The last time Julie Macdonald saw Charlie Parker he was catching a flight home from Los Angeles to New York for the funeral of his three-year-old daughter, Pree, who had died in hospital in the early hours of March 6 1954 after a long illness.
Two nights earlier, Parker had been fired, for the second time in a week, by the owner of the Tiffany Club in Hollywood after behaving erratically and arguing with the management. He was staying at the Pasadena home of Macdonald, a sculptor, when he received the news of Pree’s death.
Some time later, Macdonald began work on a sculpture of Parker’s head, for which she had been making preparatory sketches during his visits. Then 28 (five years younger than Parker), she was the daughter of an impressionist painter and had studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles.
She had met Parker during one of his earlier visits to California, probably in 1952. It seems likely that they were a part of a gathering of artists, intellectuals and scene-makers who met at the Altadena ranch of the Turkish-born painter and sculptor Jirayr Zorthian in July that year, a short drive from Macdonald’s home. Zorthian’s guests had indulged in a collective striptease while Parker played; a surviving home recording of the event reveals the sound of the saxophonist — apparently fully clothed, despite voluble entreaties — playing Embraceable You, the Gershwin ballad emerging above the noises of ribaldry. At any rate, Parker and Macdonald became close friends and enjoyed long conversations as she took him to art shows around Los Angeles.
After leaving to bury his child that Sunday morning in 1954, Parker would never return to California. He had only 12 months left to live, a year in which he and his fourth wife, Chan (Richardson), attempted without success to create a quieter life for their family outside the city; in which his drinking worsened; in which he almost succeeded in killing himself by swallowing iodine; in which he committed himself to the psychiatric ward at New York’s Bellevue hospital; and in which he made his last recordings and played his final gigs, before dying of an accumulation of symptoms while watching television in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.
When William Dickson, a retired architect living in Edinburgh, got in touch last month to tell me that he was the owner of a stone head of Charlie Parker, I knew exactly what he was talking about. It had to be Macdonald’s carving, which appeared on the cover of Down Beat magazine in 1965, an issue that commemorated the 10th anniversary of the saxophonist’s death. That black-and-white photograph showed the head to be a work of great distinction, capturing the contradictory elements of Parker’s character.
Macdonald carved a face that could be that of a child or an old man, simultaneously illuminated by innocence and exuding wisdom. Once seen, even in a reproduction, it was not easily forgotten. And here it was, 8 000km and 55 years from its point of origin, with a back story that demanded to be told.
A few years after Parker’s death, in a brief memoir of their relationship, Macdonald wrote warmly of his “ability to perceive” and of an intellect that, although untrained, was “prodigious”.
Her rendering of Parker’s head is carved out of pale, lightly striated sandstone from a nearby Pasadena quarry. It is a little less than twice life-size, weighs 125kg and is pinned to a cube of polished black granite. Its individual features — the sightless eyes, the shapely nose, the slightly pursed mouth, the neat ears — are finely executed. The back of the head, covered with carefully worked hair, is distended like that of a newborn baby.
Parker was capable of extremes of behaviour and appearance. Emerging from a midwestern background of no particular distinction, he became the second of jazz’s great instrumental soloists (after Louis Armstrong) to change the way music was played, engendering a cult that endures more than half a century after his death, continually refuelled by what the American critic Gary Giddins called “the relentless energy, the uncorrupted humanity of his music”.
In 2000 Macdonald’s stone head was sold to one of the world’s leading experts on Parker memorabilia. From there it passed into the hands of Dickson, who had returned to his native Edinburgh after retiring from his London practice several years earlier. Now 67, Dickson works as a photographer, surrounded by his own sizeable collection of material — records, concert posters, books, night-club handbills — from jazz’s post-war era, with Macdonald’s majestically resonant work as its centrepiece, a direct physical link with one of modern music’s most remarkable figures. —