Accessible and answers fairly well. Paranoid delusions, also grandiosed. Auditory hallucinations and visual. Talks to self. Much reaction. Picks things off the wall. Tears his clothes…. Looks deteriorated but memory is good…. Has a string of talk that is incoherent. Hears voices of people that bothered him before he came here.… Diagnosis: Dementia praecox, paranoid type.

I went to a chili house in Harlem where it is said that ideas going through boot camp in Charlie Parker’s head resulted in his finding a metaphor inside old chord changes that no one had heard before.

I remember one night before Monroe’s I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December, 1939. Now, I’d been getting bored with stereotyped changes that were being used all the time… and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night, I was working over “Cherokee,” and, as I did, I found that by using higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.

—CHARLIE PARKER

According to those present, Bird’s playing started everyone in the joint to jumping giddy and yapping in a strange tongue that emphasized the buzzing sound of the letter Z. It started when someone said—

“Kiss my ass!” And the comeback was—

“That don’t make me no nevermind cause eee-it-tiz neee-iz-zot the beee-iz-uuuteee, eee-it-tiz the bee-iz-zoooteee!”

Bird wailed on at the top of the chords, and the Z string rap spread its healing and hurting potential all over Seventh Avenue. Over the years so-called “buzz talk” became the most popular street lingo and the most difficult for outsiders to decipher.

Many dismissed Bird. They said he played jujitsu music and was not only out to lunch but should be fitted for the wraparound dinner jacket. Before Bird left the scene he produced many moments of improvisational bliss. It is rumored that one night at Birdland he played the standard You Go to My Head, and had everyone within the sound of his horn on their knees attempting to entertain other ways of going to someone’s head.

Scatology is a branch of science dealing with the diagnosis of dung and other excremental matters of state. Talking shit is a renegade form of scatology developed by people who were fed up with do-do dialogues and created a kind of vocal doodling that suggested other possibilities within the human voice beyond the same old shit.