Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
BIRD: THE LEGEND OF CHARLIE PARKER.
Author: Bird
Author: Chuck HaddixPublisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095170
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music, and then died when only 34 years old. His friend Robert Reisner observed, "Parker, in the brief span of his life, crowded more living into it than any other human being." Like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, he was a transitional composer and improviser who ushered in a new era of jazz by pioneering bebop and influenced subsequent generations of musicians. Meticulously researched and written, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker tells the story of his life, music, and career. This new biography artfully weaves together firsthand accounts from those who knew him with new information about his life and career to create a compelling narrative portrait of a tragic genius. While other books about Parker have focused primarily on his music and recordings, this portrait reveals the troubled man behind the music, illustrating how his addictions and struggles with mental health affected his life and career. He was alternatively generous and miserly; a loving husband and father at home but an incorrigible philanderer on the road; and a chronic addict who lectured younger musicians about the dangers of drugs. Above all he was a musician, who overcame humiliation, disappointment, and a life-threatening car wreck to take wing as Bird, a brilliant improviser and composer. With in-depth research into previously overlooked sources and illustrated with several never-before-seen images, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker corrects much of the misinformation and myth about one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.
Chasin' the Bird
Author: Brian PriestleyPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195327098
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
Priestley offers new insight into Parker's career, beginning as a teenager single-mindedly devoted to mastering the saxophone through his death at 34 in such wretched condition that the doctor listed his age as 53.
Celebrating Bird
Author: Gary GiddinsPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452940797
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
Within days of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard many musicians strove to reach—though he never enjoyed the same popular success that greeted many of his imitators. Today, the power of Parker’s inventions resonates undiminished; and his influence continues to expand. Celebrating Bird is the groundbreaking and award-winning account of the life and legend of Charlie Parker from renowned biographer and critic Gary Giddins, whom Esquire called “the best jazz writer in America today.” Richly illustrated and drawing primarily from original sources, Giddins overturns many of the myths that have grown up around Parker. He cuts a fascinating portrait of the period, from Parker’s apprentice days in the 1930s in his hometown of Kansas City to the often difficult years playing clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and reveals how Parker came to embody not only musical innovation and brilliance but the rage and exhilaration of an entire generation. Fully revised and with a new introduction by the author, Celebrating Bird is a classic of jazz writing that the Village Voice heralded as “a celebration of the highest order”—a portrayal of a jazz virtuoso whose gargantuan talent was haunted by his excesses and a view into the ravishing art of one of jazz’s most commanding and remarkable figures.
Bird Lives!
Author: Ross RussellPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jazz musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
Kansas City Lightning
Author: Stanley CrouchPublisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062314068
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
“A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker’s music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives.” — Washington Post A stunning portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.
Bird
Author: Robert ReisnerPublisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Book Description
More than to any other musician, the credit for the birth of modern jazz belongs to Charles "Yardbird" Parker--known to his friends and fans simply as "Bird." Parker's virtuoso technique, melodic genius, and inspired improvisations helped launch a whole new era in jazz, an era that began with bop and culminated in the "cool" or modern jazz of the fifties. His brilliant handling of the alto saxophone inspired a generation of jazz musicians; without him, there would have been no John Coltrane, no Ornette Coleman, no jazz as we know it today. Parker died in 1955 at the age of thirty-five. He left behind a rich legacy of musical innovation and a legend of self-destructive dissipation that made him a votive hero of the hipsters and the beat generation. For this first full-length reminiscence, Reisner interviewed eighty-one of Parker's friends, relatives, and fellow performers. From Charlie Mingus, one of the few real innovators since Bird, and Dizzy Gillespie, whom Parker once called "the other half of my heart," to jazz historian Rudi Blesh and Parker's mother, each remembers Bird in his or her own special way. Thus from the shards and splinters of firsthand reminiscence emerges a telling mosaic of Parker's brief but intense career: the indulgences in drugs and alcohol; the legendary bouts of lovemaking; the temperamental behavior on and off the bandstand; the jam sessions at the Harlem jazz club Minton's Playhouse with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk; and the historic firing from Birdland, the club which took its name from this larger-than-life musician and man.
"To Bird with Love"
Author: Chan ParkerPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jazz musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 426
Book Description
Charlie Parker - The Complete Scores
Author: Charlie ParkerPublisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 1705108245
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 866
Book Description
(Transcribed Score). Celebrate "Bird" with this collection of 40 full note-for-note transcriptions of classic performances for saxophones, trumpet, piano, bass and drums. Includes: Anthropology * Au Privave * Billie's Bounce (Bill's Bounce) * Bird Feathers * Blues for Alice * Chasing the Bird * Donna Lee * K.C. Blues * Leap Frog * Marmaduke * Ornithology * Scrapple from the Apple * Steeplechase * Yardbird Suite * and more.
Charlie Parker and Thematic Improvisation
Author: Henry MartinPublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 081083121X
Category : Improvisation (Music)
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Book Description
Martin provides a new overall assessment of the importance of Charlie Parker through an analysis of his improvisations in a variety of genres. Earlier studies of Parker argue that his style is based on an extensive network of melodic formulas that are combined to create solos. Because the same formulas appear throughout his improvisations regardless of the theme, these studies concluded that the solos do not usually relate to the original melodies. Charlie Parker and Thematic Improvisation provides a much-needed reassessment by showing that Parker's solos are often related to the original themes in unexpected and sometimes ingenious ways. Numerous transcriptions are provided. This groundbreaking technical study will be of interest to musicologists and serious students of jazz.