Every Film Clip of Charlie Parker, 7: A Tiny Silent Clip +Bonus

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This series started back in December 2022 with the post linked here; please scroll through the archive for the rest of this series. We are proceeding chronologically through every surviving scrap of film and TV footage of Bird, with detailed background information about each occasion. So, moving in order, the next preserved visual record of Parker is a short silent film known by few people outside of Scandinavia.

Parker left New York City on November 18, 1950, arrived in Stockholm, Sweden on the 19th, and performed around the country with an excellent Swedish group through November 27, except that on November 24 they played in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bird then flew to Paris on the 28th and performed there that night. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge was also on tour, and performed on some of the same concerts, but he and Bird mostly played separately, taking turns as featured guest with the Swedish musicians.

Martin Westin of Uppsala, Sweden, has been a long-time Secretary of the Group for Swedish Jazz History, as well as a regular contributor to Orkester Journalen (now called Jazz), the Swedish jazz magazine that has been publishing since 1933 (before Downbeat, making it the world’s oldest). In 2007 he wrote a detailed essay in English about Bird’s tour of Sweden, followed by a full book in Swedish about the tour, with many rare photos, in 2014. (The English translation has not yet been published, but Westin has generously shared the relevant chapter below for Paying Subscribers.) I thank him for providing me with some information for this post.

There is less than a minute of 16mm silent footage of Parker from November 21, 1950 in the warm-up room (aka the “green room”) in the concert hall in Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden. It was taken by Bo Tak, age 16 at the time, who later became a cinematographer for Sweden Television and is now retired. Tak has never released the complete footage, but a few seconds appears in the documentary film, The Bird: Charlie 'Bird" Parker 1920-1955, directed by the late Jan Horne, 1990, Norway TV (with cooperation from Sweden Television). In this excerpt, Bird is sitting at a table, writing autographs on little pieces of paper (Tak said that Bird kept these in his pocket specifically for that purpose), and then he is seen holding his saxophone unassembled. You will also see Bird’s widow Chan (1925-1999, born Beverly Berg) talking with artist Harvey Cropper (1931-2012). Cropper, raised in Harlem by Caribbean parents, knew Charlie and Chan in the 1950s, and moved to Sweden around 1981. This short excerpt is the only part of the documentary where the footage of Bird appears:

Although Tak has never released the complete footage, he has posted some still photos that give us a good idea what is in the rest of it. There are a few seconds of Bird playing his saxophone (remember, this is silent footage):

And here is Parker with Swedish saxophonist Arne Domnerus, known as “Dompan” to his fans. He also performed on the tour. The man on the right is Nils Hellström who produced the tour.

And finally, here is Parker backstage with Eldridge:

Now, there is a story from this Swedish tour about Parker playing while cows were being milked. The story was originally published by Björn Fremer as a joke in the 1958 summer number of Orkester Journalen. Fremer wrote it to make fun of fanatic collectors, his point being that if Parker had indeed been recorded playing for some cows, the collectors would chase all over for it. If anyone had read the story closely they would have known it was a spoof—the farmer who met Parker was named Jöns Jönsson (which is somewhat equivalent to "Old McDonald") and one of the tunes he played for the cows was supposedly "Cow Cow Boogie"! Nevertheless, the story is reported as truth in the Ken Burns documentary film series Jazz, in the Giddins book Celebrating Bird, and in other sources!

As mentioned in the first post of this series, there is also a rumor about some silent footage of Parker painting on a canvas, with his saxophone visible off to the side. Nobody has ever found such footage, and I believe it comes from confused memories of the documentary, because some paintings by Cropper are shown before and after the Bird footage.

There is one remaining film of Bird, and it’s the only one with “live” sound—the famous performance of “Hot House” with Dizzy Gillespie. You may have seen it before, but I have a lot of new information about this clip—coming soon!

All the best,
Lewis