The Tennessean from Nashville, Tennessee • Page 46

12E THE TENNESSON Friday OCTOBER 14. 1988 TeacheifsJ y- fiie- Election's f- jri tt (, 4 Get your free exciting 16-page Election '88 activity tabloids to use with your students and follow the candidates! Charlie 'Bird' Parker (Forest Whitaker) kisses a rose thrown by an adoring French audience following his Paris debut in Bird, opening today at the Belcourt Twin. Eastwood film on 'Bird Parker shows the man and his music Order a class set of daily Tennessean's on six days porary sidemen, and created a pure, clean, new stereophonic sound track on which Charlie Parker's saxaphone is unmistakably present The movie is all of a piece the music, the visual look, the tone of Forest performance. Eastwood has gone for a mostly somber, indoor, nighttime look, with a lot of shadows and warm, muted lighting This is a world where breakfast is a meal held in the late afternoon, where hotel rooms are home, where work is play, and everything else is work. Whitaker occupies this world as a large, friendly, sometimes taciturn man who tries to harm nobody and who cannot understand why the world would not let him play his music.

Neither can we. It between now and the end of November including the 7th and 9th and receive your free Election '88 tabloids. The cost will be 78c per student. For more informationTo order: Call 259-8033 or 1-800-351-1227; (Outside area 615, call 1-800-351-1751.) Ask for ext. 8033.

midi ii ii 1 jfc.wAfctt. "Wl 7 ning through much of Eastwood's work and especially the 14 films he has directed are a love of music and a fascination with characters who are lonely, heroic drifters. There is a connection between the Charlie Parker of Bird and the alcoholic guitar player in Honkytonk Man. They are both men who use music as a way of insisting they are alive and can feel joy, in the face of the daily depression and dread they draw around themselves. The film follows the general drift of Charlie Parker's life, but does not pay much attention to specific details (it glosses over all but his last marriage, for example).

It shows the kid growing up in love with jazz, and sneaking in to hear his heroes play. It shows the almost overnight acceptance given to Parker's talent. It shows him joining bands, forming bands, taking delight in stunts like the time he toured the South with a band including Red Rodney, a white sideman who was passed off as "Albino Red" because integrated bands were forbidden. It shows him touring the West Coast and hearing some simple truths one night from Dizzy Gillespie, who told him that the difference between them was that Diz took care of business, and Charlie took care of screwing up. And it shows his relationship with Chan Parker, a white woman who loved jazz and understood Parker enough to be the best of his enablers all of those who cared so much for Parker that they were willing to coexist with his drugs.

If Clint Eastwood were not a major movie star, he would be known as one of the most successful American directors of the last 17 years (since Play Misty for Me, in films are often bittersweet, and most at home in poverty. His heroes, usually played by himself, are loners who depend upon a strong personal code in the face of an uncaring world. The difference between Charlie Parker and the other Eastwood protagonists is that Parker was an artist, and so, on top of all the other adventures and struggles, there is the music, which comes from somewhere inside and is inexplicable. Bird wisely does not attempt to "explain" Parker's music by connecting experiences with musical discoveries. This is a film of music, not about it, and one of the most extraordinary things about it is that we are really, literally, hearing Charlie Parker on the sound track.

Eastwood and Lennie Niehaus, his music coordinator, began with actual Parker recordings, some of them from Chan Parker's private collection. They isolated the Parker tracks, scrubbed them electronically, recombined them with contem ROGER F.BF.RT I've seen two documentaries about Charlie Parker recently, but I haven't seen a lot of Parker. In an age when archives are filled with newsreel footage and videotape on even the most obscure of public figures, Parker seems always to have been somewhere else when the cameras were on. There is a shot of him accepting a Downbeat award at a banquet, where the master of ceremonies solemnly informs him that jazz is colorblind (if so, then why the and another brief clip of htm playing with Dizzy Gillespie. There are a few minutes of silent footage, too, and that's it No complete performances on film.

No interviews. No home movies. That's one reason why Clint Eastwood's Bird, a musical autobiography of Charlie Parker, is so valuable. It supplies us with images to go with the music, and it provides an idea of the man, more than 30 years after his death. If we are to judge by Forest Whitak-er's substantial performance, Parker was a large, warm, gentle man who was comfortable with himself and loved his work.

He was haunted all of his days by drug addiction he got hooked as a teen-ager and never got of but for many years he doesn't seem to have been filled with the rages of most addicts. He seems to have regarded addiction as a burden to carry, and been resigned to carrying it while not wishing it on anybody else. He carried on as long and as well as he could, and only in the last years was he finally overcome with despair. But addiction took a dreadful physical toll. When he died, a coronor estimated his age at 65.

He was 34. Bird is a long, complex, ambitious movie, and it contains a lot of great music. Charles (Bird) Parker was one of the great ountainheads of jazz, a creator of bebop whose improvisations and joyful discoveries on the saxaphone created a sound that is absolutely distinctive. He stood as a bridge between the swing era and the cool modern jazz of the 1 950s, and even as his career collapsed into disarray, his influence continued to grow. At the end, Bird was denied a cabaret license because of his drug use, and couldn't even play in Birdland, the famous club named after him.

But wherever and whenever he did play, other musicians gathered, because he taught them what they were working for. Eastwood might seem like an unlikely choice to direct this film, but not if you consider his origins as a West Coast kid, growing up in the 1 940s and buying into the Parker legend. Two of the subtler themes run 9r 10 8 if jj i3f jr jhsbes fii-aajlfcas Channel 30 for sale 5" i Vv 1 cause our budgets are a fraction of that" He attributes a large part of his ability to compete successfully with Los Angeles and New York production companies to Tennessee's right-to-work laws, which mean shows can be produced here at a cost far below union scale. Another ingredient to his success is that everything gets done in one place, according to Owens. "We have everything under one Hid "i roof here," he said.

"We're like a little cable," Owens said yesterday. "Weekend with Crook arid Chase is totally syndication. This Week in Country Music is totally TNN and Crook and Chase is both." It must be working This is an era when many television production companies are having a hard time surviving because of costs that are spiraling upwards, and an increased number of choices for viewers, Owens said, but his company has tripled its gross income over the last three years. "There are so many choices some people have 50 or 60 programs they can watch at any given time," he said "A lot of companies are losing a lot of money on high-budget shows that aren't working "Some of our competitors are spending up to a half million dollars a week for their programming They can't make any money if they only get a three or four rating, but we can be 3 MM factory." That roof is going to grow soon. Owens hopes to have the new studio completed by summer, which should make a lot of loyal viewers happy, particularly those who come here as tourists.

Last year, there were over 14,000 requests for tickets to tapings of Crook and Chase, Owens said, but the current studio only accomodates 150 viewers per taping. The new facility will have seating space for 500. Video Depot 287 New Shackle Island Hendersonville, TN 37075 Video Depot S73S Nolenwille Rd 372ll Totally Video 129 N. lowery Smyrna. TN 37167 Eye Magic Video Inc 143-A McGavock Pike Donelton, TN 37214 Anchor TV Appliance 235 E.

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