BIRD NOW

There are two main protagonists in Bird Now. One is Charlie “Bird” Parker, the legendary saxophonist, “the messiah of modern jazz”. The other one is New York, the mythical city. Black America’s jazz music in the 40s was 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. In Harlem, in uptown Manhattan, a new music form is born: Bebop, Dizzy Gillepsie, Thelonious Monk – and Charlie, now “Bird” Parker. In the after-war years, the new jazz forced its way into the white city. Its bastion was midtown 52^nd Street. But it was a short-lived heyday.

Bird Now was shot in the New York of today – in all its guises: from Harlem to the Bronx, from the Bowery to Brooklyn. It seeks out Harlem’s past glory and shows the hovels of today’s ghettos. With the fluidity of jazz itself, the film’s documentary reality is caught up by fiction. Somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, in a seedy bar in the South Bronx, Mr. Jones, a shambling wreck of a man declares his own truth about New York: “It’s my blood that keeps this city alive!”