Jazz Articles about Charlie Parker

About Charlie Parker

Book Review

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

by David A. Orthmann
February 3, 2014

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker Stanley Crouch 365 ISBN:978-0-06-200559-5 Harper Collins 2013 Stanley Crouch's account of Charlie Parker's first twenty-one years isn't a litany of facts and antidotes rendered in an easily digestible form. Not unlike Parker, Crouch is brilliant, bold, ambitious, and mercurial. He delights in conjoining a dazzling array of topics, often introducing a particular subject, moving on to something else, and later on revisiting the ...

Book Review

Testimony: A Tribute To Charlie Parker

by Ian Patterson
November 20, 2013

Testimony: A Tribute To Charlie Parker Yusef Komunyakaa 156 pages ISBN: 978-0-8195-7429-9 Wesleyan University Press 2013 In terms of his global influence and enduring legacy, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was unquestionably one of the most important artistic figures of the 20th century. Almost sixty years after his premature demise Parker's musical DNA can be detected almost everywhere jazz is played. Parker's music--and in no small measure his myth--has inspired countless jazz musicians but ...

Book Review

Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker by Gary Giddins

by C. Michael Bailey
November 19, 2013

Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker Gary Giddins 208 pages ISBN: 978-1-4529-4080-9 University of Minnesota Press 2013 Having read Gary Giddins' revised edition of Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker I am even more committed to my position in my recent review of Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker: “Crouch casts a well-worn story, many times told, within the frame of an exhaustively-researched ...

Book Review

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

by C. Michael Bailey
November 6, 2013

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker Stanley Crouch 365 Pages ISBN: # 978-0-06-200559-5 Harper 2013 Ross Russell, in the cover blurb of his biography of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker Bird Lives--The High Life and hard Times of Charlie “Yardbird" Parker (Quartet Books, 1973), asks “Why should a white man tell this story?" and proceeds to state the obvious: “Firstly, because [as Ross Russell points out] no black man has ...

Book Review

Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker by Charles Haddix

by C. Michael Bailey
August 24, 2013

Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie ParkerCharles Haddix190 PagesISBN: 025203791University of Illinois Press2013 Charlie Parker shares with delta blues legend Robert Johnson the lack of a comprehensive and academically-sound biography. Johnson's biographical material is strewn across several books, the earliest riddled with romance and inaccuracy, periodical articles and liner notes. While at least two completed or near completed biographies by the late Stephen Calt and Mack ...

188

Extended Analysis

Charlie Parker: The Complete Masters 1941-54

by Chris May
January 27, 2012

Charlie ParkerThe Complete Masters 1941-54Universal France2012 It is possible that more “complete" collections of the work of Charlie Parker have been released than there were recordings made by the saxophonist. And as you beat your way through the box set undergrowth, caution is required. Few of the collections are, in fact, complete, even within the parameters (complete live, complete studio, complete with strings, etc) by which they define themselves. In the ...

553

What is Jazz?

The Story Of Jazz Saxophone

by AAJ Staff
October 9, 2009

For some, the saxophone is the sound of jazz. The unique fusion of brass and woodwind that is the sax found an electrifying vibrato in the hands of jazzmen that truly changed the world. The pale “pure" tone of the instrument, as first used in classical compositions, vanished in a musical blast of slurs ( Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges, occasional exciting “false-fingering" (Lester Young) and runs almost too fast, for some at the time, to listen to (Charlie Parker). ...