Bird Now

There are two main characters in this film: Charlie 'Bird' Parker (1920-1955), the legendary jazzman whose turbulent career the film retraces - evoking the jazz music of black America in the forties, a cry of defiance in the face of racial segregation, of police harassment and the dangers that lurked along the quick 'escape routes' of drink and hard drugs. The other main character is New York City, a figure of myth. The film was shot in New York today - in all its guises: from Harlem to the Bronx, from the Bowery to
Brooklyn. With the fluidity of jazz itself, the film's documentary reality is counterpointed by interludes of fiction where we see how Parker's music came to flow in the lifeblood of jazz. How the young Parker left Kansas for Chicago with a suitcase and a saxophone. How he arrived in New York with a clarinet and a reputation. Harlem in uptown Manhattan was where it all happened. It was the time of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and 'Bird'. It was the time when a new music, the 'be-bop', began to open doors to black people that had always been shut against them.