Background
Charlie Parker, widely known as Yard bird or Bird, was born in Kansas City, Kans. , on August 29, 1920. His mother bought him an alto saxophone in 1931, and in the following years he played with several prominent local big bands.
Charlie Parker, widely known as Yard bird or Bird, was born in Kansas City, Kans. , on August 29, 1920. His mother bought him an alto saxophone in 1931, and in the following years he played with several prominent local big bands.
In 1941 he became a member of Jay McShann's band, with which he made his first commercial recordings. At this time Parker met Dizzy Gillespie, widely accepted as the cofounder with Parker of the jazz style that became known as bop or bebop. In 1945 they recorded the definitive titles in the new idiom. Although younger musicians quickly realized his genius, Parker met with considerable hostility from musicians of earlier stylistic persuasions. Upon his release from a sanitarium where he was curing his nerveous breakdown he formed his own quintet and worked with this format for several years, mainly in the New York City area. He also toured with Norman Granz's "Jazz at the Philharmonic" and made trips to Paris in 1949 and Scandinavia in 1950. On March 4, 1955, he made his final public appearance; he died 8 days later.
Parker composed a number of tunes that became jazz standards, though these were usually casually assembled items based on chord sequences of popular tunes. In terms of melodic skill, his recordings of ballads such as "Embraceable You" and "How Deep Is the Ocean" are even more revealing than his interpretations of the bebop repertoire. He spawned dozens of imitators, but his own achievements were unique. In 1995, the U. S. Postal Service issued a 32-cent commemorative postage stamp in Parker's honor. In 2002, the Library of Congress honored his recording "Ko-Ko" (1945) by adding it to the National Recording Registry. A memorial to Parker was dedicated in 1999 in Kansas City at 17th Terrace and The Paseo, near the American Jazz Museum located at 18th and Vine, featuring a 10-foot (3 m) tall bronze head sculpted by Robert Graham. The Charlie Parker Jazz Festival is a free two-day music festival that takes place every summer on the last weekend of August in Manhattan, New York City, at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem and Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side, sponsored by the non-profit organization City Parks Foundation. The Annual Charlie Parker Celebration is an annual festival held in Kansas City, Kansas since 2014. A biographical film called Bird, starring Forest Whitaker as Parker and directed by Clint Eastwood, was released in 1988.
In 1984, modern dance choreographer Alvin Ailey created the piece For Bird – With Love in honor of Parker. The piece chronicles his life from his early career to his failing health.
Recordings of Charlie Parker were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance. "
In 1946, as a result, he suffered a mental breakdown and was committed for 6 months to a sanitarium. From his teen-age years Parker had been a narcotics addict, and in the last 5 years of his life he worked irregularly as a result of physical and mental illness. Parker's earliest records reveal that he was already developing the more complex harmonic approach that was characteristic of his mature work. This style is notable for a then unheard-of variety of rhythmic accentuation, harmonic complexity allied to an acute melodic sensitivity, solo lines that employ a wider range of intervals than had previously been the norm, and a disregard for the four- and eight-bar divisions of the standard jazz repertoire. This approach and his strident, even harsh, tone made it difficult for the casual listener to follow the logic of his choruses. Also, with major changes taking place in the rhythm section, it was not altogether surprising that his music sometimes met with opposition or downright incomprehension. Another facet of Parker's playing was its extraordinary technical facility, enabling him to express his ideas with the greatest clarity even at the most rapid tempos.
Since 1950, Parker had been living with Chan Berg, the mother of his son Baird and his daughter. He considered Chan his wife although he never married her, nor did he divorce his previous wife, Doris, whom he had married in 1948.
