I have purchased these book titles about or on Charlie Parker these past few months. Bird Lives! and The Found by Ross Russell, A graphic-bio Chashin’ The Bird: Charlie Parker in California by Dave Chisholm, Carl Woideck’s The Charlie Parker Companion, and the intriguing—Chan Parker’s My Life In E-Flat. I just finished the Parker bio by Russell, which is a good read, but I have read other places that he’s not the most reliable chronicler of Parker’s life. But I’m very interested in Russell himself because he had a record store on Hollywood Blvd called Tempo Music Shop, which was devoted to BeBop Jazz and its culture. But perhaps his most significant contribution to jazz culture is his Dial Records. A label that was home to Parker’s music and other great jazz music, but later Russell devoted Dial to contemporary classical music and was the earliest label to release music by Béla Bartók and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as John Cage. He dissolved Dial Records in 1949.
My dad, the artist Wallace Berman, worked for Russell and did some visuals for the shop, but he also did the album cover for a Dial compilation, BeBop Jazz, which legend has it was the first appearance of Charlie Parker on a disc. Wallace was very much a Jazz Hipster (not to be confused with the contemporary hipster), and he was a devoted follower of Parker and his music. For me, Parker’s music is almost like recordings from another planet. For the past decade, I have been slowly getting myself in tune with the Be-Bop world. I lost my dad when I was twenty-one, and I wished I knew Wallace as an adult if for nothing else, to spend some quality time with him. Losing someone to death is never an easy path, and yet, there is a difference between a parent who died young in your life and another parent who died as an older person. Both are painful, but there is a difference, but oddly enough, there is still a mystery. One never can stop asking one’s parent about their or my history. But now the questions have been cut off or unanswered, and I have to use music to obtain my relationship with Wallace. So, even in death, it is not the past but very much part of the present.
As a social scene, I think of BeBop Jazz as Punk Rock. Of course, there are significant differences, but they have one thing in common: music that wasn’t popular with the masses but only with the few who made up a social scene. Punk and Bop are both characterized movements with a critical visual sensibility. Clothing is almost a code that speaks secretly between individuals and others to be alarmed of. Seeing a Punk or a Hipster (zoot-suited) apart from the mainstream or square world can make the outsider of those movements uncomfortable. So aesthetically speaking, there is no vast difference between a record store like Bomp Records (late 70s Punk) and Tempo Music Shop. If I owned a record shop in the late 1970s focusing on Punk recordings, I would now more likely add Be-Bop jazz recordings to the inventory.
I once made a painting called Unanswered Questions for just that reason... and for the questions we would leave behind if we let ourselves go extinct as a species.
Did Bomp have its own store at one time? I worked for Suzy in the Bomp warehouse in the early 2000s. My first job.