Above is a photo of Charlie Parker and a quote from James Baldwin. I love both of them. The quote was actually going to be the front quote in The Mobster’s Lament, but I switched it out at the last minute (anyone who has the promo copies of the book will see it’s still in there). It basically sums up one of the main themes of the book – how do you cope with the roaring void? How do you deal with the chaos of existence? The photo of Parker matches it perfectly, I think. The photo is a multiple exposure by Eliot Elisofon.
And here’s an eye-witness account of what it was like to watch Charlie Parker perform back in the 1940s. I love the pork chop line. The quote is from Stan Levey (from an interview with Burt Korall in ‘Modern Drummer’ magazine from some time in the 1980s) I found the quote in Scott DeVeaux’s ‘The Birth of Bebop’.