By Lee Hill Kavanaugh

The secret's out.

For months rumors have circulated throughout the jazz community about a plan to move the bones of jazz legend Charlie Parker from Lincoln Cemetery to 18th and Vine. On Thursday night the Kansas City Council revealed that there really is such a plan.

Included in the city budget proposal was a request from Mayor Emanuel Cleaver for $25,000 to move Parker's grave. The council rejected the request.

It was the first public leak of any plans to move Parker's grave, although Cleaver has spoken privately about the idea to one of Parker's sons, Leon Parker, who is the executor of the Parker estate.

"We've talked some," Leon Parker said from his home in Colorado. "But I'm not sure of what they're planning until it's off the drawing board."

Cleaver, who is in New Orleans for a mayor's conference, released a statement Friday night: "The idea is to move one of America's musical geniuses from a place that is out-of-the-way and unkept, to a place of honor befitting the man."

All family members must agree before the plan can be implemented. Parker's widow, Doris Parker, knew nothing of the plan until asked for comment by a reporter.

At first resistant, she later conceded she could see its merits if it included moving Parker's mother, Addie, who is buried next to him.

"I wish people would have talked to me," she said from her home in New York. "It was a big fight to get his body there in Kansas City....Dizzy Gillespie helped me move it there, you know.

"...He was a part of Kansas City...Addie picked out the site where the grave is now. I remember it was so beautiful there, under a big tree, overlooking a hill."

Leon Parker, the eldest son, said he was planning to inform Rebecca Davis, Parker's first wife and Leon's mother, and Chan Parker, who lives in France, once the details were confirmed.

Chan Parker was Charlie Parker's common-law wife, and was living with him when he died. Because they were not officially married, she had no legal standing to claim Parker's body. She wanted him to be buried in New York City. It is widely reported by jazz historians that Parker once asked Chan not to let anyone bury him in Kansas City. But she lost the legal battle.

Kim Parker, Chan and Charlie Parker's adopted daughter, said in an interview from her home in Pennsylvania that she had been asked for her views on the plan.

"Both my mother and I are all for this," she said. "Why wouldn't we be? The grave site is in a weedy place. And people come from all over the world to see it...and the fact that there is a tenor (saxophone) on the stone instead of an alto is a huge joke against Kansas City.

"I think the idea of a memorial, knocking down an old building and putting in a park, where people can just sit and meditate on the music of Bird, well...that sounds wonderful."

Parker's grave has long been a mecca for jazz fans. History documents Parker, nicknamed Bird, as the father of bebop and one of the main innovators of jazz.

Some members of the Kansas City Council are repulsed at the idea.

"There are better places to bury the dead," said Councilman Ed Ford. "But I don't think I'd want to see Babe Ruth's grave site at Camden Yards. Baseball stadiums and entertainment districts are not those places. We are honoring Charlie Parker right now with our jazz museum, and I think we're doing a good job."

Some jazz fans disagree.

"Moving the grave is an opportunity to right some terrible wrongs," said musician Mike Metheny, who is also editor of Jazz Ambassador magazine.

"It's an opportunity to have Charlie Parker's final resting place be a place of dignity and prominence, as opposed to an obscure, remote, hard-to-find cemetery.

"And the other thing is that by relocating it, we finally have an opportunity to fix that eternal typo -- that faux pas-- by putting an alto sax where the tenor is now."

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