A Little Less Than God But Still Hungry

Ecclesiastes 2:1-14, 24-26

A reverie on the music of Charlie Parker and the human condition

Jazz Communion 2019
9/1/19

William G. Carter

It was a busy night at Billy Berg’s nightclub, especially for a Monday in early December. The Hollywood club was packed with movie stars, raconteurs, hipsters, and glitterati, all of them leaning forward to hear a new kind of jazz.

While America fought a World Ware on two fronts in Europe and the South Seas, there had been another revolution brewing. The pop music of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman lifted the spirits of a nation at war, but a small group of creative souls declared that music boring. So they sped up the tempos, stirred dissonance into the harmonies, and created new melodies that had sharp angles in them. They called it “bebop” or “rebop” or simply “bop.”

People in California had never heard anything like this. So Billy Berg was doing something slick when he invited two New York revolutionaries, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, to bring this new music to his club for an extended engagement. They were the Bee’s knees, the cat’s whiskers, the fox’s socks, and the crème de la creme. In fact, that’s how the beboppers talked.

So it’s opening night in Hollywood. The lights go down, the announcer steps up to the microphone, and Dizzy counts off the first tune. It’s thrilling, it’s fast. But where’s Charlie Parker?

At great expense, Billy Berg had hired Dizzy to bring a quintet to California. He paid for travel and rooms. There are five musicians onstage, but Charlie “the Bird” Parker is not one of them. It seems Dizzy had hired an additional musician, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, to fill in the band. The Bird had a reputation for not showing up. Or at least, not showing up yet.

While the band performs, Bird is backstage in the dressing room. He’s just finished polishing off a huge meal of Mexican food, the Deluxe Comida Conquistador dinner: tacos, enchiladas, tamales, tostadas, black beans and rice, guacamole and two kinds of salsa. There are three empty beer bottles on the counter. Bird wipes his beak, gives a quiet belch, and then orders a second Deluxe Comida Conquistador dinner. “While you’re at it,” he says, “find me a bottle of whiskey.” The band will have to keep going without him. Bird’s still hungry.

Dizzy Gillespie is accustomed to this behavior. That’s why he hired a sixth musician for his quintet. When the second set is almost over, Bird pushes back the empty plates and bottles from his second Mexican banquet, straps on his saxophone, and wanders out to the back of the club. As the musical set builds to a furious climax, suddenly there’s a flurry of saxophone notes. The nightclub air bursts into musical flame as Charlie Parker hurls his notes into the atmosphere.

The tune explodes, then concludes, the crowd leaps to its feet in applause, the musicians nod in appreciation, and Dizzy murmurs to Bird, “Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again.” He knows full well it could happen again tomorrow.[1]

You know, there’s a great risk in playing jazz. You set the tempo and step out on a tightrope. It’s not music for those who want to play it safe.

There’s a greater risk in playing jazz in church. Some onlookers might be drawn like moths to a flame, believing this is edgy and cool; they might not come on a regular Sunday, but they’ll come for something like this. Meanwhile, the pious and upright regulars fear a holy God might blast the whole thing to bits.

For me, the greatest risk of all is playing the jazz of Charlie Parker in church because that great musician had a complex and complicated life. Spiritually speaking, he was a mess. In all kinds of ways, he was a failure as a grownup. He was charming yet manipulative, brilliant yet caustic. Bird blew up every relationship in his life, including his friendship with Dizzy Gillespie.

The gig in Hollywood was cancelled prematurely, partly because of Bird’s stunts. And when Dizzy and the others flew back to New York, Bird never made the flight. He had cashed in his plane ticket to buy a few fixes of heroin. That addiction had enslaved him since the age of fifteen and would last until his death from cirrhosis and alcohol-induced pneumonia at 34.

Yet there was no greater saxophonist in the history of American music. None greater. Even John Coltrane thought so. Can you imagine holding together the paradox of such a life?

After Dizzy Gillespie quit and couldn’t take it anymore, Miles Davis started working with Charlie Parker. In his memoirs, Miles writes,

I never understood why he did all the destructive (stuff) he used to do. Bird knew better. He was an intellectual. He used to read novels, poetry, history, stuff like that. And he could hold a conversation with almost anybody on all kinds of things. So the (guy) wasn’t dumb or ignorant or illiterate or anything like that. He was real sensitive. But he had this destructive streak in him… He was a genius and most geniuses are greedy. [2]

So it’s an appropriate day to reflect on what it means to be human. To be a genius but greedy. To be talented yet needy. To be beautiful but broken. To be enormously capable and deeply flawed. Some of us might see a reflection of ourselves, and I’m here to tell you that’s OK.

We have heard two scripture texts that explain the human situation, as long as we hold them in tension. Psalm 8 offers the most affirming words in the Bible. "Who are we, Lord, that you pay us any attention?” The answer: you are children of the Most High, created in the divine image, endowed with holy creativity. 

As the Psalmist sings to heaven about the human family, “You have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands and put all things under their feet.” (Psalm 8:5-6) 

There isn’t a more noble description of humanity in all of scripture.

Yet, not far from the book of Psalms is the book of Ecclesiastes. A wise old sage reflects on all that he has spent his life scrambling to attain. He concludes, “It’s like reaching for smoke.” It’s been a vain and empty pursuit.

The poet says: I planted vineyards for myself, cheered my body with wine, and created a lot of headaches. I made a lot of money and it never made me happy. I enjoyed the “delights of the flesh” but I never knew love.  So I worked harder, surpassed all others, and did not deny myself any pleasure. Then I watched as it all turned to sand and slipped through my fingers.

A lot of people avoid the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. They say it’s a downer. I disagree. It’s an honest corrective to self-indulgence. It’s a reminder that life is not a banquet of chocolate cake; if you’re going to be healthy, you must eat the broccoli, too. 

Ecclesiastes is a hand raised in objection to the children of God who think they can live without limits, only to find themselves consumed by all the consumption. It is a word of wisdom for those tempted toward the foolishness of burning themselves out. It’s a well-placed Yield sign to those who thought they can speed past the warning signs of self-destruction.

There’s nothing new about this, for the Bible understands who we are. Earlier in the Jewish Bible, the people conspire to reach heaven by building a big tower; heaven laughs, the Tower of Babel falls, and the people end up all the more confused.

It’s not only in the Bible. There’s the old Greek myth of Icarus, who constructs wings of wax to fly into the sky, only to soar too close to the sun where the wax wings melt. Or there’s the more recent question posed by Michael Crichton in his story of Jurassic Park: So you have the technology to clone a tyrannosaurus rex, but why would you want to? What were you thinking?

If we hold all of this together, we hear the invitation to restraint, to build a more measured view of what it means to be a human being. Yes, we were created a little less than God, empowered, equipped, hovering near the pantheon of angels. But we are still hungry, hungry for something that a third Mexican meal or some other quick fix will not satisfy. It’s important to spend some time working through that hunger and to never allow it to overtake us.

At the same time, there is deep pleasure in claiming our dignity, reaching high, taking risks, and seeking enjoyment in the thick of hard work. For in the end, we can only conclude what the wise sage of Ecclesiastes concludes: that life is a gift, not an achievement, and we will endure only by the grace and mercy of the God who is greater and kinder than ourselves.

Let’s chew on this today, as the bread is broken, the wine is poured, and the band breaks into the blues. All of us have a hungry place in our souls. We try to fill it in a hundred ways and that never quite works. So maybe today it’s enough to simply lean back and be carried, to know we are loved, to welcome help from a really good friend, and to give something extravagant to the people around us.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] The story is recounted by Ross Russell in Bird Lives! (New York: DaCapo Press, 1996)  

[2] Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 76-77.