"Bird lives!"

Hace un par de fines de semana, Carmen y yo fuimos al Charlie Parker Jazz Festival que se celebra en dos sitios diferentes dos días consecutivos: el Marcus Garvey Park en Harlem y Tompkins Square Park en el East Village. En Harlem fue donde prácticamente empezó, desde su Kansas natal, y en East Village trabajó y vivió también. De hecho, si no recuerdo mal, una calle de las que conforman la plaza Tompkins lleva su nombre. Fuimos a la segunda sesión, digamos, la del East Village. Tocaban Abbey Lincoln, Chico Hamilton, Todd Williams yMaurice Brown. Lincoln tiene 77 años y Hamilton, 85!! Y este último es batería!! Ya sabéis que no sé apreciar el jazz pero me pareció especialmente...vibrante! Desde luego, técnicamente hacían virguerías. Sonaba muy bien.

En una columna del New York Times, recordaban así a Charlie Parker:
"On a fundamental level, though, the festival pays homage to Parker and his footprint in the city. In many ways he was the quintessential New York hero: a maverick and bon vivant, a subject of notoriety and myth. He loved the city, and he toasted it outright with a tune called “Scrapple From the Apple” that was recorded in a New York studio 60 years ago this fall and almost immediately became popular with musicians. (...)
In an interview a decade later with Down Beat magazine, Parker recalled that he had tired of the stereotypical chord voicings then in use. “I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else,” he said. “I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.” One night in 1939, improvising over the Ray Noble tune “Cherokee,” he brought his idea to life. “And bop was born,” Down Beat added. (...)
“At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America,” Jack Kerouac later wrote in “On the Road,” invoking Parker. But the madness was most acute in Kerouac’s New York City, where fanatical followers began cataloging Parker’s solos and a downtown bohemian subculture claimed him as its existential hero. (...)
“Charlie Parker was really the only person who could unite in his experience the downtown avant-garde scene, with painters and self-conscious artists, and the Harlem jazz scene, which has always been more in harmony with the functional roots of the music,” Mr. Schoenberg of the Jazz Museum said. That partly explains the duality of the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, which attracts a different audience for each of its free afternoon concerts.
More recognition followed. By the 1950s Parker was finally winning jazz polls, and he had some popular success with “Just Friends” (from his sessions with strings) and “My Little Suede Shoes” . According to Mr. Schaap, Parker was enjoying the amenities of the city, from taxicabs to municipal swimming pools.
But when, in the summer of 1951, Parker’s state-issued cabaret license was revoked, he was barred from working in New York. As his condition deteriorated and the jazz world grew crowded with his imitators, he was forced to seek work on the road. And in 1954, when Chan sent word that their 2-year-old daughter, Pree, had died of pneumonia, the shock sent Parker into a tailspin.
His final descent was brutal: botched engagements, a suicide attempt, confinement at Bellevue, lurid tabloid speculation. Days after a ruinous last stand at Birdland, Parker stopped at the Hotel Stanhope, home of the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a jazz patron with aristocratic pedigree. He stayed a few days, under some supervision by her doctor, and died there on March 12, 1955. The technical cause was pneumonia, but his 34-year-old body was so thoroughly ravaged that the doctor estimated his age as 53.
In seemingly no time the defiant inscription “Bird Lives!” began appearing on otherwise unmarked subway station walls. The poet Ted Joans eventually owned up to starting the trend, but he could hardly account for its proliferation. This weekend’s festivities convey precisely the same message, and it will still feel more or less true, perhaps because both the music and the city have conspired to keep it that way."

El parque estaba repletísimo de gente, por el césped, por los caminos, bancos, etc, etc, etc. Muchos, con picnics, como ya os he contado infinidad de veces. La señora de verde era una mujer de origen oriental que me llamó la atención por el vestido de flecos verdes, mallas de colores y mechas de colores en el pelo.
Así que nosotras nos montamos nuestro pequeño picnic también con frambuesas y jamón serrano incluidos!!

Hey! Mirad quien se sentó en nuestra toalla a escuchar jazzzzzzzz!(Los compré en una tiendecilla japonesa del mismo barrio.)