Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas, and raised across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of a Pullman waiter and pianist and a mother who doted on him. He picked up the alto saxophone at eleven and, in his mid-teens, sat in on a jam session where he lost track of the chord changes so badly that drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at his feet to drive him off the stand. He answered by practicing obsessively for years, woodshedding through an Ozark resort job until the horn caught up with what he heard in his head. A car crash around the same period broke three ribs and fractured his spine, and the morphine prescribed for the pain started an addiction that never let go of him.

In New York after 1939, Parker fused what he had absorbed in Kansas City with a harmonic vocabulary built on passing chords and altered extensions, and by the mid-1940s, playing alongside Dizzy Gillespie, the sound had a name: bebop. The Savoy Records session of November 26, 1945, that produced "Ko-Ko" is still called by some critics the most important recording date in jazz. He led a classic quintet with a young Miles Davis and Max Roach through the late 1940s, recorded with strings, toured Europe, and in 1953 shared a Toronto stage with Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Roach for the Massey Hall concert, playing a plastic saxophone because he had pawned his own. A 1946 breakdown landed him six months in a California state hospital; he was recording again within weeks of release.

The addiction that began with a doctor's morphine prescription at fifteen or sixteen became heroin, and Parker spent the rest of his life chasing and evading it, substituting alcohol when heroin was scarce and, more than once, playing admired sessions drunk rather than not play at all. In March 1954 his young daughter Pree died of cystic fibrosis and pneumonia, not yet three years old; Parker attempted suicide twice in the aftermath and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. He died on March 12, 1955, in the Stanhope Hotel suite of his friend the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, watching television, having refused hospitalization for pneumonia, a bleeding ulcer, and advanced cirrhosis. He was thirty-four; the coroner examining his body estimated his age at fifty to sixty.

Graffiti reading "Bird Lives" appeared on New York walls within days of his death, the start of a mythology that outpaced the documented record almost immediately — his own tombstone in Missouri lists the wrong death date. The U.S. Postal Service put him on a stamp in 1995, the Library of Congress added "Ko-Ko" to the National Recording Registry in 2002, and an annual jazz festival named for him fills Manhattan parks and clubs every August. Miles Davis, who recorded beside him two years before Parker died, later reduced the whole story of jazz to four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker. What survives most concretely is technical — the harmonic vocabulary he built after Jo Jones's cymbal remains, seven decades on, close to the working language every jazz improviser still learns.

Charlie Parker's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Ko-Ko song
  Savoy Records session with Miles Davis and Max Roach, later added to the National Recording Registry 1945
• Ornithology song 1946
• Charlie Parker with Strings album
  Recorded November 1949, paired his saxophone with an orchestral string section 1950
• Jazz at Massey Hall album
  Toronto concert with Gillespie, Powell, Mingus, and Roach 1953
• Confirmation song 1953

• August 29, 1920 aged 0 Born in Kansas City, Kansas
• 1931 aged ~11 Begins playing alto saxophone at eleven
• 1936 aged ~16 Jo Jones throws a cymbal at his feet during a jam session A car crash the same year broke three ribs and his spine, and morphine treatment began his addiction.
• 1939 aged ~19 Moves to New York City and develops the harmonic ideas behind bebop
• November 26, 1945 aged 25 Records "Ko-Ko" for Savoy with Miles Davis and Max Roach
• July 1946 aged 25 Committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital after an on-stage breakdown
• March 1954 aged 33 His daughter Pree dies of cystic fibrosis and pneumonia
• May 15, 1953 aged 32 Performs at the Massey Hall concert in Toronto
• March 12, 1955 aged 34 Dies in New York City at thirty-four

• Miles Davis 1926–1991
  Trumpeter and bandleader who repeatedly redirected jazz through bebop, cool jazz, modal music, and fusion. mentored, then eclipsed by
• Thelonious Monk 1917–1982
  Pianist and composer whose distinctive harmonies, rhythms, and repertory became central to modern jazz. contemporary architect of bebop
• John Coltrane 1926–1967
  Saxophonist and composer whose technical and spiritual explorations transformed modern jazz. influenced
• Duke Ellington 1899–1974
  Composer and bandleader who expanded the artistic ambition and vocabulary of jazz. predecessor generation of jazz