Well, my book Charlie Parker Played Be Bop initially was supposed to be sort of a straight forward book about a man named Charlie Parker who lived a life, died young, was a great genius of American music. But as I contemplated this as a children’s book I realized if this was to reach a young audience as I hoped it would, I decided really all I needed was to teach two things, Charlie Parker played be bop, Charlie Parker played saxophone.
My next subset of teaching was to be — well what is be bop. And to make it clear that be bop is what it is already and it’s in the sound of it. So that after be-bop arrived in that book, I realized that all of the text could be pointing to that fact that be bop is already what the sound is. And be bop was initially an almost a derogatory term for the kind of new music because it sounded like that.
So what I chose to write and create were rhythmic lines that had certain rhythm that almost always came out the same way and one of those being Never Leave Your Cat Alone. It seemed to me to almost always flow out that way and it fit that way with the rhythms that were in my head from be-bop songs, one of them being A Night in Tunisia, so I let — which was not written by Charlie Parker but by his close friend and associate Dizzy Gillespie.
So I let everything try to explain what be-bop was by creating lines that made no sense other than the sounds themselves and then the images had to free quickly and freely. So it was a fast flowing line and nothing was to hang up the reader too much from turning the pages.
I wanted the pages to turn quickly so it could with the quickness of the be-bop music itself. As I worked on it I realized it jazz is very, it’s very child friendly because it’s full of experimentation, lots of humor, lots of repetition, and it’s what we — creative people do whether they’re a creative 4-year-old peoples or a 40 or 84-year-old creative people. They experiment, they repeat, they turn things on their heads, they try it backwards and forwards until something is pleasing to them.
