As the story goes, one Saturday night in the winter of 1951, Igor Stravinsky took a table at Birdland, the New York club named after Charlie Parker. One of the band spotted him and told Parker.
According to the one man who said he was there, Parker didn’t announce him from the stage. Instead, he launched into “Ko-Ko” at a ferocious tempo, and at the start of his second chorus he slipped in the opening of Stravinsky’s Firebird.
The source for the story is the writer Alfred Appel Jr., who said he was in the audience. In his book Jazz Modernism, he described Stravinsky roaring with delight and pounding his glass on the table, sending his drink and ice cubes over the people behind him. The critic Alex Ross later retold it in The Rest Is Noise, with Stravinsky spilling his scotch in ecstasy.
A legend with one witness
It’s a wonderful story, and it rests on one account. Appel was a teenager at the time and wrote it down half a century later. We couldn’t find the night in any of the major Parker biographies, and no recording of it is known to exist.
The piece also tends to change in the retelling. Some versions, including posts on social media, say Parker quoted The Rite of Spring. Appel’s account says The Firebird. The confusion may come from the fact that Parker did quote The Rite on other occasions.
Quoting as a habit
Slipping other tunes into a solo was one of Parker’s trademarks. In the middle of a fast bebop line he might drop in a bar or two of a nursery rhyme, a pop song or a march, then carry on as if nothing had happened.
His 1945 recording of “Ko-Ko” itself has an example: at the start of his second chorus he quotes the old New Orleans tune “High Society”. And on “Repetition”, recorded with an orchestra a few years later, he opens his solo with a horn motif from the “Augurs of Spring” section of The Rite of Spring. So the Birdland story fits what he did on record.
What Parker heard in Stravinsky
Parker took classical music seriously. In a 1949 interview with DownBeat, he said he had first heard Stravinsky in New York in the early 1940s, when a friend played him The Firebird. The same piece described him as a devoted admirer of Paul Hindemith, and Parker talked about wanting to study in Paris.
People who knew Parker said the music that interested him most was Stravinsky’s.
What Stravinsky heard in jazz
Stravinsky had been borrowing from jazz since the end of the First World War, when he wrote Ragtime and Piano-Rag-Music, working from ragtime sheet music the conductor Ernest Ansermet had brought back from America. In 1945 he wrote the Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman’s big band, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in March 1946.
Stravinsky later said that the jazz performers he most admired at that time were Art Tatum, Charlie Parker and the guitarist Charlie Christian.
Bird with Strings
Parker wanted to play with orchestras too. On 30 November 1949 he recorded with a string section for producer Norman Granz, and the session produced “Just Friends”, with Parker’s alto floating over lush strings. Some critics saw it as a bid for commercial success. Parker reportedly counted it among his favourite recordings, and Charlie Parker with Strings became one of his best-selling records.
You can hear more of his best work in our pick of the best Charlie Parker albums, and him at his most electric in One Night in Birdland.
The lessons that never happened
Near the end of his life, Parker approached the composer Edgard Varèse in New York and asked to study with him. Varèse later recalled that Parker followed him down the street and said he wanted to be his pupil, and that he agreed.
Parker talked about it in a radio interview with Paul Desmond, saying Varèse wanted to write for him. But Varèse left for Paris to complete and premiere a new work, Déserts, and the lessons were put off. Charlie Parker died on 12 March 1955, aged 34, before they could begin.
You can hear that conversation for yourself in our article on Parker’s rare interview with Paul Desmond.
