Buried Alive in the Blues…and the reds, and the greens, and the yellows, Christopher Parker paints to the rhythmic strokes of brush on canvas
By VICTOR FORBES
Near Giverny with Bob Dylan in Paris, France. I had the day off and went south from Paris to Giverny, sat in Monet’s garden and painted. 
Near Port-of-Spain in Trinidad/Tobago. I was with Ralph MacDonald and the New York All-Stars on tour. This beautiful girl and her dog were looking for some shade near the beach.
Though it wasn’t in “19 and 41”, Chris Parker was born in Chicago and that native grit certainly contributed to his ability to get along so well with the Windy City blues legend, Paul Butterfield, who gave the neophyte his music business start in Butterfield’s incredible early 70s aggregation, Better Days. Mr. Parker, who was barely of drinking age when he found himself behind a drum kit on the major stages of the world, is an extremely successful studio and road musician who has gone on to record platinum, gold and Grammy winning music with such stars as the Brecker Brothers, Cher, Donald Fagen, Ashford and Simpson, Natalie Cole, Aretha Franklin, Salt’n’Pepa, Stuff, Miles Davis, Patti LaBelle and Michael Bolton. He has toured with Boz Scaggs, Bette Midler, Paul Simon and Ralph MacDonald and spent three plus years on the road with another musician who paints, Bob Dylan.
In New York after a recording session, I did this still life In Maui with Steely Dan, recording at their studio 
In Maui with Steely Dan, recording at their studio
“He was an inspiration,” said Parker recently from his Connecticut home where he was getting ready to come to Artexpo and work with his own band. “The fact that on stage, he was in his creative process and wasn’t there to please the audience amazed me. Sometimes it would be an utter failure but sometimes it was unbelievable, magic. You’d take The Times They Are A’Changing or Rainy Day Woman and even he didn’t know where the song was going. We’d try to hang on and make something happen, coming up with some weird arrangements at times. Forever Young was once like a lullaby, but Dylan came up with an arrangement for acoustic guitar and harmonica and I would be playing the brushes very lightly. You could sail away on it.”
One would think that after a two and a half hour set playing drums behind Dylan, or Paul Simon, or any of the other greats he has toured with, Mr. Parker would be content to go back to the hotel, pop in a movie and just relax. But after the show, Parker personally had a lot of performance energy. “Then the thing is over and unless you’ve played a twenty minute drum solo, you’re left with the urge to create.”
For Mr. Parker painting is an outlet for stored-up creativity, a way of learning new skills and keeping the juices flowing. He discovered that the sound of brush or pen or ink on paper carried a rhythm all its own. The act of painting, he maintains, is really akin to drumming with the hand-eye coordination. “There are many similarities to the music. If I’m laying out a painting, what am I trying to tell you? A lot of it is the emotion of the place. You can’t help but get emotionally involved with the color and the light. ”
Inspired by Dylan (“we compared paintings — he admired mine, I admired his — he’s good”), Parker has filled sketchbooks with scenes from many of the places he has visited throughout the world.
A natural as a drummer and as a painter, Mr. Parker has the uncanny ability to project his art as he projects his music, to show his subjects in their best light, whether they’re singers or watercolors on paper.
