BORN THIS DAY, August 29, in Kansas City, Kansas USA, and raised across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri jazz saxophonist and one of the leaders in the development of bebop, CHARLIE PARKER! The son of a pianist, dancer and singer on the T.O.B.A. circuit, music came easily to Charlie Parker. He began playing the saxophone at age eleven, and at age fourteen he joined his schools band. After school, he began playing in the nightclubs around Kansas City. In 1939, he moved to New York to pursue his career, and there he joined the bands of Jay McShann and Earl Hines who introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie. Parker and Gillespie began to play as a duo and in time, Parker became a member of a group of young musicians, who played in after-hours clubs in Harlem, such as Clark Monroes Uptown House and Mintons Playhouse. It was with this group of friends that Parker really stretched out, and he developed his method of improvisation. Parker was a highly influential jazz soloist and a leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique and improvisation. He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. The style was avant garde and intellectual, and Parker became an icon for the Beat Generation, known as the quintessential uncompromising artist, who was not simply an entertainer. Early in his career, Charlie Parker received his nickname Yardbird and it was soon shortened to Bird,” by which he was known for most of his life. This nickname inspired the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as Yardbird Suite,” Ornithology,” Bird Gets the Worm and Bird of Paradise. Sadly, when just a teenager, Parker was involved in a car accident, which put him into the hospital where he became addicted to morphine. At various times, Parkers chronic addiction caused him to miss gigs. He frequently resorted to busking on the streets, receiving loans from fellow musicians and admirers, and pawning his saxophones for drug money. The addiction was something he battled for the most of his life, and eventually, it claimed him. Charlie Parker died in the suite of his friend and patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City. The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parkers 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age. The legacy he left, a completely new sensibility of jazz. And around the city of New York, a new slogan began to appear in graffiti, Bird lives. Here, Parker and Dizzy Gillespie,with “Koko” ~
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 09:03:02 +0000
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