TRAVEL ADVISORY, PART III

I spent the winter months humming the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” my theme song for the wonderful long weekend I anticipated spending in sunny San Diego in April.  Well, I guess you could say that I had to change my tune, as I made it only halfway there, our travel itinerary foreshortened by an invitation to a wedding that same weekend . . . in Kansas City.   So it goes.  I had passed through KC around 30 years ago, though I had no specific memories outside of attending a Royals game.  I thus wondered if this was a fair trade . . . not that I had any negotiating power as (as usual) I was traveling on my wife’s frequent flyer miles. . . .

Anyway, I “agreed” to go to KC . . . but only if our visit would include a pilgrimage to the grave of Charlie “Bird” Parker, arguably the greatest jazzman of them all.  A native of Kansas City, he is buried in a cemetery in the vicinity of Independence, MO—apparently because he proclaimed before his untimely death that he did not want to be buried in KC itself, where the jazz community did not really embrace his innovative bebop style until after his death.

As it turns out, Kansas City overall was a fine place to visit.  We had great barbecue at Jack Stack’s, we visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, we had a decent pint of Guinness at O’Dowd’s Little Dublin Irish Ale House and Pub—even the wedding was fun!

But our weekend there ended up being centered around jazz in general and Charlie Parker in particular, thanks in large part to the remarkable restoration of the historic neighborhood of 18th and Vine . . . as in the classic blues song “Goin’ to Kansas City”: Standin’ on the corner, 18th and Vine . . .  That is now the location of a very pleasing museum dedicated to the history of jazz in KC—we spent a happy hour or so there.  (The building that houses the Jazz Museum also houses the Negro Baseball League Museum, but we didn’t have time to tour that . . . unfortunately, as we understand that there is some fascinating historical crossover between jazz history and baseball history right in that once-segregated neighborhood.  We actually got a short version of that history from the janitor at the Jazz Museum, who shared with us some engaging stories about growing up in that neighborhood in the 1950s.)

As the couple of photos below suggest, the area around 18th and Vine has been nicely rehabbed:

But for us, Charlie Parker was the centerpiece of our jazz tour.  We were in awe of the sculpture of his head—the lips pursed as if he were blowing on a saxophone mouthpiece—that stands about a block away from the Jazz Museum: 

Our feeling after visiting his grave was another story altogether.  The graveyard itself was basically unmaintained—the grass had not been cut and there was not a single standing headstone: every stone was of the sort that lies flat . . . and thus most were buried in the overgrown grass.  We found it sad—depressing, scandalous even—that the final resting place of arguably the most important figure in American music should be not just so nondescript but also so decrepit.  We paid our respects to “Bird” (who is buried next to his mother) and left with heavy hearts.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE . . .

A couple of days ago, I read in pretty much one sitting a book titled Aerobleu by an author named Max Morgan. This book crossed my readerly radar screen by way of my interest in the Parisian jazz scene around the time of World War II, so I ordered a used copy and gave it a go. The book purports to be the diary of an American-born pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force who settles in Paris after the war. Published in facsimile hand-printed manuscript in a format resembling a pilot’s log (and, furthering that effect, the “log” comes in a metal case), the book presents an engaging account of the mysterious Max Morgan’s encounters with various jazz greats—including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker—who visited Paris in the years immediately following the war. The hands-off owner of a jazz club called Aerobleu, Morgan also becomes the owner of an old DC-3 airplane, which affords him side-adventures in North Africa and elsewhere; some of these adventures involve musicians hitching a ride with him and jamming en route.

Perhaps because it is written as a diary, the gaps in the probability of all this get obscured by the thin veneer of plausibility. Like the musicians, I too went along for the ride . . . pretty much until the end. One of my favorite moments in the narrative was when Morgan tells tales of Le Festival Internationale de Jazz in May of 1949. I was so willing to suspend my disbelief that I thumbed the wheel of my iPod until I came to the live recording of the Miles Davis / Tadd Dameron Quintet at that actual event; the recording is complete with voiceovers from a French radio commentator identifying the band members and the tunes! (One of the tunes is Dameron’s “Good Bait,” one of my personal favorite tunes to blow on in the jazz combo I play with.)

Of course I knew that it was all a work of fiction . . . but I didn’t know until I did some homework after finishing the book that it is both more than that and less than that: Aerobleu was actually part of an elaborate marketing ploy by a San Francisco-based agency called Less Than Seven. In an article in the Business section of the New York Times in October of 1997 (after Aerobleu was published), Stuart Elliott writes:

Remember Morgan, the free-spirited aviator, and Aerobleu, the jazz club he ran in Paris after World War II? Remember those all-night jam sessions in Morgan’s DC-3 en route to London, New Orleans and New York? Remember his mysterious disappearance in Havana as Castro was coming to power?

Well, if you remember those events, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn someone may want to sell you, because they’re all imaginary. What is real, however, is a line of merchandise—now being sold by stores across the country—focused on Morgan and his fabulous though fictitious life style.

In other words, the book was simply the tail wagging the dog of a much larger enterprise involving the selling of posters, coffee mugs, clothing, and other accessories all calculated to cash in on an American nostalgia for iconic jazz and the romantic allure of Paris. The essential non-literariness of the diary format was perfect in every respect: it was literate but not dauntingly so, and was grounded just enough in “reality” to draw susceptible readers into its web of intrigue. While I enjoyed the narrative for what it was, I have to admit that I enjoyed even more finding out afterwards exactly what it was!

But I have to admit further that the greatest pleasure I took was in tuning in to a telltale false note just five pages into the narrative when, in a diary entry dated Wednesday, August 7, 1946, Max Morgan recalls an event from the previous year: “That Charlie Parker concert at Town Hall in September was mesmerizing.” Indeed it was . . . except that it was in June of 1945, not September—a forgivable slip . . . if not for the narrator’s unforgivable failure to note a truly distinguishing feature of that concert, which headlined Dizzy Gillespie as well as Parker: that Parker was a no-show until partway through the opening tune, “Bebop,” when he suddenly appeared on the stage. Could anyone actually there have forgotten such an unlikely entrance? Probably not. Could the corporate creator of Max Morgan and Aerobleu have known that little detail? Definitely not, as the acetate discs of the concert were discovered, restored, and released on CD only in 2005, sixty years after the concert—and eight years after the book’s publication. But when I read that reference to the concert, I remembered right away how in his introduction of the night’s proceedings radio host Symphony Sid Torin hesitated for a second before mentioning that Don Byas would be substituting for Parker to start the concert. I thumbed my way to that on my iPod too, after I closed the cover on Aerobleu.