Jazz Articles about Charlie Parker

About Charlie Parker

Album Review

Charlie Parker: Birth Of Bebop - Celebrating Bird At 100

Read "Birth Of Bebop - Celebrating Bird At 100" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
August 2, 2020

Let's face it, there is absolutely nothing new to say about the music of Charlie Parker, unless (insert joke here) you happen to be Phil Schaap. Lao Tzu's quote “The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long" is fitting. John Coltrane was 40 when he died in 1967, Eric Dolphy 36 in 1964, and Clifford Brown died at 25 in 1956. Parker was dead at the age of thirty-five in 1955. His legend has grown larger with ...

Book Review

Il trombonista innamorato

by Libero Farnè
March 10, 2020

Il trombonista innamorato e altre storie di jazz Aldo Gianolio 278 pagine Robin, Torino 2019 Non possiamo sapere fino a quando durerà l'emergenza Coronavirus, che per forza di cose inibisce la nostra vita sociale e culturale. Sta di fatto che di questi tempi la lettura dei racconti di Aldo Gianolio agisce come un potente antidepressivo. Già nel 2002 per Mobydick lo scrittore reggiano aveva pubblicato A Duke Ellington non piaceva Hitchcock; ora quei racconti ...

Album Review

Charlie Parker: The Savoy 10-inch LP Collection

Read "The Savoy 10-inch LP Collection" reviewed by Kyle Simpler

by Kyle Simpler
March 7, 2020

Charlie Parker is one of the most important musicians in jazz history and a household name even for people who never listen to jazz. His music is like a textbook for aspiring jazz musicians, and it still sounds modern even after more than a half century since its creation. 2020 marks the centennial of Parker's birth, and to help commemorate the anniversary, Craft Recordings has released a vinyl box set containing the first four “The New Sounds in Modern Music" ...

History of Jazz

Bird's Trumpets

by Matt Lavelle
June 28, 2019

Looking closely at all the trumpet players that played with Thelonious Monk in a piece I wrote in March 2018, I decided to continue the focus, and explore the trumpet players that played with Charlie Parker. As challenging as the trumpet is to play, playing Bebop raised the technical bar. Playing with Charlie Parker at fast tempos where he thrived took trumpet playing to an extreme that may have never been matched since. Parker certainly enjoyed the alto saxophone and ...

Album Review

Charlie Parker: Bird: The Complete Masters 1941-1954

Read "Bird: The Complete Masters 1941-1954" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
May 6, 2019

All roads lead back to Charlie Parker, and if ever a musician's recorded output is worth collecting in its entirety, it is his. Only Louis Armstrong's corpus of work is comparably important. Much of Parker's output has been made available over various box sets, of which the three most comprehensive are the 8-CD The Complete Savoy And Dial Studio Recordings 1944-1948 (Savoy, 2002); the 10-CD Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker On Verve (Verve, 1989); and the 7-CD The ...

Radio & Podcasts

Yardbird - The Savoy and Dial Recordings of Charlie Parker (1945 - 1948)

by Russell Perry
April 23, 2019

Emerging from the Jay McShann Orchestra in Kansas City and relentlessly curious about how to play the new music he heard in his head, Charlie Parker found sympathetic players in New York, especially Dizzy Gillespie. In November of 1945, Bird, as he was universally known, began to record with his own quintets and sextets in a legendary series of recordings for Dial in Hollywood and Savoy in Newark. By the end of 1948, when he began to record for Norman ...

Jazz Fiction

Last Song for Valentine, Part 1-4: Dancing in the Dark

by Jakob Baekgaard
February 26, 2019

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 It was at the end of the second set when Cory realized that he couldn't play. Nothing had really changed. He looked across the room in Jan's Supper Club and saw the same familiar faces and some new ones too. Valentine wasn't there. She would never be. He had tried to persuade her many times. “Look," he had said, “it's free. I'll write you on the guest ...