NEW BOOK. Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker, By Chuck Haddix

Publicat in: 02.09.2013, 06:32AM
Autor: Richard Constantinidi
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Etichete: Bird: The Life And Music Of Charlie Parker, Chuck Haddix, Life And Music Of Charlie Parker

A true portrait of the troubled jazz genius

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.

Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker 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 Parkercorrects much of the misinformation and myth about one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.

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Chuck Haddix is the director of the Marr Sound Archives of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries. He is the coauthor of Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — A History and the producer and host of KCUR-FM’s “The Fish Fry".

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Available From

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Cloth, ISBN: 978-0-252-03791-7 $24.95
216 Pages, 16 Black & White Photographs
Publication date: September 2013

Publisher Contact
Steve Fast
University of Illinois Press
PH: 217-244-4689
sfast@illinois.edu