Charlie Parker, 1920-1955

August 29, 2012 by Doug Ramsey

This is Charlie Parker’s birthday. If he had lived, he would be 92. I wish that he had taken better care of himself.

Here’s a segment from Ken Burns’ film Jazz.

Comments

Brew says

August 29, 2012 at 4:32 pm

Bird is forever young. He was jazz’s only real genius — for me, he was the Mozart of jazz. Too bad that he wasted too much of his lifetime with his special addictions. Well, some can’t get enough out of life, they need the extra portion; and so, the candle is burning from both ends.

Happy Birthday, Bird. Your marvelous music will live forever.
Terence Smith says

August 29, 2012 at 10:16 pm

Bird Lives!
And every Bird solo is another life.
Charley Gerard says

August 30, 2012 at 6:41 am

I have found just bits and pieces about the interracial audience for
bebop in the 1940s. Chan Parker writes about how her friends lived for
bebop, and Jimmy Heath writes about how musicians became involved in
interracial affairs. This audience of young musicians allied
themselves around heroin and Red Rodney describes the drug as the
badge that set them apart from the rest of the world. I have seen this
crowd of bebop fans described as the group that preceded the beats.
Unlike the beats, they seemed to live around midtown Manhattan – like
Gil Evans and Jimmy Knepper. And unlike later generations, it was a
remarkably interracial artistic community – not at all the
bebop-as-black-music conception that has become the favored view of
jazz writers.

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