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Blues for Bird by Martin Gray 
Santa Monica Press LLC. P.0. Box 1076, Santa Monica, CA 90406-1076, USA.  ISBN 1-891661-20-5. £14.99 UK. $16.95 USA. $25.95 Canada.
“...a verse narrative in iambic trimeters or syncopated hexameters on the  life and music of Charlie Parker (1920-1955).” 

The balance of probability is written into some mission-crucial contemporary technology. This publication seems a significant exception to a proven scientific cornerstone. It appeared  improbable that a seventy three year old British expatriate academic, specialising in Victorian literature, could write such a book. That such a partially deaf scholar would play his textual keyboard, as if mirroring and reflecting Charlie Parker’s musical improvisation, even less likely.
     
   “A heroic story is one thing, how to tell it quite another”, says Mister Gray. He certainly has a tale to tell and tells it extraordinarily well. Middlesex born in 1930, he became a Canadian citizen in 1957. A lifelong student of long poems. He decided in 1980 to write one of his own. In 1993 the first such creation was published and thus eventually became a “12 book 5,400 line dramatic narrative with a cast of over a hundred jazz personalities which extends with glossary to almost 300 pages.” Eight years in the making. Prerequisites of preparation and foundation diligently and painstakingly executed.  All that research sweat and inspired cerebral blood-letting more than justified.
    
    Bird was a unique talent. Musical innovator, creative genius and trailblazing jazz legend supreme. He got  so good , because he worked hard at it. The same can surely be said of his bardic biographer. Poetry written with understanding, insight and simplicity. A creative journalism that clarifies and explains. Making an important  musical experience and its essential jazz theoretic easily understood. Blues for Bird is an erudite capsule; stripped bare of unnecessary literary adornment  and closely shorn of trivial baggage. Descriptive and informative. Peeling away layers of folklore, mythology, misunderstanding and invention. Fleshing clean bones with hard fact, honesty and warmth.
    
    Nothing is romanticised, exaggerated, vanished or buried. Charlie Parker’s intensely hyperactive thirty five years is revealed in its essential contradictions and extremities. Junk, booze, sex, jazz, ecstasy and pain. Above all, that unbelievably acute music. Simultaneously experientially spiritual and deep down animal beast-self. Entering unexplored inner landscape and unknown outer terrain. Bird was a talented voluntary outsider on a personal mission. Martin Gray helps us  move inside his life and music. An epic tale, an epic poem.