Jazzmen Up Close
The following was written as a prospective script for some public radio show about Jazz and Blues that wanted a "sketch comedy" bit. The examples they sent me were awful and I'm afraid they won't use this because it's not as painful to hear and makes-you-want-to-punch-the-radio as they seem to like, so here it is as a gift to you. Just pretend like it's some jazz radio host reading it out loud.
Narrator: And now we’d like to take a moment to celebrate the richness of culture and history in Jazz music by taking an in-depth look at one of Jazz’s greatest musicians in a segment called “Jazzmen Up Close.” Our segment today will focus on Charlie “Bird” Parker, the legendary saxophonist who is widely regarded as having developed the bebop style of jazz, and who would become an icon of the genre.
But Parker, despite his success, was not without his own demons. Throughout his life, Parker was a prisoner of his destructive and insatiable appetites. In particular, the one thing for which he lusted most was chicken, the bird from which his nickname was derived. As the story goes, Charlie Parker was on his way to a gig with the Jay McShann Orchestra when he spotted a chicken out of the window of the car. Parker demanded that they stop the car. “What is that miraculous creature?” he wondered. He exited the car, captured the bird, and took it with him to the show, where he entreated it with several minutes of wild improvisation before eating it, raw, onstage, before an enthusiastic crowd.
From then on his appetite for chicken grew, but as it did, he found that his tolerance for it grew as well. Where at first he was satisfied by sucking on chicken knuckles and smearing the boiled entrails on a piece of rye with a dollop of brown deli mustard, he soon came to crave the thighs, wings, breasts, and tenders, prepared in ever more ornate fashion, until he reached a critical point, as described in Miles Davis’s autobiography. Miles describes the scene as occurring as he had just arrived in New York, and was sitting in the back of a taxi with Charlie. Charlie had by that time grown so inured to the opiate effect of his favorite dish that although he had before him an entire chicken fried whole, he was forced to augment the experience with a combination of heroin, fellatio, and berating future jazz legend Miles Davis in order to extract any joy from the experience. As Miles leaned out the window of his taxi in order to vomit on the streets if Times Square he realized that he had learned a valuable lesson from his new mentor; chicken is good, but you should also mix it up with fish and fresh vegetables or else you’ll get tired of it.
That’s all the time we have for Jazzmen Up Close this week. Stay tuned, and remember; jazz isn’t something you listen to, it’s something you live.
And that's where it has to end because they said 400 word limit, which is too bad because I wanted to go on and talk about the time Charlie Parker pushed Charles Mingus in front of a subway train while huffing shoe polish and sucking on blocks of chicken bouillon like they were Halls, or the time he raped Etta James inside a giant turkey.
Narrator: And now we’d like to take a moment to celebrate the richness of culture and history in Jazz music by taking an in-depth look at one of Jazz’s greatest musicians in a segment called “Jazzmen Up Close.” Our segment today will focus on Charlie “Bird” Parker, the legendary saxophonist who is widely regarded as having developed the bebop style of jazz, and who would become an icon of the genre.
But Parker, despite his success, was not without his own demons. Throughout his life, Parker was a prisoner of his destructive and insatiable appetites. In particular, the one thing for which he lusted most was chicken, the bird from which his nickname was derived. As the story goes, Charlie Parker was on his way to a gig with the Jay McShann Orchestra when he spotted a chicken out of the window of the car. Parker demanded that they stop the car. “What is that miraculous creature?” he wondered. He exited the car, captured the bird, and took it with him to the show, where he entreated it with several minutes of wild improvisation before eating it, raw, onstage, before an enthusiastic crowd.
From then on his appetite for chicken grew, but as it did, he found that his tolerance for it grew as well. Where at first he was satisfied by sucking on chicken knuckles and smearing the boiled entrails on a piece of rye with a dollop of brown deli mustard, he soon came to crave the thighs, wings, breasts, and tenders, prepared in ever more ornate fashion, until he reached a critical point, as described in Miles Davis’s autobiography. Miles describes the scene as occurring as he had just arrived in New York, and was sitting in the back of a taxi with Charlie. Charlie had by that time grown so inured to the opiate effect of his favorite dish that although he had before him an entire chicken fried whole, he was forced to augment the experience with a combination of heroin, fellatio, and berating future jazz legend Miles Davis in order to extract any joy from the experience. As Miles leaned out the window of his taxi in order to vomit on the streets if Times Square he realized that he had learned a valuable lesson from his new mentor; chicken is good, but you should also mix it up with fish and fresh vegetables or else you’ll get tired of it.
That’s all the time we have for Jazzmen Up Close this week. Stay tuned, and remember; jazz isn’t something you listen to, it’s something you live.
And that's where it has to end because they said 400 word limit, which is too bad because I wanted to go on and talk about the time Charlie Parker pushed Charles Mingus in front of a subway train while huffing shoe polish and sucking on blocks of chicken bouillon like they were Halls, or the time he raped Etta James inside a giant turkey.