Sonny Stitt suffered from the constant comparison with his friend Charlie Parker. Fact is, former manager of Ray Brown, Jean-Michel Reisser-Beethoven explains, that The Lone Wolf, contrary to common belief, already played bebop before he’d ever met Bird. A long-awaited debunking of myth. 

You read about the nomads in North-Africa in history books. Or see them on tv on Discovery Channel. Weather-beaten people with leathery, wrinkled, red faces, dressed in full desert regalia, long robes from neck to feet, ingenuously arranged turbans on their heads. They’re wobbling on camels from dune to dune, finally reaching a tiny bit of half-fertile land, settling for a while, then moving on to the next challenge. Minding their own business. Until somebody takes them away as slaves. Or hires them as a tourist attraction below union scale.

The similarity with jazz legends is striking. You read about them in history books as well or, if you’re lucky, see them on public tv in a documentary, most likely on the European broadcasting systems. Somebody might give you a tip to go see the Miles Davis documentary on Netflix, featuring various fellow legends as supporting roles. This is the only way to know about them because, for various reasons, one being that America still hasn’t come to terms with the implications of an indigenous art form that simply by being itself defied white supremacy, the history of jazz is still largely absent from the curriculum of the educational system in the USA. (Let alone the history of serious rap and hip-hop, which was partly fueled by jazz and the most extreme – extremist – Afro-American outing in the history of American musical culture, essentially completely alien to WASP teachers, parents and kids and dealing with matters too scary to touch.)

In Hollywood, jazz is a tourist trap. To date, the jazz artist hasn’t been depicted on the big corporate screen in the manner he or she genuinely moves or behaves. Not even once. (Bird? Well… with all due respect: no) The latest effort was the jazz part of Babylon. Not quite. Unless professional jazz musicians are featured, e.g. Jerry Weldon and Joe Farnsworth in Motherless Brooklyn, these efforts are fruitless. (Not counting the indispensable European indie flick Round Midnight with Dexter Gordon)

So far, so bad. If poverty of portrayal is omnipresent, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that education falls short.

The jazz legends lived a truly nomadic life. Though they rarely if ever traveled with family. Jimmy Forrest worked on the riverboat in the band of the enigmatic Fate Marable. Up and down the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers time and again. Arnett Cobb journeyed with the so-called territory bands in the Mid-West, dust everywhere, in his nose, ears, crotch, brain. Duke Ellington worked around the clock, somewhere, somehow. He sat beneath Harry Carney in the car and traveled more miles on the American highways than Boeing 747’s fly over the oceans in their life span.

Charlie Parker, The Bird. Quite the wanderer in his all-too short and turbulent life. Sonny Stitt, The Lone Wolf. He liked to travel alone from East to West and North to South, picking up local rhythm sections and hard cash.

Speaking of Bird and The Lone Wolf. Whom crossed paths occasionally in their lives. Famously the first time, in 1942. Do you remember that story? Good one. Great jazz lore. Initially, it was chronicled by former promotor Bob Reisner in his book Bird: The Legend Of Charlie Parker in 1962. The story was quickly adopted by Ira Gitler for his liner notes of Stitt’s 1963 album Stitt Plays Bird. And repeated by critics and fans to this day.

However, Reisner and the herd forgot to mention or were ignorant of one thing. To be precise, nothing less than the punchline.

Early in his career, when he was 19 years old, Stitt played in the band of singer and pianist Tiny Bradshaw. Stitt had heard the records that Charlie Parker had done with Jay McShann and was anxious to meet him. Finally, one day, the band reached Kansas City, Bird’s place of birth. (see picture of Kansas City’s club-filled black district around Twelfth Street during the era of political boss Tom Pendergast below) Stitt: “I rushed to Eighteenth and Vine, and there, coming out of a drugstore, was a man carrying an alto, wearing a blue overcoat with six white buttons and dark glasses. I rushed over and said belligerently: ‘Are you Charlie Parker?’ He said he was and invited me right then and there to go and jam with him at a place called Chauncey Owenman’s. We played for an hour, till the owner came in, and then Bird signaled me with a little flurry of notes to cease so no words would ensue. He said: ‘You sure sound like me.’”

That’s it. That’s the official story. But it ends prematurely.

Because Stitt retorted: “No, yóu sound like me!”

“Yeah!” says Jean-Michel Reisser-Beethoven. “It’s amazing that none of the people in the business cared to tell the real story.”

(Stitt; Bird; Twelfth Street, Kansas City)

Swiss-born Jean-Michel Reisser was nicknamed “Beethoven” by the legendary Harry “Sweets” Edison. Son of a serious record collector that befriended jazz legends in the 1970’s, Jean-Michel sat on the lap of ‘uncle’ Count Basie as a three-year old kid. He eventually befriended Basie, Ray Brown, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Max Roach, Jimmy Woode, Milt Hinton, Sonny Stitt, Dizzy Gillespie, Hank Jones, Jimmy Rowles, Alvin Queen and various others. A savvy cat, he was hired as manager by Ray Brown. Besides managing Brown, Jean-Michel produced hundreds of records, tours and jazz documentaries. He has retired from the business now, lives in luscious Lausanne and, as passionate about his beloved art form as he’s ever been, is an enlightening jazz causeur.

“I would be stupid not to overwhelm all those legends with questions while they were still living and breathing. That way, I heard a lot of stories, directly from the source.”

Sonny Stitt, though, was rather reticent. “He was a great guy, but didn’t talk much. You had to take him by the arms and say, ‘hey motherfucker, I have some questions! He was the kind of guy that liked to drink and smoke and relax after a concert. It was only privately that Sonny ultimately got down to conversating about music.”

The punchline raises multiple issues. About the ignorance of the press. (Though Gitler, as we’ll see, spitballs something interesting at the issue.) About the mystery of parallel inventions in art. And, not least, about Stitt’s reputation and life. Much to his dismay, Stitt had to deal with comparisons with Charlie Parker all his life. Small wonder, since Stitt has always been a straight-ahead bop saxophonist, variating, apart from various commercial records, largely on the prevalent Tin Pan Alley changes and bebop’s contrafact compositions. However, a mere cursory afternoon of comparative listening between Stitt and Parker will reveal largely differing personalities to all listeners that trust their ears, whether beginners or aficionados.

Stitt’s a thoroughbred. Fine horse, plenty bulging muscle, shiny brown manes. Charging out of the gate, running powerfully but smoothly, eye on the finish line. Goal-oriented.

Bird’s a pinball at the mercy of a pinball wizard. It is eloquently maneuvered on the plate. Then, with a sudden push, it is smashed through the glass, careening around the arcade and miraculously jumping back into the machine.

No, yóu sound just like me!

Come again?

Reisser-Beethoven: “That’s the truth. It’s what Sonny told me when we talked about his meeting with Parker. Significantly, many people have told me about their interaction with Sonny. First of all, Ray Brown. Ray met Sonny in 1943. Ray said that he hadn’t heard about Parker until a bit later. He said, ‘I heard this young guy playing things I never heard before. Everybody says he’s playing like Bird, I said, no way. Sonny always had his own style’. Hank Jones played with Stitt in 1943 and he told me the same story. J.J. Johnson as well. He said he’d never heard about Bird until 1944, but he’d already played with Sonny Stitt: “This motherfucker had his style. He didn’t play like Parker. He played in the same vein, but it was different.’ Stan Levey told me a similar story.”

Vein is the word here.

Reisser-Beethoven continues: “This is the way of the arts. You sometimes see it happening in painting, that two great painters arrive at a similar concept. It works this way in music as well. For instance, the late Benny Golson explained to me that he composed a lot of tunes that he thought were pure originals but found out by listening to the radio that others had reached the same conclusion, without ever hearing Benny’s drafts. As far as the story about Stitt and Parker goes, Parker hadn’t totally arrived at his original style when he played with Jay McShann. It was only in 1944 when he had fully developed bebop harmonics. Stitt arrived on the scene a bit later and in the public eye and everybody said that he played like Parker. But historically, this is not the case.”

It is the way of the arts but also extends to other areas. Politics and social history, for instance, with strings of misunderstanding attached. Take Martin Luther King’s iconic I Have A Dream speech. Contrary to general belief, King didn’t invent the groundbreaking oneliner. He’d heard Prathia Hall, daughter of Reverend Hall, utter those words in a remembrance service in church after an assassination on black citizens. King used the sentence in subsequent speeches but it didn’t catch on until he so imposingly integrated it in his speech at the march to Washington, urged by singer Mahalia Jackson.

Back to our musical icons. Paradoxically, Reisner and Gitler mention an occurrence that backs up the idea that giants like Parker and Stitt arrived at the same musical conclusions apart from each other. (In this respect, it should also be noted that drummer Kenny Clarke worked on new rhythms in the very early 1940’s, a glimpse of the congruency of ideas of Parker, Gillespie, Clarke, Roach, Monk, Pettiford, Mingus, Powell in the mid-1940’s) Reportedly, Miles Davis saw Stitt coming through St. Louis (Davis’s birthplace) in 1942 with Tiny Bradshaw’s band, ‘sounding much like he does today as far as general style is concerned’. Gitler says: ‘We don’t know whether this was before or after the Kansas City confrontation, but Stitt has long insisted that he was playing this way before he heard Parker.’

Chockfull of lore, Gitler’s liner notes of Stitt Plays Bird (good but not among Stitt’s best records, by the way) also mentions something that Charlie Parker supposedly said to Stitt a little while before his death in 1955: ‘Man, I’m not long for this life. You carry on. I’m leaving you the key to the kingdom.’

Epic. Lord Of The Rings-style. However, nobody in his right mind believes Bird to be capable of uttering such pompous near-last words. ‘Please pass that piece of lobster,’ seems more likely. Or, in a more serious friend-to-friend/father-to-son vein, ‘I urge you not to do as I did, stay away from the needle’.

In fact, Bird did say something of the sort to young disciples, that didn’t listen and with few exceptions got hooked. Nothing of the sort was advised to Sonny Stitt, though, who lived with his own demons and did time in Lexington, Kentucky in 1947/48. Precisely at the time that bebop gained nation-wide traction. Bad luck. Reisser-Beethoven: “I’m sure that his being out of the public eye was a setback, but his main problem was criticism. He suffered from big depressions throughout his career. Everybody presented him as a clone of Charlie Parker. It was problematic. He wanted to quit many times. Eventually, he alternated with tenor saxophone. Dizzy Gillespie came up with this idea in 1946, when Sonny was in Dizzy’s band. Suddenly nobody said anything about Bird! Although he played the same lines, chords, improvisations. Dizzy said to me that, when Parker didn’t show up, he’d either call Lucky Thompson or Sonny Stitt. He loved Sonny Stitt.”

“In his view, Norman Granz saved his career. Granz took him out on the Jazz At The Philharmonic tours. He recorded him with Dizzy, Sonny Rollins and produced all those Verve albums. Sonny considered his Verve albums as the highlight of his career; notably Sits In With The Oscar Peterson Trio, New York Jazz, Plays Arrangements From The Pen Of Quincy Jones. He also believed his albums in the early 1970’s with Barry Harris, Tune Up, Constellation and 12! to be among his best.”

And so, the nomads traveled from East to West, North to South, dark-skinned birds and lone wolfs roaming from one asphalt jungle another, sometimes jubilant, rejoicing notes brimming with blues and Debussy, as excited as kids on a funny farm, sometimes shivering, hiding in a torn raincoat, at the end of the rope and the track. Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt crossed paths more than once. Reisser-Beethoven: “Allegedly, they met several times. As far as I’ve heard, they were good friends. Charlie Parker didn’t say anything bad about Sonny’s style, no way. Dizzy said that sooner or later the critics were bound to put walls between them. It’s not only like that in music. But also in politics, religion, history. All too often, one guy tells the so-called definitive story and the rest follows it blindly. It’s a pity.”