Charles Christopher Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Early within his career Parker was dubbed Yardbird; this was afterwards shortened to Bird & remained Parker's nickname for the rest of his life.

Parker is unremarkably considered one of a greatest jazzman, ranked alongside Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and perhaps Charles Mingus in terms of influence and impact. Parker is widely ranked while one of a better saxist; critic Scott Yanow speaks for several jazz fans & musicians when he suggests that "Parker was arguably the greatest saxophonist of all time."[http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:83ri287r052a~T1]

The instauration figure of bebop, Parker's innovative approach to melody, rhythm and harmony have exerted an incalculable influence on jazz. Many of Parker's songs develop turn into standards of the repertoire, and numerous musicians keep around exposed Parker's music & absorbed elements of his style.

Parker became an icon for the Beat generation, & was the polar figure in the evolving conception of the jazzman as an sturdy creative person and intellectual, rather than merely the popular entertainer. At various days, Parker fused jazz by having more genre, from either authoritative (looking for to survey by owning Edgard Varese and Stefan Wolpe) to Latin music (recordings with Machito), blazing paths followed later by others.

Biography
Early Life and Career
Parker was natural inside Kansas City, Kansas and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He was a merely tyke of Charles & Addie Parker. No grounds to believe that Parker showed unusual musical talent as a tyke. As a little son (even Three-Four years old), he will keep around sung in the church choir. Parker's father presumptively provided the select few musical influence; he was a pianist, dancer and singer on the T.O.B.A. circuit, although he later became a Pullman waiter or chef on the railways.

Parker began swimming a sax at age Fifteen using his school's band. Groups led by Count Basie and Bennie Moten were the leading Kansas City ensembles, & beyond question influenced Parker. He continued to play by owning local elastic within jazz clubs around Kansas City, Missouri, in which he perfected his system sustaining a assistance of Buster Smith, whose dynamic transitions to double & triple instance sure influenced Parker's getting style. Inside 1938 Parker joined pianist Jay McShann's territory band [http://www.iaje.org/bio.asp?ArtistID=46], & wwhen suspire to tour using him to the nightspot and more venues of the sou'west area of the United states, also as Chicago and New York City [http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_parker_charlie.htm][http://amb.cult.bg/music/jazz/mp3/notes/CHARLI.htm]. Parker mass produced his recording debut by using McShann's band.

In New York City
Around 1939, Parker moved to New York City. He pursued the career within music, however held many more jobs. He became fond of piano player Art Tatum, frequently attending his performances. (Parker's late swimming was in some manner remindful of Tatum's, by having dazzling, high-high-velocity arpeggios and sophisticated apply of harmony.)

Around 1942 Parker broke away from McShann's b& and played using Earl Hines for eight months. Within 1945 he joined the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and piano player Thelonious Monk. Likewise inside 1945, Parker was run by the immature trumpeter known as Miles Davis. He would pop up around the select few classic bop sessions using Parker, & last in to be a major figure in jazz.

Bebop
By today, Parker was emerging as a leading figure in the nascent bebop scene. Based on data from an locate Parker gave in the 1950s, one nighttime inside 1939, he was playing "Cherokee" inside the jam session whenever he hit upon the method for getting his solos that enabled him to play what he got been hearing around his head for a select few period, by building chords on the higher intervals of the tune's harmonies. Actually, the birth of bop was probably a supplementary gradual run than this story reports.

Early around its development, this fresh nature & severity of jazz was rejected and disdained by numbers of older, additional constituted jazzman, whom a beboppers around response known as "mouldy figs", though a few musicians, like Coleman Hawkins, were more caring all about its emergence. It wasn't until 1945 that Parker's collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie had a material impact on the jazz globe.

In November 26, 1945 Parker led a record date for the Savoy label, which was once marketed, when you took a LP era, as a "greatest Jazz session ever". As the matter of fact, it was a super haphazardly sessiin, using Gillespie getting to deputize on piano for virtually all of the period. Parker though did handle to lay down leash classic sides "Ko-Ko" (according to a chords of "Cherokee"), "Now's the Time" & "Billie's Bounce".

Shortly subsequently, the hike to Los Angeles by the Parker/Gillespie band to fulfil an engagement at Billy Berg's club was less than successful. Virtually all of the band before long decided to go to to Up to date York. Parker though, stayed inside California, in which his life-style was to catch higher using him.

As the adolescent, he experienced developed a morphine addiction while within hospital fallowing an machine accident, & afterward became addicted to heroin, which was to plague him throughout his life and in the end defeat him. Parker's addiction unluckily created the impression (for numerous musicians of his era) that his musical genius was somehow related his drug apply. For all about the decade resulting Parker's demise, jazz was closely associated using narcotics, and several musicians began applying doses, part inside imitation of their musical idol. Although he produced occasionally worthful recordings in the cycle of this period, Parker's behavior became progressively erratic. Diacetylmorphine was hard to obtain when his dealer was arrested, & Parker began to drink heavily to compensate for this. The recording of "Lover Man" for the Dial label from July 29, 1946 provides evidence of his affliction. Reportedly, Parker can barely could have in a period of a session & got to become physically supported by others sequentially to keep him placed properly against the microphone. A record illustrates how else a human's genius tried desperately to appear across his agony. Parker never forgave his producer Ross Russell for releasing a sub-par record (& re-recorded the tune within 1953 for Verve, this time inside primthe form), however it remains an priceless testimony to a a share of his career.

Two or three years fallowing a "Lover Man" session, Parker was ingesting around his hotel room once he placed fire to his mattress by using the coffin nail, so ran through the hotel lobby wearing merely his socks. He was arrested & committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where he remained for hexad months.

Coming away from a hospital, Parker was uncontaminating & fit, & proceeded to clean a select few of the better swimming & recording of his career. He returned to New York and recorded dozens of sides for the Savoy and Dial labels (including "Relaxin' at Camarillo," in information to his hospital stay) that remain one of a high points of his recorded output.

Parker's soaring, convenient, rhythmically asymmetrical improvisations can amaze the auditor; all the same close review shows to both one line to hang on to a complete, easily-constructed sentence by using each note in situ. Parker's harmonic ideas were revolutionary, introducing the newly tonal vocabulary using 9ths, 11ths & 13ths of chords, quickly implied passing chords, & new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone was fresh & penetrating, however sweetly & mournful in ballads. Although numbers of Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling masterful system & complex melodic lines — a early "Ko-Ko" occurs as superb lesson — he was besides one of a peachy blues players. His themeless blues improvisation "Parker's Mood" represents one of a virtually all deeply affecting recordings within jazz, when first harmonic when Armstrong's classic "West End Blues", from either merely twenty years before

Stardom
By 1950, much of the jazz globe was under Parker's sway. His solos were transcribed & copied; legions of saxist imitated his swimming note-for-note. Within 1953, Parker was invited to perform at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada, where he was joined by Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell and Max Roach. Regrettably, the concert clashed by owning a televised heavyweight boxing match between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott and the concert was ill attended following. Pleasantly for a sake of posterity, Mingus recorded a concert, & the issued album Jazz at Massey Hall is often cited when one of the finest recordings of a survive jazz performance.

One of Parker's longstanding desires was to perform by having the string section; he was a lament fan of classical music. Whilst he did record & perform by owning strings, occasionally fans thought it was the move of a sell out catering to popular tastes. Period demonstrated Parker's move the caring a single: Charlie Parker by owning Strings was the right-seller, & his version of "Just Friends" is seen when one of his better performances. Inside an locate, he considered it himself to become his better recording up to now.

Parker was known for typically showing as much as performances while forgoing an instrument & borrowing individual else's at a endure moment. At one venue he played in the thin plastic Grafton saxophone; this inspired saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who utilized the thwithin plastic sax in his early career.

Parker died when watching Tommy Dorsey on television in the suite at the Hotel Stanhope belonging to his friend & patronne Nica de Koenigswarter. Though a official stimulate of dying was pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, his death was without doubt hastened by his drug & alcoholic abuse. A 34 season old Parker was and then haggard that a medical examiner erroneously calculated Parker's age to exist as between 50 & 60.

Parker left the widow, Chan, the girl, Kim Parker, world health organization is too the musician, & a boy, Baird.

The mythic Charlie Parker
A legend "Bird Lives" number one appeared when graffitti inside New York City subways, a few hours when Parker's passing. For this, a poet Ted Joans is usually credited.

A character of Bleeding Gums Murphy in the television series The Simpsons is clearly physically based on Charlie Parker, especially when he plays a alto saxophone. He too claims to have the $1500 a day habit; though this is revealed to exist as an addiction to buying Fabergé eggs.

The Far Side cartoon entitled "Charlie Parker's private hell" shows him locked within a recording booth when the devil pipes in nothing however new age music.

Memorials

Parker's performances of "I Remember You" & "Parker's Mood" were selected by Harold Bloom for inclusion on his shortlist of the twentieth-century American Sublime.

The Birdland night club was named fallowing him.

Deeply touched by Charlie Parker's demise, Moondog wrote his famous "Bird's lament" inside his memory. Moondog affirmed that he experienced met Charlie Parker in the streets of Up to date York & that it had planed to jam together.

In New York City, Avenue B between 7th & 10th Streets is known as Charlie Parker Place. Parker experienced sleep in an Avenue B townhouse between Seventh & Eighth streets.

A memorial to Parker was dedicated inside 1999 in Kansas City at 17th Terrace and a Walk, next to the American Jazz Museum featuring a Decade-foot tall bronze head sculpted by Robert Graham.

The Californian ensemble "Supersax" has harmonized numbers of of Parker's improvisations for a 5-piece sax part, which to several hearer bring recently life to the children, whereequally others assume the arrangements as somewhat constructed.

Saxophonist Phil Woods recorded a tribute concert for Parker, & around an locate stated that he thought Parker got said all about he required to say.

A biographic film known as Bird, directed by Clint Eastwood, was released inside 1988.

Quotation
"Bird's mind and fingers work with incredible speed. He can imply four chord changes in a melodic pattern where another musician would have trouble inserting two." - Leonard Feather "I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around." - Charles Mingus "During 1945, we used to go down almost every night to catch Diz and Bird wherever they were playing. We felt that if we missed hearing them play, we were missing something important. Man, the shit they were playing and doing was going down so fast, you just had to be there in person to catch it." - Miles Davis

Samples
Download sample of "Bird of Paradise"