In the clip above, I discuss “Bird,” Clint Eastwood’s 1988 bio-pic of the epochal jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. It’s familiar knowledge that the film was a labor of love. Eastwood, an accomplished pianist who often composes and performs the music in his own films, is a lifelong lover of jazz; in the first film he directed, “Play Misty for Me,” he played a jazz d.j. “When I was fifteen or sixteen, I’d seen [Parker] on two or three occasions, and I’d always been fascinated by him,” Eastwood said in a 1988 interview with Nat Hentoff (himself a major jazz critic). “There was something special about the way he played, a very confident sound. His presence was overwhelming. It was like Gary Cooper or Clark Gable standing next to John Doe. There was a big magnetism there.”
He told Hentoff that another incentive was the desire to put the authentic music in the film: “We used Bird’s own recordings. No sound-alikes.” (Parker’s solos were extracted from recordings, and accompaniments were filled in by a group of notables, among whom, Eastwood said, were Walter Davis, Barry Harris, Ray Brown, Jon Faddis, Ron Carter, and Red Rodney.) In another interview that year, with the journalist Milan Pavlovic, Eastwood said that he saw Parker for the first time “in 1946, at ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ in Oakland, along with Lester Young, who was my first idol. I saw then that Parker was one of the greats of jazz, a forerunner, a trendsetter, a giant of jazz. He brought a whole new expressiveness of feeling into the music.” (Both of these interviews are in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews,” edited by Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz.) In an interview that appeared last week, Eastwood lists the film as one of his six favorites from among his own films.
When, several years after the release of “Bird,” Spike Lee went on to make his own movie about jazz musicians, “Mo’ Better Blues,” he complained that “Bird” and Bertrand Tavernier’s “Round Midnight” were “narrow depictions of the lives of black musicians, as seen through the eyes of white screenwriters and white directors.” In another interview, Lee explained, “I did not want to make another typical story of a jazz musician who’s an alcoholic or who’s hooked on heroin.” (That’s in “Spike Lee: Interviews,” edited by Cynthia Fuchs.) But there’s nothing typical about the way that Eastwood depicts Parker’s addiction; what’s typical is the addiction of those (as seen in Eastwood’s depiction of the white trumpeter Red Rodney) who follow in his footsteps and make the mistake of thinking that jazz is nourished by drugs. Parker’s addiction is shown as a distinctively personal matter, his way of contending with, or eluding, his artistic demons—the abyss between the music he dreams of and the music he plays, the torment of struggling with himself and seeking to overcome his own limits, of shutting out all practical anguish while unearthing the most precious treasures of his soul on a bandstand in a smoky club, on command.
Last week, writing about Eastwood’s new film, “Hereafter,” I mentioned the character played by Matt Damon—a man who is endowed with the power to communicate with the dead but who repudiates the practice because he found that it was spoiling his life—and wondered whether he is “yet another figure in Eastwood’s gallery of those who are tormented by what they know.” I had Eastwood’s poignant, nuanced, and loving celebration of Parker in mind.
