Charlie Parker at 100: Part 5

This week, I've been celebrating Charlie Parker's centenary on August 29 by posting on the alto saxophonist's five major contributions to jazz and the culture at large. In Part 1, I posted about Parker's invention, with Dizzy Gillespie, of bebop in 1945. In Part 2, I posted on Parker's popularization of high-speed improvisation. In Part 3, I posted on how Parker turned the blues into a seductive, lyrical form. And in Part 4, I posted on Parker's pioneering albums with strings that were the first albums to unite jazz and pop standards. 

In my final part, a look at Parker's inadvertent role in helping to launch the American civil rights movement. By inventing bebop, which relied on sophisticated improvisational skills, Parker created a Black idiom that placed a focus on exceptional Black artists and their talent. Bebop began by celebrating Black individualism, encouraged personal creative development divorced from white and Black band leaders, and built up self-confidence and self-determination. As a result, a distinct sense of pride flowered among Black modern jazz artists in the late 1940s and early '50, and many became emboldened, by extension, to demand equal rights and justice.

In many cases, Black jazz musicians' demands for equality was triggered by encounters with segregation and racism while touring in the South and West. In other cases, musicians' demands for equality was a byproduct of artistic self-assurance and was expressed through their music.

Parker's influence on bebop musicians in the 1940s and early '50s cannot be understated. So much so that many attributed their drug use to Parker's consumption and his ability to perform at a high levels under the influence. But first and foremost, Parker was a musical role model, since his tone and skill were singular and impossible to mimic. As musicians grew comfortable with their own individualism, artists such as Sonny Rollins, Randy Weston, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and others took up the civil rights battle after Parker died in 1955.

Here's Sonny's Airegin, which is Nigeria spelled backward. The country had just become a federation in 1954, when Sonny wrote the song...



Here's Donald Byrd's The Jazz Message (With Freedom for All) in 1956...



Here's Sonny's Freedom Suite in 1958...



Here's Charles Mingus's Fables of Faubus in 1959, a protest against Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who in 1957 called in the state National Guard to prevent the racial integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine Black teenagers...



Here's Mingus's Prayer For Passive Resistance in 1960, live in Antibes, France...



Here's Max Roach's Freedom Day in 1960, with singer Abbey Lincoln...



Here's Art Blakey's The Freedom Rider in 1961...



Here's Grant Green's Freedom March in 1961...



Here's Oscar Peterson's Hymn to Freedom in 1962...



Here's John Coltrane's Alabama, recorded in November 1963, two months after the bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four girls...



And here's Billy Taylor's I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free in 1968...