@Christine615
As Charlie Parker was born on this day in 1920 Kansas City......
Billie's Bounce
(For Charlie Parker)
The sky over Dawson street was full of weather, rain and sun woven together, strands of silk and strips of steel. The day groaning with indecision like a washed up street magician tired of his old tricks, leaning at the bar, can't decide whether to pull a clap of thunder or a bouquet of dancing dawn lights from his weather beaten hat. A fading starlet crippled by vanity and pride, who can't choose what garment will conceal her decline, the night withered in front of a mirror that refuses to lie anymore, excuses made, date cancelled, a mound of cast off dresses, another glass poured.Like the smudged rouge on her lips, her life is in the red, overdrawn on past glories, pawned cheaply as anecdote to anyone who cares to listen. Stories so well worn, they are re-heeled with embellishments each time they are rolled out like loose change and retold.A worthless currency with no purchase other than in the snugs and saloons of memory.
The day irritates me, a pebble in my shoe. I wander the same routes in town that every half-day Friday map my afternoons. Well tested rituals, the lunch in The Buttery, the cigarette smoked on the steps of Ladbroke's on Abbey Street, leaning back into silence after thirty hours of repairing broken English, stitching up sentences with red ink, hoping they'll last the weekend, stumble through to Monday intact. Grafting prepositions onto traumatised phrases, time travelling with Brazilians through the trap doors of Tenses. It feels at times like working in a linguistic A+E.
The day won't give, we are dancing different steps, her x's trapping all my run of o's.
Walking under the scaffolding of the Central Bank, I hear a line of melody that irons out the first creases of this mood, a warm draft of air. A saxophonist is playing a riff doused in deja vu that sirs something dormant. I recognise it as a Charlie Parker line, his sensual algebra is unmistakable. The sophisticated logic of his tunes always sound like a bold new mathematics filled with ironic and erotic equations.
As he plays, I stop and find myself singing along, memory knows the next line, I don't have to think.
Parker has been a loyal ally to me most of my music listening life. I skipped a lot of the musical gate way drugs and got hooked on 1940's Be-Bop when I was seventeen. The past was in many ways easier to navigate and seemed to have a way better store of tunes. After back surgery in The Mater, I walked its smokey corridors, lined with statues of saints, blissed in a warm morphine haze, listening to Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, on a sellotaped Walkman.Ornithology, Now's The Time and the tune I now recognised on the street as "Billie's Bounce"
When he reached the end of the tune i went over and hanseled his music case with a few euro.
We got talking. He had recently arrived from Sao Paulo. I told him that I taught English to mostly Brazilians. I told him about listening to Parker while I was in hospital and how at seventeen I had naively romanticised being given morphine with Parker's own heroin addiction. After telling him about jam sessions in The International Bar and where he could hear good local music in Arthurs he said,
"Now, I play you Parker's hospital tune"
Turning towards Dame street he played "Relaxin' at The Camarillo" a piece Parker wrote while recovering from a mental breakdown in Camarillo State Hospital in California. Two hospitals colliding, The Mater and Camarillo, jazz and a chance polishing the day bright again. Dublin is full of riffs, you just have to listen out for them!
