of the melody and chords. Some musicians felt the same way. When Diz was in Cab Calloway’s band, Calloway told him to “stop playing that damn Chinese music” or leave the band.

What was “too free” yesterday is today conventional. Read what people said about Ornette in 1960, and you wonder what all the fuss was about.

Bird is not the only one that Brooks wants to play his arrangements. There’s the paradox-of-choice riff: “The ‘paradox of choice’ is a well-established phenomenon,” he says. Maybe. It certainly makes for an interesting TED talk. But a lot of research doesn’t support it. I also note that every supermarket I’ve seen in the past few years still stocks a staggering variety of jams and jellies.

As for Durkheim, Brooks has him play this line:

“[The] results were clear: Individuals are less likely to hurt themselves in communities with more clearly articulated moral boundaries.”

I’m not a Durkheim scholar, but I’d be curious to see if a text search of Suicide turned up anything about moral boundaries. I’d put it differently. The most relevant types of suicide Durkheim outlines are anomic and egoistic. “Anomic suicide” rises when the socially distributed means are out of proportion to socially induced desires. “Egoistic suicide” is highest where people are more individualistic and less attached to social groups and to the society as a whole. If this involves morality, it’s a morality that de-emphasizes the collective in favor of the individual.

Brooks apparently was a decent sax first-rate French horn player in his day, and he currently heads a successful right-wing think tank (American Enterprise Institute) whose work can include good social science. But Charlie Parker does not belong in the AEI. Why not let him rest in peace?  Bird’s music was about music – the sounds, the tunes, the chords and notes and rhythms. It was not about morality.

Here’s Bird’s 1953 recording of Confirmation, probably his best composition. If you can hear moral standards here, your ear is better than mine.  (I was going to choose “Moose the Mooche,” also a fine tune based on “I Got Rhythm” changes. The Mooche was not a presidential adviser. He was Bird’s connection.)